Customer Reviews

The Silence of Heaven: Agnon's Fear of God

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This book is at least on part based on public lectures given by Oz at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Oz is a tremendously powerful and beautiful speaker and reader of Hebrew. These lectures sounded not so much like academic criticism but as a kind of long prose-poem. I do not know Agnon's work well- enough to argue with the reading Oz makes of it. Agnon was a religious Jew who was deep inside the Tradition as is evidenced in some of the anthology work he did especially ' Days of Awe' . Oz has gone somewhere else, and does not have Agnon's midrashic and talmudic background. Yet the thesis that Oz proposes in regard to the contradiction between the ideals of the religious and Zionist return to the land, and the reality which was met and made in the Yishuv is a very real one. It is also true that Agnon's work is a chronicle of the collapse of Eastern Jewry written before the great destruction comes. Oz knows the Agnon text well, and his power as writer makes it seems as if his reading of Agnon is the most convincing one. I think however it should be balanced against the reading of other commentators including Baruch Kurzweil, Arnold Band, Hillel Weiss and a host of others.

However reading this work of Oz will give not only knowledge of two of the Hebrew language's greatest writers in modern times ( Agnon and Oz) it will illuminate the whole ideological dimension of the Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael.