July 17, 1887
Shmuel Yosef (“Shai”) Agnon, who becomes the first Israeli Nobel laureate when he is awarded the literature prize in 1966, is born in Buczacz, Galicia, a region that is now part of Ukraine. Although his birthday is officially recorded as July 26, he insists that his birthday is Tisha b’Av, which falls on July 17 in 1887.
Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, he studies rabbinic texts with his father and secular German literature with his mother. Although his early works are in Yiddish, most of his literature is in Hebrew.
He immigrates to Ottoman Palestine in 1907 and lives in Jaffa, where he becomes secular and eventually gives himself the name Agnon after one of his own stories, titled “Agunot.” Agunot are Jewish women who lead solitary lives, unable to remarry because their estranged husbands will not grant them divorces. Agnon identifies with this sense of being enchained and caught in limbo between two worlds.
He leaves Palestine for Germany, where he lives from 1913 to 1924 and joins a community of prominent and influential, religiously non-practicing Jewish intellectuals, including philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, publisher Zalman Schocken, and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. When he returns to Jerusalem in 1924, Agnon again practices Orthodox Judaism.
Agnon’s fiction is pervaded by an overwhelming sense of loss for shtetl1 life, which is largely destroyed during his lifetime by state-sponsored pogroms and by the Nazis, combined with an exhortation for Jews to immigrate to Israel. His writing is peppered with allusions to biblical and other religious texts. His sophisticated language and tone bear the mark of those religious texts, and Hasidic folklore is a favorite subject.
Twice in his life, once in Germany and once in Jerusalem, Agnon is devastated by the loss of his personal library in a fire. All-consuming fires and burned book collections are recurring motifs in his fiction. Prone to mythologizing in life as in fiction, he likes to claim that his libraries’ destruction occurs on Tisha b’Av, the 9th of Av, the holiday commemorating the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem.
Agnon dies in Jerusalem in 1970. He remains the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. His house in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem is a museum that is open to visitors.
1 “Shtetl” is Yiddish for “small town.” According to Yivo Enclyclopedia,
The Yiddish term for town, shtetl, commonly refers to small market towns in pre–World War II Eastern Europe with a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. While there were in fact great variations among these towns, a shtetl connoted a type of Jewish settlement marked by a compact Jewish population distinguished from their mostly gentile peasant neighbors by religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetl was defined by interlocking networks of economic and social relationships: the interaction of Jews and peasants in the market, the coming together of Jews for essential communal and religious functions, and, in more recent times, the increasingly vital relationship between the shtetl and its emigrants abroad (organized in landsmanshaftn).
