The Agnon Wink

My thanks to Jeffrey Saks and Dara Horn for their gracious responses to my essay on S.Y. Agnon and his 1945 Hebrew masterpiece Only Yesterday. I’ll reply to their comments in the reverse order of their appearance in Mosaic.

I thank Dara Horn for her remarks and for making me laugh out loud with a Grouchoism—“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read”—that was new to me. It made me think of the time I literally fell out of my seat and onto the floor, writhing helplessly, while watching A Night at the Opera at the old Thalia movie theater, of blessed memory, in New York.

I’ll return to Agnon’s dog shortly; first I want to address Dara Horn’s guess that, for me, Agnon “must be an ideal writer.” To tell the truth, I’ve never thought of him as my “ideal” Hebrew writer. He’s too sly for my temperament. It took me a long while to appreciate his greatness, and even now there are Hebrew writers I enjoy reading more. In fact—and I say this to my sorrow—when I was offered the job of translating Only Yesterday some 25 years ago, I turned it down. This was partly because there were other things I wanted to do more, and partly because I didn’t realize at the time how intelligent a novel it was. I mistook its slyness for coyness. Perhaps the long passages from it that I’ve translated in my Mosaic essay were meant to be a corrective experience.