Nobel Prize–winning author Shmuel Yosef Agnon recreated a lost world in his prose. In Hebrew echoing the majesty of the prophets and the clarity of the Mishna, he peeled away nostalgia for the distant shtetl. Yet the pity and longing with which Agnon exposed the Diaspora’s rotten core make his writing a fond farewell rather than a critique

Just a few months after Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes stepped off the boat in Jaffa on day 33 of the Omer in 1908, he published a short story, “Agunot ” (Abandoned Wives), in Ha-Omer, a Zionist literary supplement. From then on, the young author adopted the pen name Agnon, connoting separation and longing. His vocabulary and style, rife with biblical allusions, Talmudic phrases and Hasidic motifs, was a far cry from the popular ideal of a new literature for the new Jews of Zion.

 

The Pain of Separation 

Romance and its misery are a theme of Agnon’s. His characters’ constant search for a lost beloved resonates with the separation between God and Israel, which expresses the longing that haunts the psyche in many ways. The struggle for faith in the modern world, central to Agnon, is but one example.

After four years in the land of Israel , writing mainly about the Zionist homeland springing up around him, Agnon turned his quill back to his native Buczacz. His novel And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1912) was serialized in Ha-poel Ha-tza’ir, then the leading literary journal of the Jewish community in the land of Israel, and praised across the board, by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook (rabbi of Jaffa at the time) as well as by secular author Yosef Hayim Brenner, who sponsored its publication in book form. 

Six months later, at the end of 1912, Agnon sailed to Germany as secretary to Zionist activist Arthur Ruppin. It would be twelve years before his return.

Creatively, however, his stage was already set. Like a pendulum, it would swing between the two centers of gravity that pulled at Agnon’s soul: Buczacz (his birthplace) and the land of Israel, his spiritual home.

 

A Library of One’s Own

Agnon never enrolled in any Talmudic academy, high school, or university. In his youth he studied mostly with his father, who came from a distinguished line of scholars, but the author was mostly self-taught. He spent hours in libraries, and books often play a crucial role in his characters’ development. “Every book is a part of the soul,” he wrote in A Guest for the Night (Toby Press, 2015, p. 277), and he mourned the destruction of his libraries as personal bereavements. The books of Buczacz were the community’s pride and joy, and the loss of these volumes (including some of Agnon’s own writings, left behind in his parents’ home)  in the turmoil of World War I and its aftermath were, for him, no less a part of its tragic fate than the loss of human life. The home in which Agnon lived in Bad Homburg, Germany, with his wife and two children went up in flames in 1924, consuming his collection of thousands of volumes as well as his own manuscripts. The author rebuilt his life in Jerusalem, then saw his library in Talpiot ravaged along with the rest of the house in the 1929 Arab riots. 

Wherever he lived, Agnon wrote of Galicia as well as the land of Israel. He depicted Galicia’s past glories along with the yesterdays of his lifetime, stretching back two centuries to the rise of Hasidism, when traditional Jewish communities were still largely unchallenged. Against this richly embroidered backdrop, he exposed the disintegration of the shtetl as its social and spiritual resources decayed. Reading between the lines in And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, for example, the reader realizes that the seemingly firm structures of tradition always hung from a precarious perch; the Jews’ entire livelihood, not to mention their lives, could be crushed anytime at a Polish overlord’s whim. 

Alas, when it pleases God to subvert a man’s ways, good fortune swiftly takes wing, and the Omnipresent has many emissaries to fling a man down upon the dunghill of need. While they sat safe and sound in their home, fearing no evil, offering praise and thanks to the blessed Lord for their shop and its serenity, fortune’s fury sprang upon them. Their shop caught the eye of one of the town’s prominent shop owners and he coveted it, seeing how good their portion was. Having close ties to the authorities, he went to the court of the town’s lord and offered him significantly more rent than Menashe Chaim and his wife were then paying, and the shop nearly fell into his hands. (S. Y. Agnon, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight [Toby Press, 2017], p. 4)

By the end of the first chapter, the protagonists’ business has declined, their goods are maligned, taxes have consumed their efforts, and Menashe Chaim takes to the road to beg for his keep, leaving his wife behind to manage as best she can – another aguna. 

Thirty years later, writing in the new State of Israel, Agnon dug further into the rot. His tales of Buczacz and Galicia after the Holocaust differ markedly from his earlier perspective. Having heretofore limited himself to hints and irony, using the artistry of the grotesque to expose the hollow remnants of traditional life, now he twisted the point of his quill into all the community’s warts and blemishes: usurers taking advantage of vulnerable debtors and rich men ignoring the plight of widows and orphans, meeting the quota of army conscripts by handing over the children of the poor instead of their own kith and kin. The strong oppress the weak, hiding behind the non-Jewish authorities to disguise their own cruelty; communal leaders exploit their connections to take revenge on their rivals. 

To literary critic David Knaani, Agnon quipped: 

This was how Jewish sociology worked: In earlier generations, the rabbi was primary, and the town was secondary; in later generations, the town was primary, and the rabbi a poor second. (David Knaani, The Oral S. Y. Agnon, Kibbutz Hameuhad Publishing, 1971, Hebrew)