Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Hebrew: שמואל יוסף עגנון \ שְׁמוּאֵל יוֹסֵף עַגְנוֹן shmuél yoséf agnón; August 8, 1887 – February 17, 1970) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the nom de plume Shai Agnon (Hebrew: ש״י עגנון \ שַׁ״י עַגְנוֹן sháy agnón). In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon.
Agnon was born in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Jerusalem.
His works deal with the conflict between the traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world. They also attempt to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl 'small town' (cf. Yiddish: שטאָט shtot 'town, city', שטעטל shtetl 'little town', דאָרף dorf 'village'). In a wider context, he also contributed to broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator's role in literature. Agnon had a distinctive linguistic style, mixing modern and rabbinic Hebrew.
In 1966, he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the poet Nelly Sachs.
Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes was born in Buczacz (German: Butschatsch), a small town in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Buchach, Ukraine. He was born in the summer of 1887, but in later life gave his birthday as the fast of Tisha B'Av in 1888, a date he seems to have adopted first to avoid military service and kept afterwards for its symbolism.
He was the eldest of five children in a traditional, middle-class family.
His father was a Hasid, while his maternal grandfather, Yehuda Farb, belonged to the Misnagdim, the movement opposed to Hasidism. Agnon entered cheder at three and left it about six years later; from then on he was taught privately, by tutors and by his father, with whom he studied the Talmud and Maimonides. Alongside rabbinic and Hasidic learning, the household was open to European culture, and as a youth he read widely in the literature of the Galician maskilim.
He began writing as a boy and, from 1903, published poems and stories in Hebrew and Yiddish in Galician periodicals. By the time he left Buczacz he had published some seventy pieces, occasionally under his own name but more often under pseudonyms. He left his hometown for good at the age of twenty.
Drawn to Zionism, and facing possible conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army, Agnon set out for Palestine in 1908. Travelling by way of Lwów, Kraków and Vienna, he reached Jaffa at the beginning of June, during the Second Aliyah. He settled in Neve Tzedek, gave up religious observance, and soon became part of the small Hebrew literary circle then taking shape in Palestine.
His first story published there, "Agunot" ("Abandoned Wives"), an account of a failed marriage set in Jerusalem, appeared in the journal Ha-Omer in October 1908. He signed it "Agnon", a pen name drawn from the story's title that later became his legal surname. At Agnon's request, Martin Buber published a German translation of the story in the Zionist weekly Die Welt in 1910. In 1909 he met Hayim Nahman Bialik during the poet's visit to Palestine. The story won him recognition as a serious writer, above all from Yosef Haim Brenner, and a warm welcome among the intellectual leadership of the Yishuv. Some of his Jaffa stories reflected his new surroundings, such as "Tishre" (1911), later reworked as "The Sand Hill"; others went back to the Galician world he had left behind.
The most important work of these years was the novella Vehaya he-akov lemishor ("And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight", 1912). Based on a Hasidic tale and set in and around Buczacz, it is dense with allusions to classical Jewish texts, a technique that became a hallmark of his writing. Brenner, at the time far better known than Agnon, paid for its publication as a book, reportedly by selling a pair of suspenders.
In Jaffa Agnon gave Hebrew lessons to the Zionist settlement official Arthur Ruppin and his wife, and the two men became friends. In October 1912, probably with Ruppin's encouragement, he left Jaffa in Ruppin's company, bound for Berlin.
Agnon had planned a short stay in Germany but remained there for twelve years. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 cut off any return to Palestine, and after the war he stayed for personal reasons. He lived in Berlin until early 1917 and spent long periods during the rest of the war in Leipzig, where his sister Rosa lived. Opposed to the war, he went to great lengths to avoid being drafted.
In Berlin he quickly became close to Buber, who already knew his work, and to the young German Zionists around him, among them Gershom Scholem. For this circle, which was rediscovering the Jewish culture its parents had turned away from, Agnon stood for the authentic tradition of Eastern European Jewry. Scholem called him "the Jews' Jew". Through these circles he met the businessman Salman Schocken, who became his patron and freed him from financial worries; in Laor's assessment, Schocken's support for Agnon had no parallel in twentieth-century Hebrew literature. Schocken also kept him supplied with books, and during these years Agnon read widely in European literature in German, from Flaubert and Dostoevsky to Goethe and Fontane.
Agnon's fiction of the German years dealt almost entirely with the Jewish world of Galicia and Poland, reworking pious legends, folklore and Hasidic tales. It included the long story "Ha-Nidah" ("The Outcast"), the cycle Polin, and the first version of Hakhnasat Kalla, serialized in 1920. And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight appeared in German in 1918, in a translation by Max Strauss, and was reprinted three times within five years; Buber's monthly Der Jude became the main outlet for his stories in German, some of them translated by Scholem. In Hebrew, the Jüdischer Verlag in Berlin issued a new edition of the novella in 1919 with woodcuts by Joseph Budko, followed by the collections Be-sod yesharim (1921) and Al kapot ha-man'ul (1923). It was in Germany that he began his lifelong habit of revising and rewriting stories that had already been published. He also worked with Buber on a large anthology of Hasidic literature.
After a year in Munich, where his relationship with Esther Marx (1889–1973) of Königsberg deepened, Agnon returned to Berlin and married her in 1920. She was the sister of the scholar Alexander Marx. The couple, who had two children in the following two years, lived first in Wiesbaden and then for more than three years in Bad Homburg. Between 1921 and 1925 the spa town became a small centre of Hebrew literary life, where Agnon's circle included Bialik and Ahad Ha'am.
On 6 June 1924 a fire broke out in the Agnons' house in Bad Homburg, destroying his library and all his manuscripts, among them a novel, Be-tsror ha-hayyim, whose publication had already been announced, and the first volume of the Hasidic anthology. The loss is echoed occasionally in his fiction. Agnon saw the fire as a punishment for his long stay in exile, and within three months he had left Germany.
In the autumn of 1924 Agnon settled in Jerusalem, this time for good. Having set aside religious practice in Jaffa and Germany, he had by then returned to a traditional observant life, which he maintained until his death. This religious traditionalism, which he cultivated in his life as well as in his writing, made him a singular figure in the largely secular literary world of the Yishuv.