Word: agnon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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More often, Agnon transcends the Orthodoxy of his material. In The Bridal Canopy, the Hasid Reb Yudel Nathanson, a deliberately quixotic hero, half saint, half shlemiel, sets out to beg a dowry for his daughters. The book is one long metaphor for the wandering Jew, but Agnon heroes have a disconcerting universality. "A difficult thing to grasp," says Reb Yudel, pondering war. "What satisfaction do the kings derive in sending folk of this countryside to another land and folk of another land to this countryside? What difference does it make to the Angel of Death whether he has to come...
...Bridal Canopy is a frame story, and the tales that Agnon tells along Reb Yudel's digressive way fill the landscape with a teeming humanity. Like Yudel himself, the characters appeal to readers of any faith: the pompous petty official totally unstrung by the disappearance of his cat; the husband whose love for his sterile wife crumbles at last before the siege of his kin; the cantor whose heavenly voice dissolves the synagogue in tears-and who gets blind drunk on a holy...
Supernatural Fables. Two Tales is the one book among the three translations that should prompt U.S. readers to endorse the Nobel committee's judgment. Symbolic and supernatural fables, masterpieces of the form, they help to explain why Agnon has been compared to Kafka. In Betrothed, the heroine Susan suddenly appears before the hero, a young scientist on the threshold of a brilliant career, to remind him of the vows of fidelity they had sworn as children. Susan is the past: alluring, insistent; and the compulsion she represents is as enduring as mankind's yearning for its departed youth...
...last Gemulah sings the song of Grofith, a mythical bird who dies with the last note. She dies too, along with her mysterious auditor. It is Agnon's anguished challenge to his own quest: the past is alien, and unrecoverable, and he who seeks it is destined to live in the limbo between the sunset and the dawn...
...Which Agnon shared with Jewish Poet Nelly Sachs, who lives in Sweden...