The recently published A City and Its Fullness brings into English, for the first time, a cycle of stories by S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), the Nobel Prize-winning Hebrew author, based on the history of his Galician home town of Buczacz. Through these stories, Agnon, himself religiously observant for most of his literary career, takes his readers into the inner world of East European Jewish spiritual and communal life in a way unparalleled in Jewish literature. Reviewing the collection, Sarah Rindner examines Agnon’s appeal to the 21st-century Orthodox reader:

There are probably few readers outside of the Orthodox Jewish community who have the cultural literacy necessary to recognize many of the . . . allusions in Agnon’s stories. Yet Agnon’s works have not made the deep inroads into the Orthodox world that one might imagine they would.

This may in part be due to the fact that Agnon’s writing, like the work of other great modern authors, is complex and often ambiguous. He winks at the reader by using irony and the interplay of multiple perspectives. Even the name Agnon [deriving from the Hebrew word for sorrow] is a construct—a pen-name that refers to his first published story, “Agunot” [the term for wives abandoned by their husbands and prohibited by halakhic stricture from remarrying]. . . . Agnon is a master of self-invention and it is often difficult to pin him down to specific positions, theological or otherwise.

Yet his writing communicates an overarching message about Judaism and religious life in the modern world that transcends mere agnostic relativism. Indeed, the careful Orthodox reader of Agnon will relate to his elusive and slippery yet incredibly fruitful project of both depicting the complexities of the human condition and situating these human stories within the tapestry of . . . Jewish tradition. . . .

Were he more of a universalist, Agnon could have been a major modernist writer in the mode of James Joyce or William Faulkner. Instead he ultimately chose, through his extensive engagement with classical Jewish texts, and unwavering loyalty to his religion and nation, to remain within or at least alongside the tradition of his Jewish brethren. [Orthodox Jews] are the readers Agnon needs for his fiction to be understood and appreciated, and [they], in turn, will only be the richer for it.

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.