Agnon’s Dog, and Other Talking Animals in Jewish Literature

Hillel Halkin’s great gift, richly on display in his ten-part series for Mosaic on Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries, is his ability to translate, in the deep sense of the term, the almost archaeological layers of modern Hebrew literature for the contemporary English reader, who without knowing where to start digging cannot possibly understand the tel of allusions beneath so many modern Hebrew works.

For a literary archaeologist like Halkin, the modern Hebrew master S.Y. Agnon, with whom he concludes his Mosaic series, must be an ideal writer, the writer for whom all of his knowledge has prepared him. And Agnon’s meandering 1945 masterpiece, Only Yesterday, which adds to these linguistic layers the religious and secular dimensions of pre-state Israel, must be the ideal book. I’m with him. It was those archaeological layers that drew me as a young writer to the work of Agnon, and those layers are still the reason I keep returning to so many of his stories.

But Only Yesterday stays with me for one reason and one reason only, and it looks as if it’s Halkin’s reason, too: namely, the dog.