The beautiful and moving Israeli novel about homelessness; uprooted-ness; exile and transformation, Shira (1971) by the late Nobel laureate Shmuel [Samuel] Yosef Agnon (who is to this day the only Nobel Prize winner in Literature to ever emerge from Israel) is an enormously rich, complex, seamlessly written story about the lives and circumstances of various immigrants to Israel. The book is set in Jerusalem [then Palestine] before World War II. It has as its dominant, most vibrant concern (there are many concerns in the story but one is, I believe, still the central nerve of the novel) an extramarital affair with the title character Shira – this being the illicit fruit of what we today would call (banally) a 'midlife crisis'). Agnon makes infinitely, ingeniously more of it than that. Herbst the German-born immigrant to Israel is the proverbial stranger in a strange land; and he must first wander in the darkness at its outermost borders in order to know how and why he truly fits, after all, within it (albeit uneasily).
             It is this affair of Herbst's with the title character Shira, in fact, that seems to ultimately point the alienated, self-estranged Herbst circuitously, toward real depth and authenticity. Shira, who helps Herbst's wife Henrietta give birth to their daughter Sarah in Jerusalem also helps give birth symbolically Sarah's father's long-cocooned personhood. This then parallels another birth whose own pangs are felt continually in the various external, historically significant events of the novel: the birth of Israel itself.
             The birth pangs of Israel are in fact in a larger sense much like Herbst's as he himself becomes slowly transformed. Ironically, through Herbst's engaging in passionate, illicit love rather than engaging in anything more sublime, spiritual, patriotic, or academic (or just socially acceptable) he finds himself led circuitously; errati...