Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Agnon was born in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Jerusalem.

His works deal with the conflict between the traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world. They also attempt to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl 'small town' (cf. Yiddish: שטאָט shtot 'town, city', שטעטל shtetl 'little town', דאָרף dorf 'village'). In a wider context, he also contributed to broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator's role in literature. Agnon had a distinctive linguistic style, mixing modern and rabbinic Hebrew.

In 1966, he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the poet Nelly Sachs.

Biography

Early life in Galicia

Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes was born in Buczacz (German: Butschatsch), a small town in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Buchach, Ukraine. He was born in the summer of 1887, but in later life gave his birthday as the fast of Tisha B'Av in 1888, a date he seems to have adopted first to avoid military service and kept afterwards 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, Yehuda Farb, belonged to the Misnagdim, the movement opposed to Hasidism. Agnon entered cheder at three and left it about six years later; from then on he was taught privately, by tutors and by his father, with whom he studied the Talmud and Maimonides. Alongside rabbinic and Hasidic learning, the household was open to European culture, and as a youth he read widely in the literature of the Galician maskilim.

He began writing as a boy and, from 1903, published poems and stories in Hebrew and Yiddish in Galician periodicals. By the time he left Buczacz he had published some seventy pieces, occasionally under his own name but more often under pseudonyms. He left his hometown for good at the age of twenty.

Jaffa (1908–1912)

Drawn to Zionism, and facing possible conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army, Agnon set out for Palestine in 1908. Travelling by way of Lwów, Kraków and Vienna, he reached Jaffa at the beginning of June, during the Second Aliyah. He settled in Neve Tzedek, gave up religious observance, and soon became part of the small Hebrew literary circle then taking shape in Palestine.

His first story published there, "Agunot" ("Abandoned Wives"), an account of a failed marriage set in Jerusalem, appeared in the journal Ha-Omer in October 1908. He signed it "Agnon", a pen name drawn from the story's title that later became his legal surname. At Agnon's request, Martin Buber published a German translation of the story in the Zionist weekly Die Welt in 1910. In 1909 he met Hayim Nahman Bialik during the poet's visit to Palestine. The story won him recognition as a serious writer, above all from Yosef Haim Brenner, and a warm welcome among the intellectual leadership of the Yishuv. Some of his Jaffa stories reflected his new surroundings, such as "Tishre" (1911), later reworked as "The Sand Hill"; others went back to the Galician world he had left behind.

The most important work of these years was the novella Vehaya he-akov lemishor ("And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight", 1912). Based on a Hasidic tale and set in and around Buczacz, it is dense with allusions to classical Jewish texts, a technique that became a hallmark of his writing. Brenner, at the time far better known than Agnon, paid for its publication as a book, reportedly by selling a pair of suspenders.

In Jaffa Agnon gave Hebrew lessons to the Zionist settlement official Arthur Ruppin and his wife, and the two men became friends. In October 1912, probably with Ruppin's encouragement, he left Jaffa in Ruppin's company, bound for Berlin.

Germany (1912–1924)

Agnon had planned a short stay in Germany but remained there for twelve years. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 cut off any return to Palestine, and after the war he stayed for personal reasons. He lived in Berlin until early 1917 and spent long periods during the rest of the war in Leipzig, where his sister Rosa lived. Opposed to the war, he went to great lengths to avoid being drafted.

In Berlin he quickly became close to Buber, who already knew his work, and to the young German Zionists around him, among them Gershom Scholem. For this circle, which was rediscovering the Jewish culture its parents had turned away from, Agnon stood for the authentic tradition of Eastern European Jewry. Scholem called him "the Jews' Jew". Through these circles he met the businessman Salman Schocken, who became his patron and freed him from financial worries; in Laor's assessment, Schocken's support for Agnon had no parallel in twentieth-century Hebrew literature. Schocken also kept him supplied with books, and during these years Agnon read widely in European literature in German, from Flaubert and Dostoevsky to Goethe and Fontane.

Agnon's fiction of the German years dealt almost entirely with the Jewish world of Galicia and Poland, reworking pious legends, folklore and Hasidic tales. It included the long story "Ha-Nidah" ("The Outcast"), the cycle Polin, and the first version of Hakhnasat Kalla, serialized in 1920. And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight appeared in German in 1918, in a translation by Max Strauss, and was reprinted three times within five years; Buber's monthly Der Jude became the main outlet for his stories in German, some of them translated by Scholem. In Hebrew, the Jüdischer Verlag in Berlin issued a new edition of the novella in 1919 with woodcuts by Joseph Budko, followed by the collections Be-sod yesharim (1921) and Al kapot ha-man'ul (1923). It was in Germany that he began his lifelong habit of revising and rewriting stories that had already been published. He also worked with Buber on a large anthology of Hasidic literature.

After a year in Munich, where his relationship with Esther Marx (1889–1973) of Königsberg deepened, Agnon returned to Berlin and married her in 1920. She was the sister of the scholar Alexander Marx. The couple, who had two children in the following two years, lived first in Wiesbaden and then for more than three years in Bad Homburg. Between 1921 and 1925 the spa town became a small centre of Hebrew literary life, where Agnon's circle included Bialik and Ahad Ha'am.

On 6 June 1924 a fire broke out in the Agnons' house in Bad Homburg, destroying his library and all his manuscripts, among them a novel, Be-tsror ha-hayyim, whose publication had already been announced, and the first volume of the Hasidic anthology. The loss is echoed occasionally in his fiction. Agnon saw the fire as a punishment for his long stay in exile, and within three months he had left Germany.

Jerusalem (1924–1948)

In the autumn of 1924 Agnon settled in Jerusalem, this time for good. Having set aside religious practice in Jaffa and Germany, he had by then returned to a traditional observant life, which he maintained until his death. This religious traditionalism, which he cultivated in his life as well as in his writing, made him a singular figure in the largely secular literary world of the Yishuv.

The family made their home in the neighbourhood of Talpiot. During the 1929 Palestine riots the house was looted, and much of Agnon's library, including rare books and manuscripts, was destroyed. Agnon came to call the Bad Homburg fire and the 1929 looting his "two destructions", likening them to the destruction of the two Temples.

Schocken remained his patron. In 1928 he informed Agnon that 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, and on the same journey made a short visit to Buczacz. The collected stories appeared in four volumes in 1931. Besides stories published up to mid-1929, they included Hakhnasat Kalla, now expanded into a full-length novel; 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: the novella Sippur Pashut ("A Simple Story", 1935), a realistic portrait of the Buczacz of his youth, and the story collection Be-shuva va-nahat (1935). At the suggestion of the firm's editor, Moshe Spitzer, he compiled Yamim Nora'im ("Days of Awe"), an anthology of traditions and legends for the High Holy Days. In the early 1930s he also began to publish the stories of Sefer ha-Ma'asim ("The Book of Deeds"), a series of surreal, dreamlike pieces that mark his turn towards modernism.

His two major novels of these years both grew out of his own experience. A Guest for the Night, serialized from October 1938 to April 1939 and published as a book in 1939, drew on his 1930 visit to Buczacz and follows a narrator who returns to his Galician hometown to find it desolate after the First World War. Only Yesterday (1945) returned to Palestine in the years of the Second Aliyah. The two books are generally regarded as his greatest achievements.

State of Israel (1948–1970)

After the establishment of the State of Israel, Agnon had a hand in the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel (1948). For decades its authorship was disputed: Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog was generally credited until a 1983 article in Ma'ariv by the scholar David Tamar suggested that Agnon had written it. In 2018 research by Yoel Rappel, corroborated by the National Library of Israel, established that Herzog was the author and that Agnon had edited the text.

In 1951 Agnon was diagnosed with a heart condition; until then he had written standing at a lectern, and from then on he worked seated. He continued to write prolifically, publishing about six new stories a year in Haaretz. For some twenty-five years he also worked on the novel Shira, set among German-Jewish immigrants in 1930s Jerusalem, which he never completed. In the aftermath of the Holocaust he wrote the stories later collected in Ir u-melo'ah ("A City in Its Fullness"), a vast body of legends and chronicles devoted to Buczacz, whose Jewish community had been annihilated. In 1966 he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with Nelly Sachs.

Agnon generally kept his distance from public life and rarely voiced political opinions. After the Six-Day War, however, he joined the Movement for Greater Israel, founded in 1967; according to Abramovich, his belief in the biblical Land of Israel grew out of his religious outlook rather than a political programme.

In his last years Agnon suffered a series of strokes that left him incapacitated. He died in Rehovot on 17 February 1970 and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Agnon was a strict vegetarian in his personal life.

During much of the 20th century, there was debate about whether Agnon or Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog was the actual author of the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel in 1948. Herzog was generally considered the author until a 1983 article in Ma'ariv by scholar David Tamar raised the possibility of Agnon's authorship. However, findings by scholar Yoel Rappel and corroborated by the National Library of Israel in 2018 confirmed Herzog's authorship but confirmed that Agnon had edited the work.