Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Origins and early life

Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes was born in Buczacz, in Austrian Galicia, on 8 August 1887, into a family of Polish Jewish merchants, rabbis and scholars; he later gave his birthday as Tisha B'Av 1888, the date the Nobel Foundation records.

Work and career

Yiddish was spoken at home; he studied the Bible and the Talmud formally until the age of nine, and learned Maimonides and Hasidic teaching from his father and German literature from his mother. He was publishing in Hebrew and Yiddish as a boy, and in Jaffa, during the Second Aliyah, his story Agunot appeared in 1908 under the name Agnon, which later became his legal surname. He then spent the years until 1924 in Germany, close to Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, with Salman Schocken as his patron, and in 1920 he wed Esther Marx.

On 6 June 1924 a fire at his home in Bad Homburg destroyed his manuscripts and some four thousand Hebrew books, and within months he settled for good in Jerusalem, returning there to an observant Jewish life. Schocken's new publishing house brought out his collected stories in 1931, among them The Bridal Canopy; A Guest for the Night, in 1939, and Only Yesterday, in 1945, are counted among his greatest works.

Recognition

He twice won the Bialik Prize, in 1934 and 1950, and the Israel Prize, in 1954 and 1958, and after the Holocaust gathered the legends of the destroyed Jewish community of Buczacz into A City in Its Fullness. In 1966 he shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the poet Nelly Sachs, for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people, and in Stockholm he said that, born in a city of the Exile, he had always regarded himself as one born in Jerusalem.

Later years

He died in Rehovot on 17 February 1970 and was buried on the Mount of Olives; his house in Talpiot became a museum, and his portrait appeared on the fifty-shekel note from 1985 to 2014.