Photo: Wikipedia
SY Agnon
Israeli Author
Nobel Prize, Literature
Shmuel Yosef (S.Y.) Agnon, also known as “Shai” (1888-1970), was one of Israel’s foremost writers, and a pioneer of Hebrew fiction. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, the only Israeli to have earned that award.
Agnon was born in the Ukraine and made aliyah (immigration) to Palestine in 1908. He made a name for himself as a writer in both Hebrew and Yiddish. His stories reflected the tension in Eastern Europe between traditional Jewish life and modernity, and the impact on the Jewish condition of the movement to the Land of Israel. At a time when many prominent Jewish writers were assimilated, secular Europeans, Shai Agnon mined his deeply religious heritage to frame his stories and characters.
