In 1967, on a visit to Jerusalem, the American novelist Saul Bellow met Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Israel's Nobel laureate in literature. "This spare old man," Bellow would recall, "asked me if any of my books had been translated into Hebrew. If they had not been, I had better see to it immediately, because, he said, they would survive only in the Holy Tongue." And what about Heinrich Heine's imperishably fine German, Bellow asked? "Ah," replied Agnon, "we have him beautifully translated into Hebrew. He is safe."
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