Twenty-One Stories

Shmuel Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, to date the only Israeli to do so. This collection of twenty one pieces of short fiction is a good representation of Agnon's subtle form of literature. He is heavily influenced by fable and fairy tales, and many of the short stories have the dream like, simplistic quality of a children's stories (The Lady and the Peddler, First Kiss). Very many stories are considered his masterpieces (Agunot, The Doctor's Divorice). Although deeply indebted to the Jewish Diaspora experience, with its traditions and religious context, Agnon was very much a modernist. All of the stories in this collection suffer from a kind of disjointedness which says less about the skills of the writer, and more about the world he wrote about: this is a world of discontinuities. Here there are often strange shifts in daily life. Often, the end comes quite abruptly. So, reading Agnon's stories can be a little disconcerting to the reader unprepared for his subtly and unschooled in the basics of Jewish life in the early parts of the 20th century. Readers need to come to Agnon fighting his lulled tempo and prepared to search below the surface of things.

This is a collection of stories by one of the great masters of the form. Agnon in Hebrew writes on many levels at once, and shows a deep mastery of the traditional sources. It is difficult to translate this . Yet he does more and presents characters and situations which move us to a sense of the holiness , mystery and beauty of life. Of all the remarkable stories in this collection one, ' The Scribe' remains strongest in my mind. For it gives an image of purity in life and love, an image of holiness that inspires and augments the reader's love of life. Meeting this work is meeting one of Literature's great masters.