Shmuel Yosef Agnon
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Society of Young Nigerian Writers SHMUEL YOSEF AGNON Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970), Israeli writer and Nobel laureate. Originally surnamed Czaczkes, he was born in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published his first poetry, written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, at the age of 15. In 1910 he settled in Jerusalem. Except for two stays in Germany, between 1912 and 1932, Agnon lived in Israel until his death. In 1935 he was named the first recipient of the Bialik Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Israel. In 1966, Agnon and the German-Swedish poet Nelly Sachs shared the Nobel Prize in literature. Agnon was cited for his “profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.” Agnon's stories, written in classical Hebrew and very difficult to translate, are rich in Jewish folk legends and mysticism. They note the gradual decline of the Galician Jewish communities between the time of his youth and the beginning of World War I. Agnon's work that is set in Israel illustrates the differing outlooks of the religious and idealistic early Jewish settlers of Palestine and the predominantly secular present-day Israelis. Among his most admired works are his novels The Bridal Canopy (2 volumes, 1919; trans. 1937) and A Guest for the Night (1938; trans. 1968). AHARON APPELFELD Aharon Appelfeld, born in 1932, Israeli writer of Hebrew-language fiction. Appelfeld’s writing is concerned almost entirely with the near destruction of the European Jews in the Holocaust during World War II (1939-1945). His work represents some of the most successful and sustained treatment of the subject in Israeli literature. Appelfeld was born in Chernivtsi, Bukovina (then Romania, now part of Ukraine). He was eight years old when he and his parents were captured by Nazi troops. Appelfeld’s mother was killed, and Appelfeld and his father were imprisoned in concentration camps. Appelfeld escaped and spent most of the war years hiding in the forests of Ukraine. He arrived in Palestine in 1947 and was educated at Aliyah, a group of institutions that worked with young immigrants to Palestine, and at Hebrew University, where he studied Hebrew and Yiddish literature. The hallmark of Appelfeld’s fiction is the choice not to represent the images and motifs central to most other Holocaust literature, such as the world of the concentration camps and the Nazis themselves. His writing is based on techniques of restraint and aesthetic distance. Appelfeld often treats the war years indirectly by concerning himself with the periods before and after the horror. Such works as Badenheim 1939 (1975; translated 1980)and The Age of Wonders (1978; translated 1981) explore how the German-speaking Jews could have been unaware of the tragedy that was to befall them during the war. Other works examine the persistence of the past in the lives of middle-aged Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Appelfeld presents an unidealized image of the Holocaust survivor, yet one that is depicted with understanding rather than judgment. His other works in English translation include Tzili: The Story of a Life (1983; translated 1983); To the Land of the Cattails (1986; translated 1986); Katerina (1989; translated 1992); Unto the Soul (1994); and Iron Tracks (1991; translated 1998). AMOS OZ Amos Oz, born in 1939, Israeli writer, whose work explores conflicts and tensions in contemporary Israeli society. More broadly, his work looks at the constraints of ideology, geographic boundaries, and historical traditions universal to all societies. Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem shortly before the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945), Oz was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he obtained his B.A. degree in 1963, and at Saint Cross College, University of Oxford, where he obtained an M.A. degree. He served in the Israeli army from 1957 to 1960, and again as a reserve soldier in the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. He worked as a schoolteacher and laborer between 1957 and 1973. Oz was a writer in residence at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Colorado College in the United States. In 1986 he began teaching Hebrew literature at Ben- Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel. Oz has been active in the Israeli peace movement since the 1967 war and has played a leading role in the activist group Peace Now since its founding in 1977. A master of modern Hebrew prose, Oz paints an eloquent and often pessimistic picture of Israeli and Palestinian society in the years since the Six-Day War. Among his most successful works of fiction are Mikha'el sheli (published in 1968; translated as My Michael, 1972), the first of his works to be published in English, which chronicles the mental breakdown of a young Israeli homemaker; and Menuhah nekhonah (1982; A Perfect Peace, 1986), the story of two young men living on a kibbutz, a communal settlement in Israel, and their opposing reactions to the experience. Critics have interpreted both these works as possible allegories of contemporary Israel. Oz’s other works include Artsot ha-tan (1965; Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories, 1981), La-ga’at ba-mayim, la-ga’at ba-ruach (1973; Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, 1975), Kufsah shehorah (1987; Black Box, 1988), and Al tagidi lailah (1996; Don’t Call it Night, 1996). The short novel Panter ba-martef (1995; Panther in the Basement, 1997) depicts daily life in a land in turmoil. Oz followed it with Oto ha-yam (1999; The Same Sea, 2001), a novel written partly in verse and partly in prose that addresses the nature of love and loss. His memoir Sipur al ahavah ve’hosheck (2004; A Tale of Love and Darkness, 2004) tells of growing up in Jerusalem during the 1940s and 1950s. Oz has also been noted for his essays, which are often political in nature, for example Poh va- sham be-Erets-Yisra'el bi-setav (1982; In the Land of Israel, 1983). Oz’s Mathilim sipur (1998; The Story Begins, 1998) is a collection of essays on literature. NELLY LEONIE SACHS Nelly Leonie Sachs (1891-1970), German-Swedish poet, born into a Jewish family in Berlin. She began to write poetry at the age of 17. Her early romantic poems appeared in periodicals during the 1920s. In 1940 she left Nazi Germany to live in Sweden. Her later writing, profoundly Jewish in theme, drew lyrical inspiration from the tragedies of Jewish history. Her O the Chimneys (1946) includes the verse play Eli, written in 1943 and produced on the German radio in 1958. Sachs shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in literature with the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. A. B. YEHOSHUA A. B. Yehoshua, born in 1936, Israeli writer of Hebrew fiction, known as a leader of new wave Israeli literature during the 1960s. Together with Amos Oz, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Aharon Appelfeld, Yehoshua was part of a literary movement known as the new wave that broke both with realistic techniques and with the spirit of collective identity. Born into a Sephardic family in Jerusalem, Abraham Ben Yehoshua attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and served in the Israeli Army. After four years in Paris, he settled in Haifa, Israel, in 1967. He has been on the faculty of comparative and Hebrew literature at Haifa University since 1972. He is also an active member of the Israeli peace movement. In the stories collected in Mot ha-zaken (1962; Death of the Old Man), Sheloshah yamim ve- yeled (1968; Three Days and a Child, 1972), and Bi-tehilat kayits 1970 (1974; Early in the Summer of 1970, 1977), the hero is typically a well-educated, nameless male isolated from family and friends. Deprived of support from others and unaware of his desperation, he momentarily loosens the controls that bind him to civilization and longs to participate in a cataclysmic disaster, only once again to recede into isolation, unchanged. In Yehoshua’s novels, Ha-me'ahev (1977; The Lover, 1978) and Gerushim me'uharim (1982; A Late Divorce, 1984), the focus is broadened to include a group in which each member speaks in his or her own voice. The novels explore some of the central tensions in Israeli society such as Israel and the Diaspora (the dispersion of Jews outside Israel), Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish identities, religion and secularism, Eastern versus Western tradition, and war and peace. Yehoshua’s later novels leave the contradictions of present-day Israel to explore other times and places. Mar Mani (1990; Mr. Mani, 1992) traces a fictional family over five generations and various locales. The story is told through conversations about which the reader learns only one side and is left to imagine the other side. The novel Shivah me-Hodu (1994; Open Heart, 1996) is told in the first-person by an Israeli doctor who confronts love and its irrational power in India. Massa'el tom ha-elef (1997; A Journey to the End of the Millennium, 1999) is set in a Jewish community in southern France in the year AD 999. With Kalah ha-meshaòhreret (2001; The Liberated Bride, 2003), Yehoshua returned to contemporary Israel, producing a dark comedy that moves between the worlds of Jews and Arabs. ABU AT-TAYYIB Abu At-Tayyib Ahmad Ibn Husayn al-Mutanabbī (915-965), Arab poet, the most famous poet of the classical tradition of Arabic literature. He is best known by the name al- Mutanabbī, meaning “he who claims to be a prophet.” He received this name after claiming in his youth that he was a prophet and composing a text imitating the sacred Islamic scripture, the Qur'an (Koran).