S.Y. Agnon's Jerusalem: before and after 1948.(Critical essay)

This essay explores S. Y. Agnon's Jerusalem in a number of texts, spanning nearly his entire life--and beyond, into posthumous publications. I argue that the two constitutive events of the 1940s--the Shoah and the war of 1948 that led to the establishment of the State of Israel--hardly figure in Agnon's representation of Jerusalem, which remains largely an anachronistic site of pre-1948 pilgrimage and millennial visions. Rather than interpret this as part of a seamlessly religious worldview consistent with "holistic" poetic and political positions (especially post-1967), I suggest that there is a nonhistorical version of Jerusalem as the site of ultimate reconciliation and deliverance that is often "hidden in plain view" in some of the most audacious of Agnon's fictions. I conclude with a reading of the enigmatic short story, "Ma'gelei tsedek."