"Originally published in Hebrew in 1973 under the title Hamashal vehanimshal, having appeared as one of several stories in the volume Ir u-meloah."

S. Y. Agnon was born in 1888 in Buczacz, Galicia. He emigrated to Palestine in 1908 and lived there for five years before beginning an extended stay in Germany. He returned to Palestine in 1924 and settled permanently in Jerusalem. He received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966.
James S. Diamond is a rabbi, academic, and translator. He taught literature at Princeton University for over a decade, and has written extensively on Agnon and modern Hebrew literature.
Alan Mintz is the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is author, most recently, of Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry (Stanford, 2011). He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.