- Person
- S. Y. Agnon
- Lived
- 1887–1970
- Field
- Hebrew literature
- From
- Galician-born Israeli
The story
S. Y. Agnon was born in Buczacz, a small town in Eastern Galicia that is now Buchach in Ukraine, and lived there until he was about twenty. In the 1920s Jews made up around 60 percent of its population, and before the Second World War as many as 10,000 Jews lived there, half the town.
Buczacz was at the heart of his fiction. Its streets, synagogues and people appear again and again, from his early novella And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight to The Bridal Canopy, A Simple Story and A Guest for the Night, which grew out of a short visit he made to the town in 1930.
During the Holocaust the Jewish community of Buczacz was destroyed. After a first mass murder in August 1941, the Jews were confined to a ghetto; in October 1942 about 1,600 were deported to the Belzec death camp, and in 1943 thousands more were shot on the Fedor Hill outside town. In May 1943 the Germans declared Buczacz "free of Jews". In his Nobel speech in 1966 Agnon mourned the young tailors and shoemakers of his town who had once sung his early songs at their work, most of them murdered with their sisters.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust Agnon wrote the stories later gathered as Ir u-melo'ah, A City in Its Fullness, a vast body of legends and chronicles devoted to Buczacz. In it he rebuilt the town in words, for readers who could never visit the world it had been. The book was published in 1973, three years after his death, as his daughter Emuna Yaron continued to bring out his work.
A City in Its Fullness stands as a literary memorial to one Jewish town and, through it, to the many communities of Eastern Europe that were destroyed. Buchach itself now remembers him: its historical museum has an exhibit about him, a bust stands in a plaza across from the house where he grew up, and the street in front of it is named Agnon Street.
Why it matters
A City in Its Fullness preserves the memory of a murdered Jewish community, giving descendants and readers a way to know the world that was lost.
About S. Y. Agnon
Master of modern Hebrew fiction who wove the language of the Bible and Talmud into novels of Galicia and Jerusalem, and the first Hebrew-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, in 1966.
More about S. Y. Agnon
- Agnon's A Guest for the Night mourned a vanishing worldIn A Guest for the Night (1939), S. Y. Agnon described a narrator's return to his ruined Galician hometown, one of the great Hebrew novels of the twentieth century.
- Agnon's collected stories appeared in four volumes in 1931With the support of patron Salman Schocken, S. Y. Agnon's collected stories were published in four volumes in 1931, establishing him as a central figure of Hebrew literature.
Sources
- Shmuel Yosef Agnon Wikipedia
- Buchach Wikipedia
- Shmuel Agnon – Banquet speech NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.