Two Tales Betrothed & Edo and Enam A Novel By S.Y. Agnon
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Two Tales Betrothed & Edo and Enam A Novel By S.Y. Agnon

Code: 978-1592643561
$16.95
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Product Description

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Two newly revised translations from the Hebrew, with new and illustrated annotations, of two novellas by Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon. Two stories clearly in dialogue with one another, sharing elements of moonstruck sleepwalkers, disengaged academics, and the typically Agnonian unfulfilled love. In Betrothed, Jacob Rechnitz, a marine biologist arrives in pre-World War I Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast of the Land of Israel. His scholarly pursuits and gentle dalliance with six girls is interrupted by the arrival of his benefactor Ehrlich and his daughter Shoshanah, who is destined to rouse Jacob from his waking slumber through the power of their childhood betrothal oath. The idyllic peace of Betrothed is counterpointed in Edo and Enamby restlessness leading to tragedy. The scholars Ginat and Gamzu are wanderers; men like the narrator himself, gambling on travel for some magical answer to their problems. Ironically, Gamzu’s wife Gemulah, a sleepwalker, puts an end to their quest in a manner as tragic as it is unexpected. The New York Review of Books surveys The Toby Press S.Y. Agnon Library in “The Great Genius of Jewish Literature”

S.Y. Agnon

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 After a house fire in 1924 destroyed his library and the manuscripts of unpublished writings, he returned to Jerusalem where he lived for the remainder of his life.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.