The Mind of SY Agnon

Home , Rachel Bluwstein, Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Introduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Samuel Joseph Czaczkes) was arguably the greatest He- brew-language writer of the twentieth century. He remains the only Hebrew writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Due to the surreal and nightmarish quality of some of his stories, he has been compared to Franz Kafka, and has been the subject of keen interest by numerous literary scholars. Translations of Agnon’s work into English and other languages have multiplied English and in recent years, and studies of his work have proliferated. Several decades after his death, Agnon also remains the most important influence on modern Hebrew literature. There are few contemporary Hebrew writers who have not acknowledged their literary indebtedness to Agnon. His unique language, his fascinating style, his subtle irony, his versatility and the emotional force of his work are unmatched. His influence reaches far beyond the borders of Israel and of the Hebrew language. His works have been trans- lated not only into English, but also into all major European languages; he has been compared to William Faulkner and to Ernest Hemingway.

The Writer’s Life and His Work

The Hebrew poetess Rachel Bluwstein1 wrote “only of myself I know how to tell.”2 One can safely say that Agnon’s stories were about himself, whether directly or indirectly. Some literary scholars wish to analyze literary works without any reference to the life of their creator. As with all great artists and writers, however, the sources of Agnon’s creativity and storytelling were deep- ly personal. This psychoanalytic biography sets out to understand how and why Agnon came to write his stories and what they meant in connection to his innermost feelings. Agnon was a very complicated man; his life and work had their darker sides. He was full of internal contradictions, ambivalence, wavering and doubt. A psychological investigation of the author and his life can shed much light on some of the hidden and baffling aspects of his literary works. There have been hundreds of studies of Agnon’s works, yet only a handful of literary scholars have used psychoanalytic insight to interpret them. Agnon’s nightmarish,

1 Rachel Bluwstein Sela (1890–1931), Russian-born Palestinian Jewish poetess who died of tuberculosis. 2 Bluwstein 1995.

2 Introduction

Kafkaesque stories of the 1930s, such as those in his Book of Deeds,3 cry out for a psychoanalytic interpretation in the spirit of Sigmund Freud.4 Yael Feld- man5 has bemoaned the blindness of many Israeli Hebrew readers to Freudian themes in Agnon’s works.6 Israeli literary scholars are more reluctant than their North American col- leagues to accept the use of psychoanalysis in literary studies. Some avoid it totally. Yet, despite this resistance, the number of psychoanalytic studies of Agnon’s stories, novels, and novellas has increased. Over forty years ago, Hillel Barzel,7 who was influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, especially by his sexual-symbolism interpretations, observed cautiously that, “a secular modern interpretation may take Agnon’s conceptions to the fron- tiers of psychoanalysis [sic]. Sublimation is the root of the creative process. We should bear in mind that Agnon knew what was happening in Vienna. Those who doubt Agnon’s interest in psychoanalytic issues should consider the psychological tissue of the short story The Doctor’s Divorce, whose location is none other than Vienna.”8 The first attempt at a biography of Agnon was made by the psychologically- minded Arnold Band,9 who devoted the opening chapters of his pioneer- ing English-language study of Agnon and his work, published during the latter’s lifetime, to an examination of his life. It was far from a complete biography, and it contained several errors. The writer’s other biographer was the Israeli scholar Dan Laor,10 whose voluminous Hebrew-language biography of 1998 was full of factual detail but deliberately ignored existing psychoanalytic studies of Agnon and his works, such as those by Arnold Band, David Aberbach,11 Yael Feldman, Lev Hakak,12 Dvora Schreibaum,13 and myself.

3 Agnon 1932, 1933, 1940, 1942, 1942c, 1942e, 1943a, 1950a, 1950e, 1959. 4 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian-Moravian-born Viennese Jewish physician, founder of psychoanalysis. 5 Yael Keren-Or Feldman (birth date not published), Israeli-born American literary scholar. 6 Band 1968, 2003; Barzel 1975, 1982, 1986; Falk 1979, 1993; Aberbach 1984; Hakak 1986; Feld- man 1987, p. 29; Schreibaum 1993; Yehoshua 2000; HaLevi-Wise 2000; Arbell 2006, 2013, pp. 153–254. 7 Hillel Barzel (born 1925), Israeli Hebrew literary scholar, professor at Bar-Ilan University in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. 8 Barzel 1975, pp. 227–228; my translation. 9 Arnold Abraham Band (born 1930), American Jewish literary scholar. 10 Dan Laor (Laufer, born 1944), Israeli literary scholar. 11 David Aberbach (born 1953), Canadian Hebrew literary scholar. 12 Lev Hakak (born 1944), Israeli-born American lawyer, literary scholar and writer. 13 Dvorah Schreibaum (birth date unpublished), Polish-born Israeli psychologist.