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civilisation. But on the other hand, the author is also a man who has walked out alone through the gate of his city to the top of the hill and has stood there by himself gazing on his own city from the outside. With a cool, distant eye, with mockery, wonderment, irony, horror and hatred, and, at the same time and without any contradiction, with compassion and respect and a heart torn by anguish at the thought that all this is doomed to perish.
    And so these authors create stories, poems, plays and novels, cathedrals of words, and by their writing they deliver the fatal stab, and they also dress the wound, and record the failing pulse and the loss of body heat, and raise the lament, and derive a wicked pleasure, and build a memorial, or if you prefer stuff the skin (like the taxidermist Arzaff in Agnon’s Tmol Shilshom -or even like Agnon himself, in his writing). And while they are doing all this, with love, hatred, regret, arrogance and dexterity, they are already looking around for something new that promises to take the place of the expiring civilisation. They are longing for that new, strange development that is already filling the air, amorphous yet vigorously effervescent, they are both longing and fearful, it attracts and fascinates them and they proclaim its coming while simultaneously warning against it.
    And so, in the twilight between a great sunset and the vague glimmering of a new dawn, someone like Dante stands poised between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Or Cervantes and Shakespeare on the threshold of the modern age. Or the great Russian literature of Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, written to the accompaniment of the death-knell of Orthodox, tsarist Russia, borne down by the weight of years, of customs and beliefs, on its cities and villages, its aristocracy and its intelligentsia, its freed serfs and its peasants, this Russia sinking under the onslaught of revolutionaries, ideologues and nihilists, but mainly under the weight of its own years, its traditions and its faith. And the writers, each in his own way, are all the children of this Russia, they are all its lovers, its haters, its crucifiers, its murderers, its gravediggers, its elegists, immortalising it lest it perish and be forgotten. They spy the new forces approaching on every side, at least they discern their outlines, and they are attracted but also filled with fear and loathing. Each in his own distinctive way.
    Similarly Thomas Mann, and in a different way Kafka too, wrote in the period of the decline of comfortable bourgeois Europe, heavy with years and old ways and manners and patterns of behaviour and speech and mentalities, and in their differing ways they both knew that this world was doomed not from without but from within, from the weight of its own age and decadence; and its death pained them and yet in their writing they seem to be hastening its end, adminstering the coup de grace, and hurrying in to embalm it and memorialise it in words. Both of them sense vaguely what is going to replace this bourgeois age, and both of them, in their different ways, are brimming with fear and trembling, and with a certain secret hope: let this new thing come, but let me not see it. And similarly in modern Hebrew literature, Mendele, Berdyczewski, Bialik, Brenner, Gnessin and Agnon stand ‘on the threshold of the temple’, not entirely inside, yet not entirely outside either. A great world of faith, tradition, manners, folksongs, jokes, laws and superstitions is collapsing under its own weight (plus a battering from outside), and the Hebrew writers of the so-called ‘age of revival’ put the capstone on it in their writings, while at the same time eulogising and preserving it.
    ‘In the land our fathers loved all our dreams will be fulfilled’
    You would no doubt be pleased if I said something like this to you: in great times of revival and reconstruction great works of literature too emerge. Don’t get me wrong: I am neither a