Fantasies of deviance, including latent homosexuality, are not a major or overt theme in the fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim (pen name of S. Y. Abramowitz, 18357–1917) and Samuel Joseph Agnon (1888?–1970) but are, nevertheless, an unmistakable part of the characters whom they depict. These characters, for various reasons and to varying degrees, are deflected from normal heterosexual attachments and are inclined, for this reason, to forms of perversion which at times mirror the distortions and breakdown in the societies in which they live.