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Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town and Other Novellas
New and Revised Translations from the Hebrew Including the Novellas Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town · In the Heart of the Seas · In the Prime of Her Life · Tehilla. The volume's title story Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town tells of the epic clash between two Torah scholars who according to the Talmudic phrase cannot abide each other in matters of halakhah . First published in Hebrew 1956, the story is set over a period of roughly thirty years during the mid-nineteenth century in an unnamed Our Town, clearly meant to be Agnon's native Buczacz (in today's western Ukraine). Narrating from a point three or four generations after the action, the narrator waxes nostalgic even elegiac for a time when Torah was beloved by Israel and the entire glory of a man was Torah, [when] our town was privileged to be counted among the most notable towns in the land on account of its scholars. And yet, as the plot unwinds and insults are traded in the Study House, the ancient Talmudic curse begins to work its dark power, leading to the tragic denouement. And here we see Agnon's power as a tragedian on an almost Greek scale. With his typical irony at work, the narrator pines for an earlier, more ideal time which turns out to have been rife with flaws and tragic personalities of its own. This draws the reader to question was it always ever thus? This is Agnon at his best distilling the classical texts of Jewish study into a modern midrashic matrix on which he composed his Nobel-winning literature. Includes new Foreword by Jeffery Saks and a bibliographic essay reviewing the literary criticism.
274 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2014
About the author
S.Y. Agnon
125 books106 followersalso known as Shai Agnon
Dramatic novels in Hebrew of Polish-born Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon include A Guest for the Night (1939); he shared the Nobel Prize of 1966 for literature.
"For his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people," he shared this award with Nelly Sachs. He died in Jerusalem, Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmuel_...
Dramatic novels in Hebrew of Polish-born Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon include A Guest for the Night (1939); he shared the Nobel Prize of 1966 for literature.
"For his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people," he shared this award with Nelly Sachs. He died in Jerusalem, Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmuel_...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 7, 2026
Been reading A LOT of Agnon lately. I prefer the novels to these novellas, but of this fine batch, Tehilla was the best.
Want to Read
April 27, 2026SUMMARY
In the Prime of Her Life is a short Agnon novella narrated by Tirza, a young woman whose mother, Leah, dies young of a heart illness. After Leah’s death, Tirza gradually discovers that her mother had once loved Akaviah Mazal, a sensitive poet-teacher, but had been prevented from marrying him. The obstacle was not lack of feeling but family, illness, economics, and the ordinary cowardices by which adults dignify emotional disaster as prudence.
The plot is outwardly simple: the daughter of the dead woman falls in love with the man who once loved her mother. But “simple” is exactly the trap. The story is not really about whether Tirza “chooses” Akaviah. It is about whether choice can exist when one is born inside another person’s unresolved longing. Tirza seems to act, but her action is contaminated by inheritance. She is daughter, substitute, rival, mourner, bride, and sacrificial object at once.
THOUGHTS
The most obvious biblical shadow is Ruth. Naomi tells Ruth to prepare herself, go to Boaz at night, uncover his feet, lie down, and wait for him to tell her what to do. Ruth answers “I will do whatever you say", and Naomi says “He will tell you what to do.”.
This is not “submissive” in a pornographic sense. It is much more Jewish and therefore much weirder. It is submission mediated by law, family repair, widowhood, land, lineage, and name. Ruth goes to a man at night, but the point is not merely sex. It is redemption. That is what Agnon is playing with. Tirza is Ruth-ish, but in a perverse little domestic key. She approaches the older male figure not simply as lover, but as the man who can retroactively make sense of a broken family line. Akaviah is not Boaz, because Boaz is actually useful, public, responsible, and legally functional. Akaviah is more like a moody literary object who has somehow acquired Boaz lighting.
The redemption scene in Ruth 4 makes the yibum-like logic explicit. Boaz says he has acquired Ruth “to perpetuate the name of the dead,” so that the dead man’s name is not cut off. Ruth’s marriage is not private romantic fulfillment. It is a mechanism for continuing the dead. In Ruth, the widow is folded into a male line so that the male name continues. In Agnon, the daughter is folded into the mother’s erotic afterlife so that the mother’s lost desire continues.
Yibum, levirate marriage, is not literally happening in Agnon. Nobody is marrying a dead brother’s widow. But the emotional logic is yibum-adjacent: the living are made to complete the dead. This is why the story is so much more interesting than “young woman likes older man.”
There is also a darker Tamar-and-Judah echo hovering nearby. In Genesis 38, Tamar is denied her rightful levirate continuation through Shelah. She disguises herself, sleeps with Judah, and forces the family line to continue. Tamar is another woman who uses a sexually scandalous route to correct a failed family obligation. Ruth is the respectable version. Tamar is the feral version.
Tirza is not exactly Ruth and not exactly Tamar. She is too interior, too literary, too passive-aggressive-with-destiny. But she belongs in the same biblical zone: women who enter dangerous erotic situations because the family structure has failed and someone has to make continuity happen.
The story is not romantic in the stupid sense. It is romantic in the diseased sense, which is obviously superior. It is about inherited desire, erotic substitution, dead mothers, textual seduction, and a girl who mistakes, or maybe does not mistake, sacrifice for destiny.
In the Prime of Her Life is a short Agnon novella narrated by Tirza, a young woman whose mother, Leah, dies young of a heart illness. After Leah’s death, Tirza gradually discovers that her mother had once loved Akaviah Mazal, a sensitive poet-teacher, but had been prevented from marrying him. The obstacle was not lack of feeling but family, illness, economics, and the ordinary cowardices by which adults dignify emotional disaster as prudence.
The plot is outwardly simple: the daughter of the dead woman falls in love with the man who once loved her mother. But “simple” is exactly the trap. The story is not really about whether Tirza “chooses” Akaviah. It is about whether choice can exist when one is born inside another person’s unresolved longing. Tirza seems to act, but her action is contaminated by inheritance. She is daughter, substitute, rival, mourner, bride, and sacrificial object at once.
THOUGHTS
The most obvious biblical shadow is Ruth. Naomi tells Ruth to prepare herself, go to Boaz at night, uncover his feet, lie down, and wait for him to tell her what to do. Ruth answers “I will do whatever you say", and Naomi says “He will tell you what to do.”.
This is not “submissive” in a pornographic sense. It is much more Jewish and therefore much weirder. It is submission mediated by law, family repair, widowhood, land, lineage, and name. Ruth goes to a man at night, but the point is not merely sex. It is redemption. That is what Agnon is playing with. Tirza is Ruth-ish, but in a perverse little domestic key. She approaches the older male figure not simply as lover, but as the man who can retroactively make sense of a broken family line. Akaviah is not Boaz, because Boaz is actually useful, public, responsible, and legally functional. Akaviah is more like a moody literary object who has somehow acquired Boaz lighting.
The redemption scene in Ruth 4 makes the yibum-like logic explicit. Boaz says he has acquired Ruth “to perpetuate the name of the dead,” so that the dead man’s name is not cut off. Ruth’s marriage is not private romantic fulfillment. It is a mechanism for continuing the dead. In Ruth, the widow is folded into a male line so that the male name continues. In Agnon, the daughter is folded into the mother’s erotic afterlife so that the mother’s lost desire continues.
Yibum, levirate marriage, is not literally happening in Agnon. Nobody is marrying a dead brother’s widow. But the emotional logic is yibum-adjacent: the living are made to complete the dead. This is why the story is so much more interesting than “young woman likes older man.”
There is also a darker Tamar-and-Judah echo hovering nearby. In Genesis 38, Tamar is denied her rightful levirate continuation through Shelah. She disguises herself, sleeps with Judah, and forces the family line to continue. Tamar is another woman who uses a sexually scandalous route to correct a failed family obligation. Ruth is the respectable version. Tamar is the feral version.
Tirza is not exactly Ruth and not exactly Tamar. She is too interior, too literary, too passive-aggressive-with-destiny. But she belongs in the same biblical zone: women who enter dangerous erotic situations because the family structure has failed and someone has to make continuity happen.
The story is not romantic in the stupid sense. It is romantic in the diseased sense, which is obviously superior. It is about inherited desire, erotic substitution, dead mothers, textual seduction, and a girl who mistakes, or maybe does not mistake, sacrifice for destiny.
January 27, 2025
This is the first work by Agnon I've read. I wanted to love it. Israeli; Nobel laureate; etc. I found the novellas, to varying degrees, tedious. The experience left me reluctant to explore more deeply.
August 21, 2023
Three of the four stories were enjoyable to read - quite poignant. One (by far the longest) was not; I found it plodding. Averages to four stars (barely).
December 4, 2020
In the Heart of the Seas : #3 Favorite First-Read of 2019
December 4th, 2020 : Splendid tales (or one novel and three tales, the word count running from about 17,000 words (Tehilla) to 34,000 (In the Heart of the Seas), each so different. Two Scholars and Heart are encircled by light, mild but enduring, like the intense gray light of the sky over a morning snowfall . Both have wondrous descriptions of the natural world, and nuanced, fathoms-deep explorations of the human world of faith; Two Scholars gets its momentum from little details of psychology, conversation, interaction, and the disagreements of Torah scholars while In the Heart of the Seas is built from folklore, old world-travelers' tales, the Exile's longing for the Holy Land, and the Psalms. Both have incredible endings (a common Agnon forte). Tehilla is one of Agnon's more tender pieces, infused with love for the Old City of Jerusalem and—like echoes from another world—for Galician Hasidism. It has a commanding central character and a charming, witty narrator. In the Prime of Her Life is the representative of the psychological realist strain in Agnon, but psychological realism as Agnon does it is not like any you're likely to have read before; it's full of complications, ellipses, and lacunae. In a first read, "nothing is revealed," as the old Bob Dylan song goes; in a second, a little more is, but even a revisit only feels like passing through a corner of a town, rather than ambling into its center and taking a seat in the library beside city hall.
December 4th, 2020 : Splendid tales (or one novel and three tales, the word count running from about 17,000 words (Tehilla) to 34,000 (In the Heart of the Seas), each so different. Two Scholars and Heart are encircled by light, mild but enduring, like the intense gray light of the sky over a morning snowfall . Both have wondrous descriptions of the natural world, and nuanced, fathoms-deep explorations of the human world of faith; Two Scholars gets its momentum from little details of psychology, conversation, interaction, and the disagreements of Torah scholars while In the Heart of the Seas is built from folklore, old world-travelers' tales, the Exile's longing for the Holy Land, and the Psalms. Both have incredible endings (a common Agnon forte). Tehilla is one of Agnon's more tender pieces, infused with love for the Old City of Jerusalem and—like echoes from another world—for Galician Hasidism. It has a commanding central character and a charming, witty narrator. In the Prime of Her Life is the representative of the psychological realist strain in Agnon, but psychological realism as Agnon does it is not like any you're likely to have read before; it's full of complications, ellipses, and lacunae. In a first read, "nothing is revealed," as the old Bob Dylan song goes; in a second, a little more is, but even a revisit only feels like passing through a corner of a town, rather than ambling into its center and taking a seat in the library beside city hall.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews