“The Dead Do Not Praise the Lord”: Alter’s Psalms, Agnon’s “Tehilla,” Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

Life in this world is the only life, according to the ancient biblical belief. Robert Alter (Uri) in the introduction to his translation of the book of Psalms (2007) explains why he sometimes chose one word and not another to remain faithful to the biblical belief of Psalms, and discarded here and there the excess baggage of belief in the world to come, which throughout the generations has clung to certain words and expression that appear in the psalms. Two texts from Modern literature, one Hebrew, the other Russian, exemplify in this article the tension between belief in this world and belief in the world to come of two female protagonists, independently of each other. The last part of the article relates a personal event that illumines something about Robert Alter, the man and the translator.