February 17: S.Y. Agnon

Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (with Nelly Sachs) in 1966 and a national hero in Israel, died on this date in 1970. Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes was born in what is now Ukraine and was educated by his parents (his father, a rabbi, worked in the fur trade). As a child he wrote stories and poems in both Yiddish and Hebrew, and at age 20 he emigrated to Jaffa, where he took the pen-name Agnon (based on his first published story in Palestine, “Agunot,” that is, “chained” women who are denied a religious divorce). Agnon lived in Germany from 1913 until ‘24, where Salman Schocken, the founder of Schocken Books, became his lifelong literary patron, even when the Nazis forced relocation of the publishing house to Tel Aviv and New York City. Agnon’s library and manuscripts were twice destroyed by fire and riot, in Germany and in Palestine. He was also twice awarded the Israel Prize and the Bialik Prize. His novels and short stories detail the transition in Jewish life from shtetl and European city to Palestine/ Israel and combine traditional deep religiosity with folklore, subjective narrative, surrealism, and allegory.

“[W]hen I hear a dog bark, or a bird twitter, or a cock crow, I do not know whether they are thanking me for all I have told of them, or calling me to account.” — S.Y. Agnon