Shared Nobel Prize

December 10 1966 – 27 Kislev 5727

Israelis are justly proud of S. Y. Agnon’s Nobel Prize for Literature, received in Stockholm in October 1966, but few are aware that he shared the prize (in itself a Nobel precedent) with another Jewish writer – Nelly Sachs, a Berlin-born poet who fled to Stockholm to escape the Nazis in 1940. Agnon’s sharply detailed prose starkly contrasts with the pathos of Sachs’ lyrical poetry, a swan song to the lost world of European Jewry preserved forever in his characters.

Sachs was in her twenties when her first poems were published, but requested that nothing she had written before the Holocaust ever be reprinted. Agnon’s early writing – also mostly poetry – is similarly unavailable: it went up in flames along with his parents’ home in Buczacz, Poland, during World War I. But much of his mature work was also lost in a 1924 fire in his house in Bad Homburg, Germany. Hospitalized at the time, Agnon later wrote bitterly: “Everything I have written since leaving the land of Israel for the Diaspora was burned, as well as a book I had worked on with Martin Buber. My family legacy of four thousand Hebrew books, and the few volumes I had scraped to buy from my own meager earnings, were also lost.”

Misfortune dogged him after his return to Mandatory Palestine as well. His Jerusalem home was ransacked by Arabs in the 1929 riots, and whatever manuscripts they found there were destroyed. Agnon had grabbed what he could as he fled, later telegraphing to his publisher, Solomon Schocken, in Germany: “Person – and manuscripts – preserved intact.”

The Nobel judges chose Agnon for the loving detail with which he captured shtetl life amid immense social upheaval. Politicians and writers, housewives and shopkeepers, socialists and Zionists were all speared by Agnon’s sharp quill and delivered to the reader in a discerningly accurate word portrait.

Since Agnon was as pedantic about his appearance as he was about his writing, it is hard to believe that this photograph, in which Nelly Sachs straightens his tie for the awards ceremony, depicts anything more than a friendly gesture.

In his acceptance speech, Agnon described how he had reacted to the news of his award by reciting the traditional blessing for good tidings, thanking God, “who is good and does good”: “‘Who is good’ – for letting the members of the illustrious academy choose to bestow this honor on an author whose language is the holy tongue; ‘and does good’ – for having them choose me.”