The Nobel Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon left strict instructions for his daughter to see that, after his death, a group of his stories be published as a single volume. In accordance with Agnon’s wishes, they appeared under the title Ir Umlo’ah, meaning “A City in Its Fullness”—the city being Agnon’s native Buczacz, where all of these stories take place, and which figures prominently in his other writings. Reviewing an English translation of a selection of these stories—edited by Jeffrey Saks and the late Alan Mintz—along with Mintz’s volume about the Buczacz stories, Ruby Namdar writes:

[I]t was Agnon’s linguistic register, his choice of a literary style that somehow managed to feel continuous with the classics of premodern Hebrew, despite his deep, ironic modernism, that set him apart from the beginning. It seems to me that it was this stylistic choice more than anything else that has made him impossible both to ignore and to emulate; indeed impossible, or at least difficult, for contemporary Israelis even to read. . . .

Given all of this, there has always been something heroic, even quixotic, about rendering Agnon into English—and how much more so the late, difficult stories recovering the everyday history of his Galician hometown of Buczacz. The stories, which range from short fragments to a complex novella of local politics . . . were often published in Haaretz to little fanfare and some puzzlement. Even Agnon’s great friend and champion Gershom Scholem described this phase of the writer’s work as “peculiar.” . . .

[Indeed], there is something essentially different about in A City in Its Fullness, something that separates it from the rest of Agnon’s body of work. Here he positions himself not as a subtly ironic . . . modernist whose motivations were in the first place artistic, but as a humble, heartbroken preserver of memory.

In addition to eliminating many of the shorter pieces, Mintz and Saks took one quite brilliant liberty with what Mintz calls the “orchestrated sequence” that Agnon left his daughter. This was to begin, rather than end, the volume with Agnon’s story “The Sign.” . . . The unusually strong style and vocabulary of [the story’s] opening seem to mark A City in Its Fullness not as a 20th-century work of short stories but as a medieval cycle of martyrdom tales, an heir to the long Jewish literature of destruction that began with the biblical book of Lamentations. . . .

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.