The riddle of Helene and the revenge of Yosef: new Reading in S. Y. Agnon’s The Lady and the Peddler

This article offers a new reading of S. Y. Agnon's short story The Lady and the Peddler, situating it at the intersection of personal biography, mythic intertextuality, and gendered cultural critique. Long interpreted as an allegorical warning against assimilation and intimacy with gentile women, the story has been read as reinforcing a nationalist and halakhic ethos. Challenging this dominant framework, the article draws on feminist theory, cultural anthropology, and Agnon scholarship to reveal a more complex narrative logic. Through close textual analysis and archival research, the study identifies Dr. Elisabeth Kreiselmeier as a likely historical inspiration for Helene and examines how Agnon's personal relationship with her informs the story's symbolic economy. In this reading, Helene, traditionally cast as a demonic femme fatale, emerges as an ambivalent figure through whom the text negotiates male anxieties surrounding female autonomy, erotic agency, and modernity. The article argues that Agnon simultaneously demonizes and memorializes the modern woman, employing a fantastic folkloric mode to register his conflicted response to secularization, gender equality, and desire, while subtly engaging contemporary ideological tensions.