Agnon (Czaczkes), Shmuel Yosef

(1888–1970)

   Israel writer and Nobel laureate 1966. A small, shy man, his head always covered by a yamelke (skull- cap), Agnon was an odd figure to appear before the distinguished Swedish Academy to receive the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech he said: ‘Through a historical catastrophe - the destruction of Jerusalem by the Emperor of Rome … I was born in one of the cities of the Diaspora. But I always deemed myself as one who was really born in Jerusalem.’

   The Diaspora of his birth was Galicia. His father, a fur trader, was a scholarly man who taught the boy Talmud, while his mother told him stories from German literature. At the age of eight he was writing poetry and by 1904 was regularly publishing poetry and prose in Hebrew and Yiddish. In 1907, with his family’s reluctant consent, he went to Palestine and became secretary to Chovevei Zion in Jaffa. He published his first story, Agunot (‘Deserted Wives’) a year later and signed it Agnon, which became his official name in 1924. The pioneers of the Second Aliyah were arriving with the creed of labour on the land. To them an author was considered bourgeois. In one of his novels, Tmol Shilshom (‘Only Yesterday’, 1931–5), Agnon describes with irony how labour gave the pioneers the satisfaction of religion. Some, he wrote, came to work; others to write a book about it.

   From 1913 to 1924, Agnon lived in Germany and his works found an appreciative audience among the Zionist youth. There he met Salman Schocken, who became his publisher and supporter. He renewed his friendship with BIALIK and also met Martin BUBER, who published Agnon’s stories in his magazine, Der Jude. In 1924 his home was burnt down, destroying all his manuscripts, including a novel about to be published.

   Agnon then settled in Jerusalem and continued to write in Hebrew for a growing public. His work reflected and echoed the life and death of the eastern European shtetl as he knew it, also the early pioneering in Palestine and the life of Jerusalem. He developed his own style, a mixture of modern Hebrew and talmudic language. It was a continuation of the Hebrew language used in rabbinic literature and in tales of the pious - a new-old style which had great appeal. He also published two non-fiction works, Yamim Nora’im (1938; English Days of Awe, 1948), an anthology on the High Holy Days, and Sefer, Sofer ve- Sippur (1938), about books and writers. Several of his works have been translated into other languages.

   In 1935 Agnon received the Bialik prize in Hebrew literature and the following year (1936) he was awarded an honorary degree of Hebrew Letters by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He twice received the Israel Prize (1954, 1958), and in 1966 he was the first Israel writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, sharing it with the German-Jewish poet Nelly SACHS.