Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Best known to the world as SY Agnon, he was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Buczacz, Galicia, where he was raised in a mixed cultural atmosphere. He studied in Hebrew, spoke Yiddish in the home and learned German literature from his mother and the teachings of Maimonides and the Hassidim from his father.

Most of Agnon's novels dealt with the life of East European Jews who remained unaffected by modern life and were filled with an absolute and unquestioning faith. However, unlike other East European Jews living in Berlin, like Micha Josef Berdyczewski and David Frischmann, who never attempted to portray German Jews, Agnon's works remain some of the most fascinating accounts of German Jewry. In contrast to most German Jewish authors, he abstained from both stigmatizing the German Jewish as assimilated 'non-Jewish Jews' and idealizing the 'authentic Jews' of the East. In the era when such German Jewish authors as Alfred Döblin and Arnold Zweig went East in search of genuine Jews, East European intellectuals like Agnon moved westward, attracted by the flourishing cultural life in Germany.

SY Agnon best illustrated the manifold of dynamics that developed between German Jewish society and the Hebrew writers. Agnon became an integral part of the Galician colony in Leipzig, the East European intellectual circles in Berlin and the small group of Hebrew writers in Bad Homburg. Yet he was tied to the indigenous German Jewish community, especially after his marriage to a German Jewess. Agnon also became known among Zionists who liked his combination of traditional and modern ways of writing and for whom he was the embodiment of East Jewish spirituality.

Agnon was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance during the Weimar period in several ways. He gave readings at Rosenzweig's Lehrhaus, worked on a scholarly project with Martin Buber, and became one of the forces behind the establishment of the Schocken publishing house known as Schocken Verlag. The latter achievement was the result of his close friendship and working relationship with Salman Schocken of Chemnitz, Germany. Schocken was co-owner of a chain of department stores as well as a Zionist leader and bibliophile, who used his publishing house to produce the first publication of Agnon's collective writings. The Schocken publishing house continued until 1938 with its tremendously popular series, the Schocken Library, which in 1933 began to publish monthly installments on a variety of Jewish literature in affordable paperback.

Schocken paid for Agnon's expenses during his entire stay in Germany that ended in 1924 when his home in Bad Homburg caught fire, destroying his entire library and all of his working manuscripts. He took this as a sign to leave and settled in Israel, where Schocken continued to publish his works. In 1966 he became the first Hebrew writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Two of SY Agnon's works from this era are displayed in the Bezalel Bookcase, Die Verstossene [The Disposed] (1938) and Yamin Noraim [Days of Awe] (1938).