by S. Y. Agnon
October 1924 – Agnon returns from Germany; in following days or weeks, seeking out the Jerusalem Sage and the Rabbanit the Narrator meets Tehilla in the Old City
Spring 1925 – Narrator writes letter to Shraga; Tehilla dies (Earlier: “Already most of the winter had passed, and spring blossoms had begun to appear.”)
1950 – Agnon publishes “Tehilla” in Me’asef Davar
Bibliography of Works in English
Like most of Agnon’s important stories, the four novellas in this volume have been the object of analysis and interpretation by the major scholars and critics of Hebrew literature. Readers who would like to sample some of that body of scholarship and commentary, but are limited to material available in English, would find the following book chapters and essays to be worthwhile.
The most comprehensive, nearly encyclopedic, book on Agnon in English remains: Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968). Each of the four stories in this volume are treated there, and the reader will find concise reviews of plot and theme for: “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” on pp. 402-405; “In the Heart of the Seas” on pp. 262-270; “In the Prime of Her Life” on pp. 115-118; and “Tehilla” on pp. 406-409.
“Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” *
Lea Goldberg, “The Author and his Hero,” Ariel 17 (1966-67), pp. 37-54 – Agnon’s artful work as an author who speaks through a story-teller narrative to both portray an innocent and pure ideal while at the same time creating space for two different interpretations – as demonstrated in “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” along with other stories.
Yair Mazor, “S.Y. Agnon’s Art of Composition: The Befuddling Turn of the Compositional Screw,” Hebrew Annual Review 10 (1986), pp. 197-208 – on Agnon’s use of unexpected plot development, as exemplified in “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town”.
Harvey Shapiro, “Multivocal Narrative and the Teacher as Narrator: The Case of Agnon’s ‘Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town’,” Shofar 29:4 (2011), pp. 23-45 – explores the narrative voices that guide the reader through the story, comparing the pious traditional voice at the core versus the modern voice of the framework which distances the reader from the tale.
[* Not having been translated until now, the absence of many critical studies in English on “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” is not surprising. It is hoped that this volume will help spur the growth of such secondary literature and analysis.]
“In the Heart of the Seas”
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), chapter 3, pp. 81-102 – on Agnon’s use of the contradiction between mythic and political Zionism to “reclaim the future in the name of the past.”
Roman Katsman, The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 15-21 – the issue of myth and miracle in the novella.
Alan L. Mintz, “In the Seas of Youth,” Prooftexts 21:1 (2001), pp. 57-70 – proof of the value of prolonged engagement with an Agnonian text; demonstration of what Agnon said: “Any book not worth reading twice probably wasn’t worth reading the first time.” [Mintz revisits his earlier reading of the story in: “Agnon on the Individual and the Community,” Response (Summer 1967), pp. 28-31.]
Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 189-192 – on the amalgam of serious and comic to form an ironic statement in the novella.
“In the Prime of Her Life”
Nitza Ben-Dov, Agnon’s Art of Indirection: Uncovering Latent Content in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1993), pp. 135-138 on the novella’s web of Biblical allusions; chapter 7, pp. 107-133, on the role of the old woman (“Benign Mentor or Evil Genius?”).
Nitza Ben-Dov, “Lambs in Their Mother’s Pasture: Latent Content in Agnon’s ‘In the Prime of Her Life’,” Hebrew Studies 29 (1988), pp. 67-80 – explores the thematic and structural function of Tirzta’s dream as it operates in the novella.
Yael Halevi-Wise, “Reading Agnon’s In the Prime of Her Life in Light of Freud’s Dora,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 98:1 (Winter 2008), pp. 29-40 – on Agnon’s sources for the paradigm he establishes of dysfunctional generations linked by a shared love, which became such a potent template for subsequent Hebrew authors.
Astrid Popien, “Tirtza and Hirshl in Germany: S.Y. Agnon’s In the Prime of Her Life and A Simple Story in the Context of the Family Novel in European Realism” in Agnon and Germany: The Presence of the German World in the Writings of S.Y. Agnon, edited by H. Becker and H. Weiss (Ramat Gan : Bar-Ilan University Press, 2010), pp. 115-150 – on Agnon’s “realistic family novels” as adaptations and ironic transformations of the European model (as exemplified by Theodor Fontane and Thomas Mann).
Naomi B. Sokoloff, “Narrative Ventriloquism and Muted Feminine Voice: Agnon’s ‘In the Prime of Her Life’,” Prooftexts 9:2 (1989), pp. 115-137 – reading the novella in light of feminist critical thought and literary interpretation.
Abraham B. Yehoshua, The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt: Literary Essays (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), chapter 7, pp. 108-130 – on the father-daughter relationship as a key to the moral map of the work.
“Tehilla”
Risa Domb, “Is Tehillah Worthy of Her Praise” in History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, ed. W. Cutter and D. Jacobson (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2002), pp. 107-115 – an against the consensus reading which posits an ironic portrait in which Tehilla is not the exemplar of piety usually assumed.
Nitza Ben-Dov, “The Dead Do Not Praise the Lord: Alter’s Psalms, Agnon’s Tehilla, Pasternak’s Docter Zhivago,” Hebrew Studies 51 (2010), pp. 203-210 – the tension between belief in this world and belief in the world to come, as telegraphed through the use of (Alter’s translation of) Tehillim in “Tehilla”.
Theodore Friedman, “Exploring Agnon’s Symbols,” Conservative Judaism 21:3 (Spring 1967), pp. 65-71 – aims to unravel the character of Tehilla through what she might symbolize on different levels of meaning in the text.
Amos Oz, The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 2, pp. 13-29 – a controversial book by Israel’s leading contemporary novelist, which dedicates one of its three chapters to exploring religious themes in “Tehilla”.
Hillel Weiss, “The Messianic Theme in the Works of A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz,” in Israel and the Post-Zionists, ed. S. Sharan (Tel Aviv: Ariel Center, 2003), pp. 204-226 – response to Oz’s reading of “Tehilla” in The Silence of Heaven.
About the Author
S.Y. Agnon (1888–1970) was the central figure of modern Hebrew literature, and the 1966 Nobel Prize laureate for his body of writing. Born in the Galician town of Buczacz (in today’s western Ukraine), as Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, he arrived in 1908 in Jaffa, Ottoman Palestine, where he adopted the penname Agnon and began a meteoric rise as a young writer. Between the years 1912 and 1924 he spent an extended sojourn in Germany, where he married and had two children, and came under the patronage of Shlomo Zalman Schocken and his publishing house, allowing Agnon to dedicate himself completely to his craft. After a house fire in 1924 destroyed his library and the manuscripts of unpublished writings, he returned to Jerusalem where he lived for the remainder of his life. His works deal with the conflict between traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world, and constitute a distillation of millennia of Jewish writing – from the Bible through the Rabbinic codes to Hassidic storytelling – recast into the mold of modern literature.
About the Translators and Editor
Paul Pinchas Bashan (co-translator, “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town”) was born to Holocaust survivors in a D.P. Camp in Vienna, and grew up in Israel. Upon completing his military service in the IDF he came to the United States whe
re he initially worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense in New York, working for several years in logistics and procurement, and finally becoming an executive recruiter. He went on to establish several successful executive search companies. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Itta, and is the proud father of two daughters, Aviva and Talia, and is active in several volunteer programs.
I.M. Lask (“In the Heart of the Seas”), born in London in 1905 and arrived in the Land of Israel in 1930, was a journalist, editor and poet, but most well known as a premier translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature to English. In addition to the works of Yehuda Halevi, Tchernichovsky, Bialik, Hazaz, Shenhar, Martin Buber and numerous poets and authors, he was one of the earliest and most prolific English translators of Agnon. Additionally, as Holocaust papers and documents started to reach Palestine starting already in 1939, he was responsible for preparing English translations for the Jewish Agency. Israel Meir Lask, who died in 1974, was married to Luba Pevsner, and they had two daughters Ruth Rasnic and Bella Doron, both authors, and a son, Amittai, who was killed in the Israeli Air Force in 1956.
Walter Lever (“Tehilla”) was born in London and came to Jerusalem in 1947 to teach English Literature at the Hebrew University and was a significant translator of Hebrew literature to English. He published a memoir of his early days in Israel under the title Jerusalem is Called Liberty.
Gabriel Levin (“In the Prime of Her Life”) is the author of four collections of poems, most recently To These Dark Steps. He has also translated a selection from the poetry of Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Diwan, and a book of essays, The Dune’s Twisted Edge: Journeys in the Levant. He lives in Jerusalem.
Rhonna Weber Rogol (co-translator, “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town”), a Montreal native, attributes her passion for Hebrew language and literature to the inspiration of her 7th grade teacher and beloved lifelong friend, the late Shlomo Jaacobi. She studied Hebrew from childhood at Shaare Zion Academy and Herzliah High School and later at Brandeis University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An attorney by profession, Rogol engages in volunteer work and Jewish and Holocaust education, enjoying both learning and teaching, and mostly spending time with her wonderfully supportive husband Brian, and their three children, Alissa, Joshua and Dane.
Jeffrey Saks is the Series Editor of The S.Y. Agnon Library at The Toby Press, and lectures regularly at the Agnon House in Jerusalem. He is the founding director of ATID – The Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education and its WebYeshiva.org program. He edited Wisdom From All My Teachers: Challenges and Initiatives in Contemporary Torah Education; To Mourn a Child: Jewish Responses to Neonatal and Childhood Death; and authored Spiritualizing Halakhic Education. Rabbi Saks is an Associate Editor of the journal Tradition.
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