Tradition and trauma

de Patterson, David, Glenda Abramson

More than 100 years after his birth in Buczacz, Galicia, Samuel Joseph Agnon continues to hold a central position in modern Hebrew literature. For two generations Agnon enthralled Hebrew audiences with an immense flow of stories and novels, until his death in 1972. Even now, work found among his papers, unpublished in his lifetime, continues to be greeted with enthusiasm. In spite of his enormous impact on the Hebrew-reading public and the acknowledgment that he is a writer of great stature, Agnon's reputation has not yet had as great an impact as it deserves. This is in part because his prose loses much of its tension in translation, and his language, perhaps more than that of most writers, is central to an appreciation of his work. Agnon's themes are those of spiritual disintegration and decay as expressed through nightmare fantasy and symbol. These may be universal themes, but Agnon's originality resides in the way he relates them to the objective events of Jewish history. A palpable symbol of the appalling decline and disintegration of cultures in this century, the traumatized, evicted, or murdered Jew is highly evocative. Events have sapped his will to go on. In his encounter with the world and with God he is adrift and helpless. Beneath the dreamlike surface of many of Agnon's stories, where the fixed points of time and space dissolve, despair, tragedy, and violent death are commonplace events reflecting a pessimism of disturbing depth. The fascination and enigma of Agnon's work is the inspiration for the studies that comprise this volume, illustrating the importance of this central figure of Hebrew literature. The careful research and detailed analyses of the experienced contributors included here, it is hoped, will finally bring Agnon's literature into greater prominence among the English-reading public.