Background
Agnon was born to a fur merchant in Buczacz, Galicia, he grew up in a home that was influenced by both Hasidic traditions and European culture.
Agnon was born to a fur merchant in Buczacz, Galicia, he grew up in a home that was influenced by both Hasidic traditions and European culture.
He learned aggadot (rabbinical legends) from his father while his mother told him German stories. He studied Talmud and German with private tutors, absorbed Hasidic literature in the synagogue, and read secular Hebrew and Yiddish writings by himself.
A precocious writer, he began to write at the age of eight and published his first poem at the age of fifteen. He was soon regularly publishing his Hebrew work in Cracow, and by the time he had left his home town at the age of nineteen, had published some seventy pieces in Hebrew and Yiddish.
After leaving Buczacz, he never again wrote in Yiddish, but the town always remained an integral part of his consciousness. It became the prototype for the silted (small Jewish town) in his writing.
He arrived in Eretz Israel in 1908. The move represented a total upheavel in his life. He went there alone, leaving his religion behind with his family. Although transplanted to the center of the revival of Hebrew literature, he was not at ease. He was no longer religious, yet he did not identify completely with the modernism of the pioneers, and actually felt more comfortable in the historical
atmosphere of Jerusalem. He did not mix well either with the Russian Jews, who scorned him as a Galician, or with the new settlers, for whom labor was the highest value. He clearly felt otherwise and supported himself with such nonpioneering employment as giving private lessons, taking various clerical positions and occasional writing.
In 1908 he published the story “Agunot,” from which he was to derive his pseudonym Agnon. “Agunot” is about separation: between lover and beloved; between man and his soul; between the Land of Israel and the Diaspora; and between religion and secular life. He felt such separations deeply and chose a name which reflected the paradoxes which were so important a source of literary inspiration for him.
In 1912, he returned to Germany and began a happier period of his life. He had the opportunity to associate with Jewish scholars and Zionist officials, to read German and French literature, and to increase his knowledge of Judaiea. Although initially he supported himself by tutoring and editing, he soon began receiving financial support, first from the publisher, Abraham Yosef Stybel, and then from a wealthy businessman, Salman Schocken, who supported him and published his works. These were productive years for his writing. He lived comfortably, untroubled by the inflationary forces at work in Europe and wrote a great deal. He joined a circle of Hebrew writers in Hamburg, and when his stories began to be translated into German, became well known among German Jews.
This period ended with the first of two fires that were to wreak havoc on his life. The first, in 1924, destroyed his home and most of his books and manuscripts. The second occurred in Jerusalem during the riots of 1929, and ruined many books and rare manuscripts. In one of his novels, A Guest for the Night, he reflected on the symbolic overtones of these two fires, comparing them to the two destructions of the Temple, and viewing his sojourn in Germany as a symbol of Jewish exile.
In 1924 Agnon settled in Jerusalem. He had retained his bond to Jewish tradition and that bond lived on in his writing.
"Agunot" (1908; "Deserted Wives," 1966)
"Agadat ha-Sofer" (1919; "The Tale of the Scribe," 1967)
Hakhnasat Kalah (1931; The Bridal Canopy, 1937)
"Sippur Pashut" (1935; "A Simple Story")
Oreah Natah Lalun (1939; A Guest for the Night, 1968)
Temol Shilshom (1945; "Only Yesterday")
Shevuat Emunim (1943; "Betrothed")
Ido ve-Enam (1950)
Shirah (1971)
Sefer ha-Maasim (1941 and 1953; "The Book of Deeds")
He saw himself as the heir of the holy scribes insofar as he believed that modern Hebrew literature was a substitute for the sacred texts. But as a modern writer who could no longer participate in Jewish ritual; he had to reexpress his link with the tradition through secular fables that only hinted at the traditions he had forsaken. The Jewish factor in his writing was balanced by the influence of Western writers, among them Scandinavian authors, such as Knut Hamsen, and Flaubert.
His early works, usually set in Poland, were often positive characterizations of the lives of the pious. His later work, however, reflects a complicated negative relationship to the world, which is shaped by contradictory sources of inspiration: his hometown versus Israel, and Jewish tradition versus Western culture and modern Hebrew literature. His heroes are torn between the old world to which they are bound and the new which they admire. Often their stories end in catastrophe.
His themes are decline of the old order, loss of innocence, ambivalence, and exile. He has been compared to Franz Kafka, although he himself denied the similarity. His style is often surrealistic, introspective, and dreamlike. In A Guest for the Night, the narrator visits his home town in Galicia after a long absence and finds it desolate. Based on Agnon’s own return to Buczacz in 1930, the novel paints a grotesque picture of a city with shattered inhabitants and empty synagogues, and reflects the spiritual desolation of the Jewish world.
Quotations: If the Temple still stood, I should take my place on the dais with my fellow poets and daily repeat the songs which the Levites used to chant in the Holy Temple. Now, when the Temple is still in ruins... |and] from all our goodly treasures which we had in ancient days nothing is left us but a scanty record, I am filled with sorrow, and this same sorrow causes my heart to tremble. Out of this same trembling I write my fables, like a man who has been exiled from his father’s palace, who makes himself a little booth and sits there telling the glory of his forefather’s house.