A boyhood in Buczacz
Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes was born in Buczacz, a small town in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today Buchach in Ukraine. He was born in the summer of 1887, but later gave his birthday as the fast of Tisha B’Av in 1888, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, a date he seems first to have used to avoid military service and kept for its symbolism. He was the eldest of five children in a traditional, middle-class family.
His father was a Hasid, while his maternal grandfather belonged to the Misnagdim, the rival rabbinic camp, so the boy grew up between two Jewish worlds. Yiddish was spoken at home; Hebrew was the language of the Bible and the Talmud, which he studied formally until about the age of nine and afterwards with tutors and with his father, alongside Maimonides and Hasidic lore. From his mother he acquired a love of German literature. He began writing as a boy, and from 1903 he published poems and stories in Hebrew and Yiddish in Galician periodicals, some seventy pieces before he left home.
Jaffa and a new name
Drawn to Zionism and facing possible conscription, he set out for the Land of Israel in 1908, travelling through Lwów, Kraków and Vienna and reaching Jaffa in early June, during the wave of immigration known as the Second Aliyah. He settled in the Neve Tzedek quarter, gave up religious observance, and joined the small circle of Hebrew writers forming there.
His first story published in Palestine, “Agunot” (“Abandoned Wives”), appeared in October 1908. He signed it “Agnon”, a name drawn from the story’s title, and it eventually became his legal surname; in Hebrew he is known by the initials Shai Agnon. The story won the admiration of the novelist Yosef Haim Brenner, who paid for the publication of Agnon’s novella And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1912), reportedly by selling a pair of suspenders. The novella, set in and around Buczacz and dense with allusions to classical Jewish texts, announced the technique that would define his work.
Twelve years in Germany
In October 1912 Agnon left for Berlin, intending a short stay; the First World War trapped him there, and he remained for twelve years. He became close to Martin Buber, who had already published one of his stories in German, and to the young German Zionists around him, among them Gershom Scholem, who called him “the Jews’ Jew”. For these assimilated young people rediscovering their heritage, Agnon embodied the authentic tradition of Eastern European Jewry.
Through this circle he met the department-store magnate Salman Schocken, who became his lifelong patron and freed him from financial worry. In 1920 he married Esther Marx of Königsberg; they had two children. The family lived for several years in the spa town of Bad Homburg, a small centre of Hebrew literary life where Agnon’s circle included the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and the thinker Ahad Ha’am. Then, on 6 June 1924, a fire swept through their house, destroying Agnon’s library and all his manuscripts, including a completed novel. He took it as a sign that he had stayed too long in exile, and within months he left Germany for good.
Schocken also kept him supplied with books, and in these years Agnon read widely in European literature in German, from Flaubert and Dostoevsky to Goethe and Fontane. His fiction of the German period nonetheless dealt almost entirely with the Jewish world of Galicia and Poland, reworking pious legends and Hasidic tales; he also worked with Buber on a large anthology of Hasidic literature. It was in Germany, too, that he began his lifelong habit of revising and rewriting stories that had already been published, so that many of his works exist in several versions.
Jerusalem and the “two destructions”
In the autumn of 1924 Agnon settled in Jerusalem. By now he had returned to a traditional observant life, which he kept until his death, a striking choice in the largely secular literary world of the Yishuv. The family made its home in the neighbourhood of Talpiot, but during the Arab riots of 1929 the house was looted and much of his library, including rare books and manuscripts, was destroyed again. Agnon spoke of the Bad Homburg fire and the 1929 looting as his “two destructions”, likening them to the destruction of the two Temples.
Schocken founded a publishing house largely to bring out Agnon’s work, and in 1931 his collected stories appeared in four volumes, including the novel Hakhnasat Kalla (The Bridal Canopy), the comic, wandering tale of a poor, pious Galician Jew who travels the countryside seeking husbands for his three daughters. The collection was hailed as a landmark, and Agnon was now recognised as one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In 1931 a new house was built for the family in Talpiot in the Bauhaus style; his study there, where he wrote standing at a lectern until a heart condition forced him to sit in 1951, is preserved today.
The great novels
In the 1930s and 1940s Agnon produced his most important work. A Simple Story (1935) is a realistic, quietly devastating portrait of a young man in the Buczacz of his youth, trapped in a marriage arranged for money. The Book of Deeds, a series of surreal, dreamlike stories, marked his turn towards modernism. Days of Awe, an anthology of traditions and legends for the High Holy Days, showed his mastery of the Jewish library.
A Guest for the Night (1939) grew out of a short visit he had made to Buczacz in 1930: its narrator returns to his Galician hometown after the First World War to find it desolate and broken, and tries in vain to keep its old study house alive. Only Yesterday (1945) returned to Palestine in the years of the Second Aliyah, following a young immigrant from Galicia to Jaffa and Jerusalem. These two books are generally regarded as his greatest achievements. Agnon’s Hebrew was unique: rather than the new spoken language of the Zionist streets, he wrote in a supple style drawn from the Bible, the Mishnah, the Midrash and rabbinic literature, so that his sentences seem at once ancient and strikingly modern.
After the catastrophe
The Holocaust annihilated the Jewish community of Buczacz and the whole world of his early fiction. In response Agnon began a vast work of memory, A City in Its Fullness, a collection of legends, chronicles and stories recording the life of his hometown from its beginnings. It was published only after his death, in 1973.
He continued to publish around half a dozen new stories a year, many of them in the newspaper Haaretz, and worked for some twenty-five years on the novel Shira, set among German-Jewish academics in 1930s Jerusalem, which he never completed. He won the Bialik Prize twice (1934 and 1950) and the Israel Prize twice (1954 and 1958). After the founding of the state he helped edit the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel; research published in 2018 confirmed that Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog was its author, with Agnon as editor.
Stockholm, 1966
In 1966 Agnon shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, “for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.” He was the first writer in Hebrew to receive it. The ceremony fell on a Saturday during Hanukkah, and the observant Agnon arrived only after performing the rituals that end the Sabbath and lighting the Hanukkah candles.
At the banquet he spoke in Hebrew, opening with the traditional blessing said on seeing a king, and introduced himself as a man of Jerusalem born in exile. He told the audience that, whatever influences critics detected in his work, his first sources were the Bible and the sacred books. By then he was a national figure. When he complained that traffic noise outside his home disturbed his writing, the Jerusalem municipality is said to have closed the street to cars with a sign announcing that a writer was at work.
Last years and legacy
Agnon generally kept his distance from politics, though after the Six-Day War he joined the Movement for Greater Israel, a position his biographers trace to his religious outlook rather than a political programme. In his final years a series of strokes left him incapacitated. He died in Rehovot on 17 February 1970 and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. His daughter, Emuna Yaron, continued to publish his work for decades, and his archive went to the National Library in Jerusalem.
His house in Talpiot is now a museum, Beit Agnon, and from 1985 to 2014 his face appeared on Israel’s fifty-shekel note. Bar-Ilan University built a computerised concordance to study his language, and Israeli schoolchildren still read his stories. Agnon showed that Hebrew, revived as a spoken tongue only a generation before, could carry a literature as rich as any in Europe, one that held the shtetl, the Zionist pioneers and the questions of modern faith in a single, unmistakable voice.
Sources & further reading
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Wikipedia · Shmuel Agnon, Facts, NobelPrize.org · Shmuel Agnon, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Shmuel Agnon, Banquet speech, NobelPrize.org · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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