Nitza Ben-Dov, author of several books on Hebrew narrative fiction, offers a broad comparative probe into works by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua in relation to Agnon and other writers, thus contributing to a growing appreciation of the multidimensional connections between these authors. Her book's title—Ve-hi tehilatkha: (And She Is Your Glory)—suggests that Oz's and Yehoshua's allusions to Tehila and other famous Agnonian heroines brought them glory through open celebration of their indebtedness to the greatest master of modern Hebrew fiction. But at the same time, Oz and Yehoshua also adjusted Agnon's symbolism and plot structures to fit their own views of Israeli society in ways that eventually turned them into the current leaders of its literature.

Oz's description of his childhood visits to Agnon's house, across the street from Oz's uncle Yosef Klausner, becomes Ben-Dov's metaphor for assessing multiple and overlapping shadows that Agnon casts on Yehoshua and Oz. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz relates how he would visit Agnon during the Shabbat's liminal hours, when Agnon's study was shrouded in an enigmatic light that seemed to project more than one shadow around each of its visitors and dwellers. Ben-Dov's introductory essay ventures into this “twilight zone” of literary allusion and cultural history to explore some of the plot paradigms, characterization techniques, and historical contacts linking these authors.

The narratological genealogy that Ben-Dov traces in what is arguably Agnon's most influential work, In the Prime of Her Life, is replicated in the literary-historical genealogy she conducts across her study: Tirtza, the young protagonist and narrator of In the Prime of Her Life, marries her mother's beloved, Akavia Mazal, under the influence of various tales and psychological pressures that pull her away from a match with a man of her own age group. Similarly, Ben-Dov notes that from the beginning of their careers, Yehoshua and Oz struggled between a desire to present a complicated multifaceted vision of Israel in their fiction and a temptation to join a Palmach discourse that tried to be clear and simple “under the blazing light” of its Middle Eastern sun (the title of one of Oz's collections of essays on Israel and its literature).

From this perspective, Ben-Dov's framing literary history merely reaffirms Gershon Shaked's entrenched categorization of Yehoshua and Oz as the leaders of a generation of writers who rejected the “Danis” and “Uris” of Palmach literature, and followed instead the murkier representation of consciousness found in Agnon's surrealistic Book of Deeds and the psychological realism of his confused and ambivalent characters from In the Prime of Her Life onward. Although Agnon's last novel, Shira, operates to some extent as the centerpiece for both Ben-Dov's analysis of Agnon's own earlier works and his subsequent influence on the Sabra authors, Ben-Dov's book as a whole never delivers the systematic exploration of Yehoshua's and Oz's indebtedness to and departures from Agnon promised in its introduction. It divides instead into three separate parts devoted to close interpretations of selected works by each of these authors.

In the section focused on Oz, Ben-Dov stipulates that the tragedy of his mother's suicide “has become part of the literary biography of all of us,” and the charm of his memoirs lies in “welding the personal with the collective” (246). Following Oz's own lead in A Tale of Love and Darkness, she revisits Oz's entire opus in light of his traumatic relationship with his mother. Although I believe this psychoanalytical perspective limits our interpretation of Oz's fiction, it is admittedly a perspective we must adopt, at least temporarily in the wake of the publication of his memoir, before we can move on to a fuller appreciation of Oz's universe. Yet in this sense, too, Ben-Dov's volume divides into three separate sections, since the biographical approach is applied to Oz's opus only.

Above all, Ben-Dov is an extremely attentive reader of literary texts, who expects her readers to be equally attentive not only to the literary works under analysis but also to the parallelisms she tacitly establishes among them from chapter to chapter. To draw maximum benefit from this book, one must therefore keep in mind the insights and arguments presented in its opening chapters on Agnon, and apply them to the later chapters on Yehoshua and Oz. Apart from an essay devoted to Yehoshua's The Liberated Bride, none of the chapters devoted to Yehoshua and Oz sustains, as mentioned, the comparison with Agnon presented in the volume's introduction; in fact, most chapters compare Yehoshua's and Oz's narrative strategies not to Agnon, but rather to episodes from the Bible or to works by S. Yizhar, Moshe Shamir, and non-Hebrew writers from Sophocles to postmodern Russian authors. Nevertheless, a reader keen on the Agnonian connection can pick up this thread through footnotes, symbols, and recurrent plot structures explored in different variations throughout the volume. As Ben-Dov says about an ideal reader of the literary history she studies, “one must keep in mind the seed of the first published story, and trace its evolving form along subsequent works” (154).

Without adopting a specifically feminist discourse, Ve-hi tehilatkha: also pays particular attention to mother and wife figures that tend to be oedipally conflated in Agnon's and Oz's plots, but which in Yehoshua's most recent novels have been acquiring the form of a symbiotic relationship between a middle-aged man and his wife, whose intimate bond becomes threatened by an external breach of sexual or ethnic boundaries. It is through such deep structural paradigms that Ben-Dov discusses gender-related issues in this book. For example, she recalibrates the typically polarized categories of man/woman, youth/age, and East/West to analyze complex relationships among father, mother, and child figures in Yehoshua's Open Heart, A Journey to the End of the Millennium, and his earliest short stories, thus expanding the interpretation of what has become known as the “akedaic paradigm,” which Mordechai Shalev initially identified across Yehoshua's opusFootnote ¹ and Yael FeldmanFootnote ² more precisely articulated as an Oedipus complex disguised or entangled with references to the binding of Isaac.

Ben-Dov's discussion of such topics as the role of women in modern Hebrew fiction and its relation to oedipal and akedaic motifs in the work of all these authors, as well as the place of war and the Holocaust in Agnon's opus, and the tension he created between homecoming and exile, would have benefited from actual engagement with studies on these specific topics by American and British-based scholars of Hebrew literature. As it is, scholars who publish in English will find themselves disappointed by an almost complete lack of engagement with their work. Of course this separation occurs sometimes in Hebrew-literature scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, and students of Hebrew literature can claim they follow Agnon's own guidance when he counseled fellow Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow to secure his work for posterity by having it translated into Hebrew. But, then again, Agnon was always a wizard of indirections, as Ben-Dov brilliantly demonstrated in her own previous work on this author.

Overall, because of its rich analysis of symbolism, key motifs, and recurrent plot structures, this book certainly offers an important contribution to the comparative study of modern Hebrew literature, whether its intertextual dialogues occur between authors named in the volume's title or any other combination of authors. Ben-Dov presents a series of well-wrought essays that illuminate fundamental aspects of Agnon's work, which she then traces to a greater or lesser extent in the fiction of Yehoshua and Oz. As in her previous publications, she continues to bring layers of intertextual allusion and symbolism out of the “twilight zone” of their fictional worlds and into the fuller light of our consciousness.