Sh. Y. Agnon's community rhetoric: The heroism and crisis of power in two tales of gabbais (treasurers) from Ir u-meloah (the city and all it has in it)

Agnon's Buchach stories, which were posthumously collected in the monumental volume Ir U-meloah, being written in the perspective of the Holocaust and two World Wars, provide the boldest and finest representation of the cultural crisis in the twentieth century, and the deepest insight in its inner mechanisms. The current article is focused on one of them: the crisis of power and leadership - in the Jewish community as well as in the surrounding culture. However, the simple conception of the generations' decline, supported, for example, by Shulamit Almog in her work City, Law, Story, is hardly applicable to the book, and the whole picture is supposedly much more complicated.