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By Root 1029 0

as a terrible dread of God: Agnon believes in God and fears him, but he does not love him. "I am an easygoing sort of a man," says Daniel Bach in A Guest for the Night, "and I do not believe that the Almighty desires the good of his creatures." This is a paradoxical, tragic, and even desperate theological position that Agnon never expressed discursively but allowed to be voiced by secondary characters in his works and to be implied by what befalls his heroes. When I wrote a book on Agnon, The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Fear of God, exploring this theme, dozens of religious Jews, most of them from the ultra-Orthodox sector, including youngsters and women and even religious teachers and functionaries, wrote personal letters to me. Some of these letters were veritable confessions. They told me, in their various ways, that they could see in their own souls what I had seen in Agnon. But what I had seen in Agnon's writings I had also glimpsed, for a moment or two, in Mr. Agnon himself, in that sardonic cynicism of his that verged almost on desperate, jesting nihilism. "The Lord will no doubt have mercy on me," he said once, with reference to one of his constant complaints about the bus service, "and if the Lord does not have mercy on me, maybe the Neighborhood Council will, but I fear that the bus cooperative is stronger than both."

I made the pilgrimage to Talpiot two or three more times during the two years I studied at the university in Jerusalem. My first stories were being published then in the weekend supplement of Davar and in the quarterly Keshet, and I planned to leave them with Mr. Agnon to hear what he thought of them; but Mr. Agnon apologized, saying "I regret that I do not feel up to reading these days," and asked me to bring them back another day. Another day, then, I returned, empty-handed but carrying on my belly, like an embarrassing pregnancy, the number of Keshet containing my story. In the end I lacked the courage to give birth there, I was afraid of making a nuisance of myself, and I left his house as I had arrived, with a big belly. Or a bulging sweater. It was only some years later, when the stories were collected in a book (Where the Jackals Howl in 1965), that I summoned up the courage to send it to him. For three days and three nights I danced around the kibbutz, drunk with joy, silently singing and roaring aloud with happiness, inwardly roaring and weeping, after receiving Mr. Agnon's nice letter, in which he wrote, inter alia, "...and when we meet, I shall tell you viva voce more than I have written here. During Passover I shall read the rest of the stories, God willing, because I enjoy stories like yours where the heroes appear in the full reality of their being."

Once, when I was at the university, an article appeared in a foreign journal by one of the leading lights in comparative literature (perhaps it was by the Swiss Emil Steiger?), who gave it as his opinion that the three most important Central European writers of the first half of the twentieth century were Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and S. Y. Agnon. The article was written several years before Agnon won the Nobel Prize, and I was so excited that I stole the journal from the reading room (there were no photocopiers at the university in those days) and hurried with it to Talpiot to give Agnon the pleasure of reading it. And he was indeed pleased, so much so that he wolfed down the whole article as he stood on the doorstep of his house, in a single breath, before so much as asking me in; after reading it, rereading it, and perhaps even licking his lips, he gave me that look he sometimes gave me and asked innocently: "Do you also think Thomas Mann is such an important writer?"

One night, years later, I missed the last bus back from Rehovot to the kibbutz at Hulda and had to take a taxi. All day long the radio had been talking about the Nobel Prize that had been shared between Agnon and the poet Nellie Sachs, and the taxi driver asked me if I'd ever heard of a writer called, what was it, Egnon. "Think about it," he said in amazement. "We've