Shira

Book excerpt: Manfred Herbst, a middle-aged professor at the Hebrew University, is bored. He is bored with his studies, with the petty squabbles of his academic colleagues, and with his endlessly understanding wife, Henrietta. He spends his days - and often his nights - prowling the streets and alleys of Jerusalem searching for Shira, the beguiling nurse he met at a hospital years ago. Against the backdrop of 1930s Jerusalem - a world on the brink of war - Herbst wages his own war against the encroachment of age as he plunges deeper into fantasies sparked by the free-spirited Shira. Shira, the last novel of Hebrew writer and 1966 Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon, was unfinished at the time of his death in 1970. Agnon wrote two very different endings for this novel, both of which are included here, along with an afterword by Robert Alter.