A Simple Story
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• Baruch Hochman, The Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), chapter 4, pp. 77-111 – survey essay, placing A Simple Story within the context of other Agnon tales set in the world of Szybusz-Buczacz; attention to Dr. Langsam and his treatment of Hirshl.
• Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989), pp. 130-136 – on the surrender of the romantic dream.
2. Book chapters
• Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), chapter 9, pp. 134-153 – A Simple Story as an exemplar of Agnon’s psychological realism.
• 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. 73-106 – chap. 4 on Hirshl’s dream sequence; chapter 5 on the “interminable song of the blind beggar” at the novel’s conclusion.
• Amos Oz, The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 3, pp. 31-60 – a controversial book by Israel’s leading contemporary novelist, which dedicates one of its three chapters to exploring religious themes and conflict in A Simple Story.
• 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 Hans-Jürgen Becker and Hillel 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).
3. Journal essays
• David Aberbach, “Beggars of Love: Flaubert and Agnon,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7:2 (July 2008), pp. 157-174 – explores the obvious influence of Flaubert on Agnon, especially Madame Bovary on A Simple Story.
• Nitza Ben-Dov, “Discriminated Occasions and Discrete Conflicts in Agnon’s A Simple Story,” Prooftexts 9:3 (1989), pp. 213-227 – on Tsirl Hurvitz as an assertive “Jewish mother” of a submissive son.
• William Cutter, “Figurative Language in Agnon’s Sippur Pashut,” Prooftexts 1:3 (1981), pp. 311-315 – exploration of the novel through its use of simile and metaphor.
• William Cutter, “Setting as a Feature of Ambiguity in S.Y. Agnon’s Sipur Pashut,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 15:3 (1974), pp. 66-80 – on the culture, values and mores of Szybucz, i.e. Agnon’s Galician town of Buczacz, as a setting for the novel.
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• Hillel Halkin, “On Translating Sippur Pashut” in Agnon: Texts and Contexts in English Translation, edited by Leon A. Yudkin (New York: The International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, 1988), pp. 107-136 – reflections by this volume’s translator on the challenges he faced in creating a readable English text while staying faithful to the spirit of the Hebrew novel.
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 Hasidic storytelling – recast into the mold of modern literature.
About the Translator
Hillel Halkin is an American-born author, translator and journalist. He has translated the pantheon of Hebrew and Yiddish literature into English, including classics by Agnon, Brenner, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, and Mendele Mocher Sefarim, and contemporary Israeli authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Meir Shalev, and Shulamit Hareven. As a journalist he has written weekly columns, in different periods, for The Forward, The Jerusalem Post, The New York Sun, and The Jerusalem Review. His many essays and reviews appear regularly in Commentary and The New Republic. His books include Letters to an American Jewish Friend (1977); Across the Sabbath River (2002); A Strange Death (2005); Yehuda Halevi (2010); the novel Melisande! What Are Dreams? (2013); and a biography, Jabotinsky (2014). He has twice won the National Jewish Book Award. Father of two daughters, and now a grandfather, Halkin settled in Israel in 1970 with his wife, and shortly thereafter built a home in the (then) small town of Zichron Ya’akov, where he has resided since.
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