Samuel Agnon

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Samuel Joseph Agnon ( Hebrew שמואל יוסף עגנון Schemu'el Josef Agnon , also Shai Agnon , actually Samuel Josef Czaczkes ; * July 17, 1888 in Butschatsch , Galicia ; † February 17, 1970 in Rechovot , Israel ) was a Hebrew writer . His works reflect deep roots in the religious and spiritual traditions of the Hasidim and the everyday life of Eastern Jewry and are comparable to Kafka's works in their portrayal of fear and defenselessness . In 1966, together with Nelly Sachs, he was the first Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his profound, characteristic storytelling with motifs from the Jewish people."

life and work

Agnon grew up in a wealthy Jewish family of merchants and scribes in Galicia , which was then part of Austria-Hungary . His father Mordechai Czaczkes was a fur trader and Hasidic rabbi , and through him and the Talmud school the son received the classical Jewish scholarly education ; He got to know German literature through his mother Esther, an educated woman . Agnon published his first poems, written in Yiddish and Hebrew , in local newspapers at the age of 15. He temporarily attended a teacher training college and at the age of 18 worked for a newspaper in Lviv . He joined the Zionist movement at an early age and moved to Palestine with stops in Krakow and Vienna as a participant in the second wave of Jewish immigration ( Aliyah ), where he settled in May 1908.

Monument to Samuel Agnon in Bad Homburg
Detail: life data

At first Agnon lived in Jaffa and worked as a secretary for various organizations, including a. an association for legal aid and the Jewish council. His first story Agunot (1908, "abandoned woman"), which he published for the first time under the pseudonym Agnon - "the bound one" - met with a positive response. The writer adopted his pseudonym as the official surname in 1924.

In 1913 Agnon traveled via Vienna to Germany, where he was initially prevented from returning home by the outbreak of World War I ; but then he lived in Berlin until 1921 and in Bad Homburg until 1924 , before returning to Jerusalem. In Berlin he met the rich Jewish businessman Salman Schocken , who later became the editor of the Haaretz newspaper , who gave him financial support and published his work. Agnon lived free from material worries as a writer and editor and wrote numerous short stories. He advised the Jewish publishing house in Berlin, supported the establishment of the journal Der Jude and collected old Hebrew books. In Bad Homburg he belonged to the circle around Martin Buber , to which he was friends. In 1920 he married Esther Marx, with whom he had two children, a daughter and a son.

When Agnon's house in Bad Homburg was destroyed by fire on June 5, 1924, along with his library consisting of 4,000 Hebrew books and numerous manuscripts, the family returned to Jerusalem . There his property and books were destroyed again in 1929, this time during looting by Arabs.

Since his return to Palestine, Agnon has been considered one of the most important exponents of modern Hebrew literature . An important milestone in his work was the novel Hachnasat Kalla ( German  Die Bräutigamssuche 1934, English The Bridal Canopy ) published in 1931, which tells of Jewish life in Galicia in the 19th century as a kind of "Hasidic picaresque novel "; in the subtitle it says:

"The miracles of Hasid Rabbi Judel from Brody and his three chaste daughters, as well as the greatness of our brothers, the children of Israel, In the kingdom of the exalted [Habsburg] emperor."

A trip to his Galician homeland in 1930, which was marked by pogroms and poverty, formed the basis for the novel Ore'ach Nata Lalun (English: Just like a guest for the night , 1964), published in 1939 , in the memories of the old days of the Jewish shtetl and gloomy premonitions about the Jewish fate flowed in.

Agnon's publisher Salman Schocken ensured that his work was distributed in German at the beginning of the 1930s. When the Schocken Verlag was closed by the National Socialists, he emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1934 , where he reopened his publishing house, and in 1940 to New York, where he made Agnon's works accessible to English-speaking readers.

Other novels and stories of Agnon took place in Palestine itself. The most important is Temol Shilschom (1945, German yesterday, the day before yesterday , 1969), who deals with the failure of a Galician immigrant in Palestine between 1907 and 1913, but also with the Holocaust and its end is influenced.

In addition to his novels, Agnon published several short stories and essays each year, mostly in the Haaretz newspaper.

Numerous awards reflect Agnon's literary reputation: in 1934 he received the first Bialik Prize , the most important Israeli literary prize, and again in 1950. Several honorary doctorates from international universities and honorary citizenship of Jerusalem (1962) followed. In 1954 and 1958 he was awarded the Israel Prize . His picture is shown on 50 shekel bills, which were printed before September 16, 2014.

On February 17, 1970, four years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Agnon died and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. His daughter posthumously published numerous works that were still unpublished during Agnon's lifetime.

Works

  • WeHaja heAkow leMischor Novelle 1912 (German and the crooked thing gets straight, 1919)
  • The Book of the Polish Jews 1916 (edited by Agnon and Ahron Eliasberg)
  • haNidach , Novelle 1923 (German The Outcast , 1923)
  • The story of the Torah writer in 1923
  • Hachnasat Kalla , Roman 1929/30 (German groom search, 1934)
  • In the community of pious stories 1935
  • Sippur Paschut Roman 1935 (German A Simple Story, 1967)
  • Ore'ach Nata Lalun Roman 1939 ( Eng . Just like a guest at night, 1964)
  • Sefer haMa'asim Collection of Stories 1942 (German The Book of Deeds 1995, 1998)
  • Tmol Schilschom Roman 1945 (German yesterday, the day before yesterday, 1969)
  • Schnei Talmidei Chachamim Schehaju be-Ireinu , story 1951 (German: Two scholars who lived in our city , 1966)
  • Tehilla , story 1952 (German Tilli, 1960)
  • The oath of allegiance 1965
  • In the Heart of the Seas and Other Tales 1966
  • Love and Separation Stories 1996
  • Mr. Lublin's shop Roman, 1974, German 1993
  • Schira , Roman 1998 (German translation by Tuvia Rübner )
  • In the Middle of Her Life Novella, 1921, German 2014 (from the Hebrew by Gerold Necker)

literature

  • Amos Oz : The Silence of Heaven: on Samuel J. Agnon . From the Hebrew by Ruth Achlama. Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-633-54147-0 .
  • Gerold Necker: Schira. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 358-366.

Web links

Commons : Samuel Agnon  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mordecai Naor: Eretz Israel , Könemann, Cologne, 1998, ISBN 3-89508-594-4 , page 39
  2. ^ Center of Hebrew Literature In: FAZ of November 13, 2010, page 59
  3. ^ Israel's new banknotes - The next generation of money. In: בנק ישראל. Retrieved May 3, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Amos Oz 's autobiographical novel A Story of Love and Darkness According to this novel, his great-uncle, the Jewish literary scholar, historian and religious scholar Joseph Klausner , whose house in Talpiot (a district of Jerusalem) was directly opposite that of Agnon, “[... ] caricatured in the ridiculous figure of Professor Bachlam […] ”.
personal data
SURNAME Agnon, Samuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Agnon, Samuel Josef; Czaczkes, Samuel Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hebrew writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Butschatsch , Galicia
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 1970
Place of death Rechovot , Israel