Dan Laor has published three books on the life and writings of Shmuel Yosef Agnon: a volume of essays, Hebeitim hadashim (1995); a comprehensive biography, Hayyei Agnon (1998); and the current volume, Shai Agnon (2008) in the Gedolei ha-ru'aḥ ve-ha-yetzira ba-`am ha-yehudi series sponsored by the Zalman Shazar Center. As this last book is built on the previous and much more extensive biographical study of 1998, it is important to consider the development of the presentation from book to book.

Hayyei Agnon is a lengthy (774 pages), impressive repository of the well-researched information one would want about the life of S. Y. Agnon. I cannot imagine that it will ever be possible to add significant material to it. It fails, however, in two cardinal aspects: It avoids presenting any literary study of Agnon—who really interests us only because he was a writer of such genius; and it is a naïve hagiography of a man who, in life—and I spent hundreds of hours with him in 1962–63, and 1966–67—was egotistical, manipulative, and a canny fabricator. Agnon's pious behavior was often demonstrative, often staged, and hence, in my mind, suspect. The Agnon who appears in Hayyei Agnon bears no resemblance whatsoever to the man I knew; my opinion is shared by his contemporaries, including Dov Sadan, Gershom Scholem, Shlomo Tsemah, Shimon Halkin, Leah Goldberg, and Nathan Rotenstreich, all of whom personally affirmed my assessment. They would testify, for example, that Agnon's relationship with his wife, Esther, was radically different from that portrayed in Laor's book—the latter based solely on Agnon's letters in the volume Esterlein yakirati. They understood, however, that the man's pettiness did not diminish his stature as an author, perhaps the greatest writer of Hebrew prose fiction since the authors of the Bible.

The present volume in the Shazar series is significantly shorter (205 pages) than Hayyei Agnon and attempts to conform to the goal of presenting “monographs on the life and works of outstanding persons in Jewish history in the areas of thought, halakhah, and culture.” This volume follows works on Moses Mendelssohn, Rabbi Judah the Pious, Rashi, Saadia Gaon, Rav Kuk, Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nassi, and Theodor Herzl (a volume on Bialik was published after the study of Agnon). Laor professes his aspiration in this volume to bring Agnon close to a wide audience of readers and students. Fortunately, much of the biographical detail of Hayyei Agnon is minimized to make room for a presentation of brief studies of many of Agnon's works, thus generating an understanding of why we should be interested in his life and historical setting. The book does succeed admirably in integrating the works into the fabric of Agnon's life.

Unfortunately, the reader's anticipation of improvement in presentation induced by the integration of biography and literary analysis is frustrated from the very beginning by Laor's naïve journalistic opening: “Several minutes after 4 o'clock—the end of the Sabbath—motorcycles of the Stockholm police paved the way for an elegant automobile that traveled from the Grand Hotel to the concert hall” (9). The day Agnon received the Nobel Prize in Literature, December 10, 1966, is described as an epiphanic moment in the history of Hebrew literature and, of course, for the man himself. There is no mention here that the Nobel Prize that year was shared by Agnon and Nelly Sachs, also a Jewish writer, but one who wrote in German about the Holocaust and spent much of her life in Sweden. The symmetry between Agnon, who came from Israel, and Sachs, who came from the Diaspora and wrote about the Holocaust, was obvious to many observers: 1966 was the year for the Jews. The Nobel Prize choices seemed then, as often still, both puzzling and partly political. The omission of any critical perception of the event by Laor is fairly typical of the entire volume.

Following that scene, Laor waffles elegantly (10) on the issue of Agnon's true birth date, which I first discovered in 1963. He was born on August 8, 1887, which was the 18th of Av in the Jewish calendar, not the 9th of Av as Agnon claimed. That in the 1920s he fabricated the story that he was born on the day when, according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah would be born demands critical analysis, not casual dismissal. Certainly this false claim made by a man steeped in Jewish religious texts must have some implication for his self-image—and for his devoted readers who have always been charmed and intrigued by his unique stature as a fusion of the modern yet traditional Hebrew author.

It appears that in the late 1920s Agnon began to claim that he was born on Tisha be-Av, after his return to Jerusalem from Weimar Berlin in 1924. Laor describes Agnon's return to a life of Jewish observance in great detail (60), but never seriously addresses the conflict between this avowed return and the persistent ironies of doubt that suffuse so many of Agnon's works. He refers frequently to the critical essays of Baruch Kurzweil, who dwelled on “the demonic” in Agnon's fiction, but rarely delves into the psychological and spiritual complexities of Agnon's worldview as expressed in so many of his stories and novels.

Throughout the volume, Agnon's style is praised for its surpassing charm both by Laor and the many critics he cites. Agnon's mastery of Jewish sources and their seamless integration into his prose style are cited as wondrous literary achievements. These discussions usually omit two significant aspects of this stylistic choice. First, Agnon chose to employ a style of Hebrew based on premodern texts, deliberately avoiding the developing norms of modern Hebrew literature that both his colleagues and he himself employed in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1911, in the story “Vehaya heʿakov lemishor,” Agnon deliberately adopted a premodern late rabbinic and hasidic narrative discourse and continued to cultivate it throughout his life, precisely as the style of modern Hebrew prose developed in other directions. What is the implication of this style that runs counter to the quasi-normative style of modern Hebrew literature so closely associated with the rise of secular Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel? And what is the impact of the often parodic usage of this style in many stories, including in such classics as “Agadat ha-sofer” or the novel Hakhnasat kallah? Parody implies a conscious distancing from the norms of the society. When in “Agadat ha-sofer” the narrator tells us that the heroine, Miryam, was barren because “the Lord wants to hear the prayers of pious women,” what is the perceptive reader supposed to understand—especially since it is obvious that the husband, a sofer, foolishly refrained from having sex with his wife in the presence of Torah scrolls?

Laor does a remarkable job in compressing so much material, including the summaries of most of Agnon's works, in the limited space obviously dictated by the format of this series, but the reader wishes he had adopted, even in this limited space, a more critical and analytical stance. As a final example of this lacuna, we cite the glaring avoidance of psychologically oriented interpretation such as that which one finds in the studies of Dov Sadan, Nitza ben Dov, or Anne Golomb Hoffman. Agnon, after all, lived in a world already suffused with Freudian overtones and one cannot escape these in such major works as Sippur pashut, Temol Shilshom, Shirah, or stories like “Bidemi yameha” and “Panim aḥerot.”

In the final chapter of this book, Laor hails the sustained, even increased interest in Agnon both by common readers and literary scholars. This volume, both in its significant achievements and in its failures, prepares the way for the next generation of scholars.