Article:7.1
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“As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile,” proclaimed Shmuel Yosef Agnon in Stockholm as he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1966. “But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” Reflecting on this, the Israeli writer Amos Oz comments:
These words, so well-known to readers of Agnon, are certainly true. But strangely, their exact opposite is also true. Had Agnon chosen to say, more or less, the following: ‘As a result of the historic catastrophe, that Eastern European Jewry disintegrated, I became a Hebrew author in Jerusalem. But always I regarded myself as one who was born and destined to be a rabbi in one of the towns of Galicia’— such words would also have been completely true and right on target.[1]
His late-in-life re-centering of his formation in the Land of Israel in no way erases his exilic Galician birthplace as the center of imaginative gravity throughout his long career as the preeminent Hebrew author of the twentieth century. To imagine he was anything but a writer who drew from the well of his Galician Jewish upbringing is to misunderstand his accomplishment even in his tales of the Land of Israel or those set during his sojourn in Germany (1912-1924). Second only to his intertextual, pseudo-midrashic engagement with the classical Jewish bookshelf—which constitutes the backbone of his entire canon—the profound sense of the Galician cradle, and through it the pull of the past on the present, appear as a near compulsion.
If Agnon imagined he was born in Jerusalem, that bears truth in the sense that the pseudonym “Agnon” came about with his first publication after arriving in 1908 in Jaffa (the “signature” story “Agunot”).[2] It was rather Shemuel Yosef Czaczkes who was Galician—born on August 8, 1887, in Buchach. The two decades he spent there would occupy him for the subsequent six decades; its inhabitants—historical, fictionalized, or fully imagined—populate his stories over thousands of pages.
| Geographic Distribution of Agnon’s Story Settings (in 8 volumes of collected fiction published in his lifetime) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Galicia | The Land of Israel | Germany | Other |
| 63% | 28% | 8% | 1% |
The Eastern Galician town of Buchach is located in Ternopil Oblast, about 135 km southeast of Lviv. Following the partition of Poland in 1772, the town became part of the easternmost reaches of the Habsburg Kingdom and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. According to the 1900 census, the town had 11,755 inhabitants: 57.3% were Jewish, the remainder were ethnic Poles and Ukrainians. Whether Buchach counted as a shtetl (the definition of which is debated) is less important than the fact that Agnon consistently referred to Buchach as a “City”—a nod to the outsized role and importance it plays in his writerly imagination. 7.1-Agnon-1a
Until World War I, Buchach was an exemplar of the vibrant Jewish communities in Eastern Galicia, which had one of the densest concentrations of Jewish life in the world, with householders making their living as tradesmen, merchants, shopkeepers, and in small industry. Buchach may have been unusual in that hasidism did not make major inroads into the town. Certainly, ḥasidim took root there and established kloyzen (prayer houses), but the town never became a center of the movement, and no hasidic Rebbe ever established a court there. Later, other movements did arrive. The Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) was present in the town, and – reflecting of the relative openness of Galician Orthodoxy – Haskalah literature could be found even in the annex of the town’s Old beit midrash. A Jewish Workers Union was founded in the city in the early 1890s as a branch of the Jewish Socialist Party, and in 1893 the Zion Society was launched, the first Zionist organization in Buchach (others would follow). Throughout the nineteenth century Galicia was not afflicted with Pogroms of the intensity and frequency that are familiar to us from Russia; and the Habsburg Empire, whose 1867 constitution granted equal rights to all citizens, was deemed a benevolent monarchy. 7.1-Agnon-2
While these trends and movements impacted the life of the artist as a young man, and would influence and appear throughout his works, none did so as much as his encounter with the world of classical Torah study as embodied in the beit midrash (study hall). The Czaczkes family was strictly orthodox, and as was customary in Galicia, young Shemuel Yosef was educated in the traditional Jewish education system, first in the ḥeder, and then with private melamdim [tutors]. At around the age of 12 he joined the independent learners in the local beit midrash with its well-endowed library. During this time, he would continue his one-on-one Talmud study with his father, Shalom Mordechai Czaczkes. The father was a follower of Chortkiv Hasidism, while his mother, Esther, was the daughter of Yehudah Farb, one of the town’s fervent Mitnagdim, the Opponents of the Hasidic movement. The “cross fertilization” of these two traditions proved to be quite enriching as is evident in his writing. Yet, the epic clash between Hasidism and its opponents, and the negative impact on the lives caught in the balance and on Jewish society as a whole, are powerfully depicted in his greatest tragic works, perhaps most artfully in “Tehilla” and “The Outcast.” 7.1-Agnon-3 7.1-Agnon-3a 7.1-Agnon-4
Despite having received rabbinic ordination, Shalom Mordekhai Czaczkes made his living in the fur trade. Nevertheless, he was reported to be a scholar of note and dedicated himself to the study of the classical curriculum of Talmud and the Codes, with a special affinity for Maimonides’ Halakhic codex Mishneh Torah. However, he was also a man of poetic spirit, and his young son’s literary talents and interests were encouraged and celebrated (rather than seen as matters which would tempt the lad away from the proper religious path). Agnon recalled that his father considered himself a bit of a poet, and Agnon reported that—in addition to his Torah knowledge—his father “inspired him with his poetic spirit.” Apparently, no book, neither of the Haskalah nor European literature, was off limits. The household, which numbered five children in total, Shmuel Yosef being the eldest, was properly middle-class and comfortable. 7.1-Agnon-5
It was through his exposure to the vast collection of books in the Old beit midrash (where the elderly gabbai, responsible for its management, recognized the boy’s budding bibliophilia and put him to work organizing the collection) that Agnon began to absorb the Jewish bookshelf which would serve as the raw material that he would later distill and pour into the mold of modern literature. The Israeli critic Yisrael Cohen, a fellow Buchacher, recalled years later that “it was here, in the old beit midrash described by Agnon with great love and literary skill, that he spent his youth and absorbed its spirit.”[3] 7.1-Agnon-6
It was at this time that Agnon began to master western literature (in German, or through Yiddish and Hebrew translations). The first work of European literature he purchased, at the age of 11, was Itiel Ha-Kushi, Isaac Salkinson’s 1874 translation of William Shakespeare’s Othello. He also engaged the growing library of nascent modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. He began composing his own literary works early. According to his perhaps unreliable testimony, his first poem was written at the age of five (elsewhere he says, “six or seven”). Initially he focused on poetry in both Yiddish and Hebrew, his first published work being a short Yiddish poem about the 16th century Kabbalist, Yosef della Reina. It appeared in the Yudishes Vokhenblat, a Stanyslaviv Yiddish weekly, on July 17, 1903, shortly before his sixteenth birthday.
Less than a year later, on May 6, 1904, his first Hebrew work appeared in the Kraków literary weekly, Ha-Mitspeh: a short poem entitled Gibor Katan [Little Hero]. That newspaper, which became perhaps the most important Hebrew literary periodical in Galicia, had been established just three months earlier. At that time Hebrew literature was centered in the Russian Empire, principally in Odessa and Warsaw, and Russian Hebrew authors tended to look down upon their counterparts in Galicia, thinking it a backwater in the revival of the language and development of the literature. The local Galician journals and newspapers, and more so their intrepid publishers, consciously sought to counter that prejudice, and the platforms with which Agnon was involved through his literary contributions and later editorial work were significant in that attempt. Agnon also contributed to the Hebrew monthly Ha-Yarden, and the Yiddish newspaper Der Yüdischer Vecker, which was published for a time in Buchach and briefly employed him.
In February 1907, Czaczkes answered the call of editor and writer Gershom Bader to move to Lviv and serve as assistant at his newly launched Ha-Et, a “political and literary newspaper.” This short period in Agnon’s career marks the earliest emergence of what would later evolve into his distinctive “narrative voice.”[4] However, after only six weeks the newspaper folded. Following his abbreviated stint in a center of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing and journalism, it is not surprising that Buchach seemed even more provincial to him, and this may have encouraged him to set out once again within a year—this time bound for the Land of Israel.
Agnon’s own eventual recognition as the preeminent representative of Galician Hebrew modernism would be cemented only long after his departure from the region, but the seeds were planted early on. His writing from this period was later viewed by him as immature “first fruits” and with very few exceptions was not included in his Collected Writings. The importance of the work that he authored during the Galician Period is in the cataloging of a variety of themes and plots centered around the life of Galician Jewry, in miniature, which Agnon would rework over the next six decades, culminating posthumously with his monumental Ir u-meloah [A City in Its Fullness].
Galicia in Agnon: “I am Building a City”
In the spring of 1908, the twenty-year-old author left Galicia and “his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it” (to paraphrase the opening line of his magnum opus, Only Yesterday). As with so many great authors, he fixated on place, especially on a romanticized childhood hometown. In this regard he is reminiscent of the visceral connections between James Joyce and Dublin, Mark Twain and the Mississippi, William Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha County, and Philip Roth and his Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Such novelists spent a lifetime writing their way back to a world that had disappeared or been transformed beyond recognition and did so from a considerable geographical and chronological distance.
The scholar and geographer Avraham Ya’akov Brawer, a close friend of Agnon, observed that in recreating an imagined Galician Jewry in fiction, Agnon nevertheless sought precision about historical and mundane realia—consulting maps, histories, atlases, and experts. His literary world covers nearly two centuries of Galician Jewish experience east of Lviv and north of the Dneister, centered mainly on Buchach. “When he fictionalizes place names, any good Galicianer knows exactly where he is writing about. […] Many Yizkor books were published to memorialize destroyed Galician communities, yet Agnon’s portraits of his hometown are the most historically authentic for those who can differentiate between the splendor of imagination and historical truth.”[5]
The Bridal Canopy[6]
The Hebrew literature researcher Avraham Holtz, in his work on Hakhnasat Kallah (The Bridal Canopy), that most expansive of Agnon’s Eastern European novels, helps the reader uncover the realia, history, sources, and traditions of Galician Jewry depicted in the sprawling work.[7] A tale of an impoverished but righteous ḥasid, the novel depicts Reb Yudel’s travels as he endeavors to raise a dowry and acquire a bridegroom for his eldest daughter. It is deemed remarkable for how it is able to combine fantastical plot elements with penetrating depictions of economic tribulations and the inner struggles of faith—perhaps the two most potent disruptive forces in the life of nineteenth-century Galician Jewry—and does so in such a way that the humor and the fantastical plot elements do no damage to the realism of the portrait painted.
The Bridal Canopy is an elaborate frame story encompassing scores of hasidic tales (or pseudo-hasidic tales). The narrative is double-edged: naïve, in the manner of classic folklore, as well as sophisticated and artful, as a modern work. The Bridal Canopy parodies the hasidic folktale but does so very delicately; it censures without acrimony, always maintaining an air of reverence for the Old World. Unlike other depictions of Galician Jewish life, the story is sufficiently subtle to support divergent readings—and that is clearly part of Agnon’s accomplishment. Other Hebrew- or Yiddish-language authors who portray this period level their criticism much closer to the surface.
Set in early nineteenth-century Galicia, the plot is part quest, part comedy of errors, progressively departing from its opening tone of realism. It is the tale of poor Reb Yudel of Brody, his long-suffering wife, Frummet, and their three modest and righteous daughters, each in need of a bridegroom. Burdened with poverty, and the need to provide dowries, Reb Yudel sets out begging to collect the requisite funds to marry off the girls. The original Hebrew title, Hakhnasat Kallah, is the colloquial rabbinic expression for raising the money needed to arrange such marriages.
Despite his dire financial straits, pious Reb Yudel “always sat at the holy toil of the Torah,” serving God “in awe and fear and love and never thought of acquiring honor through study or being esteemed a scholar by himself or others.” He dedicates himself to the study of Torah in order “to fashion a seat for the Divine Presence,” but ironically the poor fellow doesn’t even have a seat of his own on which to rest in his damp hovel. From the very first chapter, Agnon has established a sharp tension between the material and spiritual realms that serve as the two plot poles of The Bridal Canopy.
In The Bridal Canopy, Agnon presents Reb Yudel’s narrow Galician world, and we experience that world only through his perspective on it as an exemplar of that world, its values and lifestyle. External forces and conflicts with gentiles, between ḥasidim and their opponents, and the presence of the Haskalah are largely and notably absent from Reb Yudel’s world. In this sprawling novel, a tight focus is maintained on traditional life. Its piety and poverty are showcased, with Torah study being the central axis around which Yudel’s life spins. These elements were the subjects of other works of modern Jewish literature, where they were usually made the subject of acerbic satire. But Agnon’s Yudel represents a worldview of the traditional Galician ḥasid who is quite convinced his salvation arises from God’s providence, even as the possibility remains for the reader to understand it as the result of random luck. Indeed, from Yudel’s point of view, the prolonged suffering he endures is totally offset by his elevation of the spiritual over the physical—another reflection on the socioeconomic realities of the time and place in which Agnon situates his stories. This, of course, produces the mayhem that fuels the plot.
A Guest for the Night[8]
From as early as Agnon’s first written description of Buchach, in Ir Ha-metim [The City of the Dead] (a short journalistic compilation published in Ha-Et in March 1907, over a year before his departure from Europe), and certainly from the arrival of the early masterpiece And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1912), he depicts Buchach, and in Yiddish Bitshutsh, as a city in decline. This is reflected in the use of the fictionalized name Szibucz (or Shibush, Hebrew: disruption) to stand in for the town.[9] The wordplay on the city name renders its meaning to be “broken-down, confused, disarrayed” (in Hebrew) and in Yiddish shibesh, i.e., a pittance or trifle. 7.1-Agnon-7
This theme reaches its apex in the 1939 novel A Guest for the Night, singled out for praise by the Nobel Committee as Agnon’s “greatest achievement.” As opposed to his other novels—on which he worked sometimes for years, sometimes for decades—A Guest for the Night seems to have been written with the least struggle and also supplies the most definitive and unambiguous ending of all of his books. Set in 1930, it also marks the chronological endpoint of his engagement with Galician Jewry as depicted in his fiction.
In summer 1930, Agnon made his only substantive return visit to his hometown, a fact which underscores the enduring and remarkable presence of Galicia in his writing despite his prolonged absence. Upon arrival he was received with great fanfare, and both the Jews and the non-Jews of the town seemed aware that this was the young boy Czaczkes who had gone off to Palestine, now returning as a middle-aged Agnon, the renowned author.[10]
The most significant outcome of the visit was A Guest for the Night, a portrait of a homecoming visit to Szibucz. 7.1-Agnon-8 The plot contains the heaviest dose of autobiographical projection of all of Agnon’s long-form work, although we should not fall into the trap of confusing the author with his first-person narrator, the titular Guest. Among the clearest differences between autobiography and fiction is that Agnon expands his short visit into a fictional period of almost a year, starting with the arrival of the guest on the eve of Yom Kippur. The novel’s action is marked off as we travel with the Guest around the Jewish calendar and its holidays, beginning with the Day of Atonement and ending on the tragic note after Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning on the anniversary of the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem. The dire and traumatic impact of World War I on the town—spiritually, physically, economically, socially—is cast in sharp contrast to his idealized memories of the Szibucz of his youth. The Guest’s visit spans that timeframe, with its emotional downward spiral, ultimately allowing the reader to imagine the year as a year of mourning for Szibucz, and so many other Galician cities, with the sorrowful tune of Kaddish echoing from between the lines. The contemporary reader, who encounters the novel at such a historical remove from the time of the action, might reasonably assume Agnon had written the work following the Holocaust, but chose to set the story in the interwar period to heighten the sense of approaching disaster. However, the book was released in September 1939 – the very month Germany invaded Poland – having begun its serial run in 139 installments in the Ha’aretz newspaper between October 1938 and April 1939. In fact, read with this knowledge, A Guest for the Night becomes an eerie and ghoulish premonition of the 1940s. 7.1-Agnon-9
For the Guest, touring Szibucz has become a waking nightmare. From the moment the train arrives in the station in Chapter 1, the very first character we meet, Rubberovitch, embodies the distinctly Agnonian mix of nostalgia and nightmare. Nostalgic, in that depiction of the dispatcher who stood on the platform, “waving the flag in his hand, and called: ‘Szibucz!’ It was many years since I had heard the name of Szibucz coming from the lips of a man of my town. Only he who is born there and bred there and lives there knows how to pronounce every single letter of that name” (a reference redolent of the High Priest calling out God’s ineffable name in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur). Nightmarish, in the man’s very name: Rubberovitch lost an arm in the Great War, and had it replaced with a rubber prosthesis. Like another character, Daniel Bach, with his false leg and lost faith, Rubberovitch (whose name in translation has been Anglicized to capture the essence of his deformity—Agnon’s Hebrew names him Gumovitz) greets the Guest upon arrival, representing a society maimed in body, but also in soul.
In search of lodging, the Guest walks from the train station into town. “Every place was changed—even the spaces between the houses. Nothing was as I had seen it when I was little, nor as it had been shown to me in a dream shortly before my return.”
The day after his arrival, the Guest stands in the old beit midrash at the close of Yom Kippur. When the Cantor, Reb Shlomo Bach, comes to the verse “‘Every city is builded in its place and the City of God is degraded to the depths of hell,’ he wept for a long time.” The weeping is for Jerusalem, the City of God in the prayer, but the reader knows it is for Szibucz as well, for religious life in the town has disintegrated along with its material ruin. Hoping to revive religious life in the prayer and study hall, the Guest is entrusted with the old, heavy metal key to the building by its last disdainful bearers as they abandon the town for foreign, presumably American, shores. . 7.1-Agnon-10
As winter sets in, the Guest pays to heat the Beit Midrash, which draws the many old, infirm, and otherwise indigent townsmen to study and prayer, not so much for the revived religious services, but for the warmth of the furnace. The Guest knows that he is, at best, running a spiritual halfway house. In the course of a few chapters the Guest loses the key to the Beit Midrash and bewails the fact that the building still exists yet he and the others are locked out and cannot enter. The missing key becomes the novel’s central symbol. With it, the townsmen might still gain access to the world behind the door—where tradition still has the force that it once possessed. But one needs a key, or a passport, or an enchanted cave, or floating handkerchief (all symbols used elsewhere by Agnon) to transport oneself. And how is the key replaced? “One day Daniel Bach came up to me. He hunched over his wooden leg and said, ‘You should do as I did. If you have lost the key, get another key made’ […]. And Daniel Bach went on, ‘I will send you the locksmith and he will make you a new key.’” Just as arms and legs have been replaced, so too keys. Bach represents a world where, in place of what once was, ersatz copies fill the vacuum. One can get around on a peg-leg, but it’s not the same thing as a limb of flesh and blood, and while a replacement key can open the door, the lost world is now inaccessible.
And yet, there is an optimistic epilogue to the novel, albeit one pregnant with anticipatory anxiety. Upon his return to Jerusalem, the Guest’s wife finds the original key hidden in a tear of the lining in his suitcase. He decides it is pointless to send it back to Szibucz, where the one key they have anyway goes unused. Recalling a Talmudic legend, “In the future, the synagogues and the study halls in Babylonia are destined to be transported and reestablished in Eretz Yisrael” (Megillah 29a), he decides to keep the key in Jerusalem, awaiting the day of redemption and ingathering.
In a novel with such elegiac reflections on Diaspora Jewry, Agnon also included a strong note of optimism for the Zionist enterprise and the return to the Land. A Guest for the Night depicts how all modern movements aside from Zionism failed to provide a viable alternative to traditional life. But he is clear that even traditional life was untenable because it had all begun to fall apart from within. The ancestral home can no longer exist—it is a place where we can only be passing guests for the night.
This is Agnon’s greatest theme in this novel and, in differing ways, throughout his body of writing: the idea that modern people are alienated from their spiritual home. While we can’t go home again, that doesn’t mean we can’t move forward through conceiving of a new home, although doing so comes with the great danger of being caught in the disconnect between the old and the new, between what was and what might be.
A City in Its Fullness[11]
As discussed above, an awareness that a sense of place, the tension between one’s origin and destination, runs throughout Agnon’s writing. It is present both when individual characters are depicted, as well as when his stories speak about the national condition of the Jewish people. This understanding is essential in approaching Agnon’s late masterpiece A City in Its Fullness, a collection that spans 300 years of the fictionalized and mythologized history of his Galician hometown.Image:7.1-Agnon-11[12] It is both an imagined history of his town and by extension, of Galician Jewry devoured by the Holocaust. The author labored over this volume in his final years and did not live to see it published; his daughter Emuna Yaron released it three years after his death. Image:7.1-Agnon-11
A City in Its Fullness bears witness to how Agnon carried his hometown and its stories with him throughout his life, and the degree to which he saw himself as the literary chronicler of Buchach. In 1956, when his published output had slackened, he answered Israeli literary critic Baruch Kurzweil’s inquiry as to where he was focusing his energy: “I am building a city—Buchach!” The literature scholar Alan Mintz observed that this statement was the “proprietary stamp of a veteran writer who writes using an established repertoire of modernist techniques. Reimagining Buchach through the filter of this imagination that abandons nothing from the toolkit of modernism, must of necessity mean creating something new, a new city. The bricks and mortar may be taken from the historical record, but the building will be a new creation. No other writer in modern Jewish culture has attempted a project of similar scope or ambition.”[13]
Conclusion
Agnon departed Buchach at age twenty, yet his literary imagination was never far from Galicia. The Israeli writer born in Bukovina Aharon Appelfeld expressed his appreciation for what he learned as a young author from Agnon thus:
Most of my generation [of authors] invested a huge amount of effort into suppressing and eradicating their past. I have absolutely no complaints against them; I understand them completely. But I, for some reason, didn’t know how to assimilate into the Israeli reality. Instead, I retreated into myself. For this, Agnon served as an excellent role model. It was from him that I learned how you can carry the town of your birth with you anywhere and live a full life in it. Your birthplace is not a matter of fixed geography. And you can extend its borders outward or raise them to the skies. Agnon populated his birthplace with everything the Jewish people had created in the past two hundred years. Like any great writer, he wrote not literal reminiscences of his town, not what it actually was, but what it could have been. And he taught me that a person’s past—even a difficult one—is not to be regarded as a defect or a disgrace, but as a legitimate source to be mined.[14] Image:7.1-Agnon-12
All this suggests that Agnon departure from Galicia was followed by a life-long artistic attempt to turn his attention back to it and, following its destruction, rebuild it in literature. This is not to say that Agnon ever abandoned his critique, nor that he was unable to retain a critical eye as he aged. Indeed, A City in Its Fullness is awash in such social criticism, bordering on outright indictment of the communal leadership and the corrosive effects of vanity and power on Jewish life. Among the objects of particular concern are the oppression of the poor and the gap between the town’s expressed ideals as a religious community versus its sometimes-shoddy application in practice. The book bears a dedication to a city that “was full of Torah, wisdom, love, piety, life, grace, kindness and charity”; its content often tells a different tale (alternating between acidic and good humor).
Agnon never attempted to deconstruct the old world. The proclivity of an author to venerate or satirize a world he depicts does not, in and of itself, indicate his stance vis-à-vis that world. In the case of Agnon, it was neither one nor the other but a desire to simultaneously see both sides, and in so doing, ask what that world of the past has to say to the present and future.
Select Bibliography
Bakon, Yitzhak. Agnon ha-tsair. Be’er Sheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1989.
Brawer, Avraham Ya’akov. “Al ha-tsorekh be-mevo’ot historiyim ve-geografiyim le-khitve Agnon.” In Yovel Shay: maamarim li-khevod Shmuel Yosef Agnon ba-hagio le-sevah, edited by Baruch Kurzweil. Ramat Gan: Universitat Bar-Ilan, 1958, 35-38.
Holtz, Avraham. Marot u-mekorot: mahadurah mueret u-meuyeret shel “Hakhnasat Kallah” le-Shay Agnon. Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1995.
Jelen, Sheila E., Jeffrey Saks, and Wendy Zierler Jelen, ed. Building a City: Writings on Agnon's Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz. Bloomigton, IN: Indiana University Press, 2023.
Laor, Dan. Haye Agnon: Biyografya. Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998.
Mintz, Alan. Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S.Y. Agnon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
Saks, Jeffrey. “From ‘A City of the Dead’ to A City in Its Fullness.” Prooftexts 37:3 (2019), 497-527.
- ↑ Amos Oz, Shetikat ha-shamayim (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993), 9.
- ↑ Ha-omer (October 1908), 53-65.
- ↑ Yisrael Cohen, “Buczacz shel Agnon,” Moznayim (Nisan-Iyar 1970), 427.
- ↑ Yitzhak Bakon, Agnon ha-tsair (Be’er Sheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1989), 78.
- ↑ Avraham Ya’akov Brawer, “Al ha-tsorekh be-mevo’ot historiyim ve-geografiyim le-khitve Agnon,” in Yovel shay: maamarim li-khevod Shmuel Yosef Agnon ba-hagio le-sevah, Baruch Kurzweil, ed. (Ramat Gan: Universitat Bar-Ilan, 1958), 36.
- ↑ S.Y. Agnon, The Bridal Canopy, edited with a new foreword by Jeffrey Saks (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2015).
- ↑ Avraham Holtz, Marot u-mekorot: mahadurah mueret u-meuyeret shel “Hakhnasat Kallah” le-Shay Agnon (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1995).
- ↑ S.Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night, edited with a new foreword by Jeffrey Saks (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2014).
- ↑ Jeffrey Saks, “From ‘A City of the Dead’ to A City in Its Fullness,” in Building a City: Writings on Agnon's Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz, ed. Sheila E. Jelen, Jeffrey Saks, Wendy Zierler Jelen, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2023), 181-205.
- ↑ On Agnon's 1930 trip see: Dan Laor, “Masa ve-shivro: Polin, kayitz 1930,” in idem, Shay Agnon: hebetim hadashim (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1995), 154-174.
- ↑ S.Y. Agnon, A City in Its Fullness, edited by Alan Mintz and Jeffrey Saks (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2016).
- ↑ Avidov Lipsker, “The Heavenly City: A Historiographic Paradigm in the Scholastic Cartography of S.Y. Agnon,” in Building a City: Writings on Agnon's Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz, ed. Sheila E. Jelen, Jeffrey Saks, Wendy Zierler Jelen, (Bloonington, In: Indiana University Press, 2023), 71-86.
- ↑ Alan Mintz, Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S.Y. Agnon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 2.
- ↑ Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life: A Memoir, translated by Aloma Halter (New York: Schocken, 2004), 153.