S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

He is known for seminal anthologies of Jewish sources in English translation; for his study of The Loves of Franz Kafka (New York, Schocken Books, 1986), and for his influential biography of Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought . He was also the author of a vast array of other books.

Anne Golomb Hoffmanis Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University and author of Between Exile and Return: S.Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (SUNY Press, 1991) as well as many articles on Agnon and other writers of modern Hebrew fiction. She also teaches and writes on the relationship of psychoanalytic writing to literature, with a particular interest in the history of representations of the body in literary and theoretical texts.

About the Editors

Alan Mintzis the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature and chair of the Department of Hebrew Language at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Mintz joined the JTS faculty in June 2001 after ten years at Brandeis University as Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature. Dr. Mintz is the author, most recently, of Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America and Translating Israel: The Reception of Hebrew Literature in America , and editor of Reading Hebrew Literature . His major academic works include Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature , and Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography Dr. Mintz was the founder of Response magazine, which he edited from 1967 through 1970. In 1981, Dr. Mintz cofounded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History with professor of Literature David Roskies.

Jonathan Rosenis the editorial director of Nextbook, where he edits the Nextbook\Schocken “Jewish Encounters” series. He is the author of two novels, Eve’s Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning , and two works of non-fiction, The Talmud and the Internet and The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature . His essays have appeared in the New York Times , the New Yorker and the American Scholar , as well as several anthologies.

S.Y. Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia. In 1908 he immigrated to Ottoman Palestine, there to publish his first story, “Agunot,” (“Forsaken Wives”), under the pen name “Agnon”—a surname he later adopted legally. After an extended stay in Germany from 1913 to 1924, he returned to Jerusalem, where he remained until his death in 1970.

Called “a man of unquestionable genius” and “one of the great storytellers of our time,” S.Y. Agnon is among the most effusively praised and widely translated of Hebrew authors. Extolled for the uniqueness of his style and the beauty of his language, as well as his comic mastery, Agnon’s contribution to the renewal of Hebrew literature has been seminal for all subsequent Israeli writing. While much of his work attempts to recapture the lives and traditions of a former time, his stories are never a simple act of preservation, but rather deal with the most important psychological and philosophical problems of his generation, touching on the spiritual desolation of a world standing on the threshold of a new age.

The winner of numerous Israeli prizes (Bialik Prize, 1934 and 1950; Israel Prize, 1954 and 1958), Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.