In S.Y. Agnon's expressionistic masterpiece "Knots upon Knots" (Kishre Kesharim), a writer's spiritual crisis unfolds through the deceptively simple story of a craftsmen's convention gone awry. Through literary analysis of the narrative structure, symbolism, and thematic elements, this translation from Hebrew by Anne Golomb Hoffman reveals how Agnon confronts the modern Jewish writer's position between sacred tradition and secular alienation. The story's first-person narrator encounters figures named for the feuding 18th-century rabbis Joseph Eibeschiitz and Samuel Emden, deepening the work's exploration of religious and cultural fragmentation. Central to the narrative is a deteriorating rope with "knots upon knots" that fails to secure the narrator's belongings—a potent metaphor for spiritual and existential dissolution. Against this imagery of disintegration stands the figure of the bookbinder, representing traditional wholeness and coherence, whose presence only heightens the narrator's inability to unify either his possessions or his existence. Written during the 1940s and 1950s, the story eschews conventional plot development in favor of symbolic narrative elements, ultimately depicting the profound isolation of the modern writer struggling to maintain connection with text-centered tradition.