Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Shmuel Yosef Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in 1887 in Buczacz, a town in Austrian Galicia, now Buchach in Ukraine. Raised in a learned and observant household, he was steeped from childhood in the Bible, the Talmud, Hasidic tales and medieval Hebrew literature, while also reading the modern writers of the Jewish Enlightenment. He began publishing poems and stories in Hebrew and Yiddish as a teenager. In 1908 he emigrated to Ottoman Palestine, settling in Jaffa, where his story Agunot, about abandoned wives, gave him the pen name that later became his legal surname.

In 1912 he left for Germany, intending a short stay, and remained twelve years. There the businessman Salman Schocken became his patron and later his publisher. In 1924 a fire at his home in Bad Homburg destroyed his library and manuscripts, including a completed novel, and he returned to settle in Jerusalem for good. His great books followed: The Bridal Canopy, a picaresque tale of a poor Hasid seeking dowries for his daughters; A Simple Story, a realist novel of thwarted love in a Galician town; A Guest for the Night, born of a visit to a Buczacz devastated by war; and Only Yesterday, about a young pioneer of the Second Aliyah. His prose, at once ancient and modern, layered with allusion and irony, moves between pious storytelling and Kafkaesque dream.

Agnon twice received the Israel Prize. In 1966 he shared the Nobel Prize with Nelly Sachs, becoming the first laureate to write in Hebrew. He died in Jerusalem in 1970; his daughter later brought out several works from his papers, including the novel Shira. His portrait appeared on Israel’s fifty-shekel note.