In Mr Lublin's Store

S.Y. Agnon’s final, posthumous novel, now in English translation for the first time, fully annotated and with an insightful Foreword by translator Glenda Abramson. In Mr. Lublin’s Store, set in Leipzig during World War I, is a profound commentary on exile and Zionism, assimilation and faith, Germans and Jews, and the pull that the past exercises on the present.

To a large degree, In Mr. Lublin’s Store sums up Agnon’s thematic and formal development. This novel is also a prime example of an objective correlative for a world that is out of joint—a world where a plot is no longer possible because impersonal forces deriving from the setting where it takes place, Germany, no longer permit development of a normal plot. Only the components of the place, which determine the fate of many individuals who live there, can be described. The entire tradition has been undermined, although many of the characters yearn for it in their nostalgia for the shtetl of their birth. However, there is no hope of returning home; there is no chance to rebuild the fallen tabernacle of the tradition.

-Professor Gershon Shaked, The Hebrew University