- Person
- S. Y. Agnon
- Lived
- 1887–1970
- Field
- Hebrew literature
- From
- Galician-born Israeli
The story
In October 1912 S. Y. Agnon left Jaffa for Berlin, planning a short stay. The First World War cut off his return, and he remained in Germany for twelve years. In Berlin he grew close to Martin Buber and to the young German Zionists around him, among them Gershom Scholem, who called him "the Jews' Jew". For this circle, rediscovering the culture its parents had left behind, Agnon stood for the authentic tradition of Eastern European Jewry.
Through them he met the businessman Salman Schocken, who became his patron and freed him from financial worries. According to the biographer Dan Laor, Schocken's support for Agnon had no parallel in twentieth-century Hebrew literature. Schocken also kept him supplied with books, and Agnon read widely in European literature in German, from Flaubert and Dostoevsky to Goethe and Fontane.
Disaster struck in 1924, when a fire at his home in Bad Homburg destroyed his library and manuscripts, and he moved to Jerusalem. In 1928 Schocken told him he had decided to found a publishing house of his own to bring out Agnon's works. In 1930 Agnon spent half a year in Leipzig overseeing the printing, one of only two journeys abroad, he later said, that he made between his return to the Land of Israel and his Nobel trip.
The collected stories appeared in four volumes in 1931. Besides the stories published up to mid-1929, they included Hakhnasat Kalla, The Bridal Canopy, now expanded into a full-length novel about Reb Yudel, a poor but devout Galician Jew who wanders the countryside in search of bridegrooms for his three daughters. The collection was hailed as a landmark and established Agnon as one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature.
Further volumes followed from Schocken, including the novella A Simple Story in 1935, a realistic portrait of the Buczacz of Agnon's youth, and Days of Awe, an anthology for the High Holy Days compiled at the suggestion of the firm's editor Moshe Spitzer. Their long correspondence was published in 1991. Schocken's backing allowed Agnon to devote himself to writing, and the 1931 edition gave Hebrew literature one of its foundational collections.
Why it matters
Schocken's patronage and the 1931 edition gave Hebrew literature one of its foundational collections, read and studied ever since.
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 wrote a vast memorial to his lost hometown, BuczaczAfter the Holocaust annihilated the Jews of Buczacz, S. Y. Agnon composed A City in Its Fullness, a vast body of legends and chronicles devoted to his hometown.
- 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.
Sources
- Shmuel Yosef Agnon 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.