Author : Nitza Ben-Dov
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 23,37 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004098633
This study demonstrates how Agnon combined traditional Hebrew lore, modern literary devices and, especially, highly crafted dream-sequences revealing subconscious motivations behind apparently fortuitous acts and decisions, thus creating a unique narrative form reflecting the "indeterminacy" of human behaviour.
Author : Nitza Ben-Dov
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 15,8 MB
Release : 1993-08-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 900467912X
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 and the undisputed master of the Hebrew novel, still remains largely an unknown or even misunderstood figure. Agnon's innovation was to construct an intricate dialectic between Hebrew tradition and the modern predicament, thereby producing a very distinctive mode of modernist narrative. Agnon deployed a technique of rich allusiveness drawn from traditional Hebrew lore and language using free-association, especially by means of imaginative dream-sequences designed to unveil the ambivalent but fateful meanings in the apparently inconsequential events and thoughts which determine the lives of his characters. This book explores the methods and materials of Agnon's art so as to provide the English reader with insight into his unique fictional world, and it proposes a fresh approach to the reading of Agnon which will also be of interest to those familiar with his work and the crucial literature on it.
Author : Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 569 pages
File Size : 42,72 MB
Release : 2023-12-22
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0520918215
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return." Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center–Jerusalem, Zion–fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, Jewish writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem. In "Jewish Geographies" Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination–in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.
Author : Stephen Katz
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 26,80 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780838637852
The study addresses a number of issues, among them the importance that manuscripts and text editing have in our comprehension of fiction; how Agnon composed some of his short works, lending them an indeterminacy and force to serve as comments on the human condition. In addition, the final chapters demonstrate several approaches to the interpretation of A Guest for the Night from thematic, linguistic, and intratextual perspectives.
Author : S. Y. Agnon
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 691 pages
File Size : 17,37 MB
Release : 2019-02-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0691197261
When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.
Author : Jeffrey Saks
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 50,20 MB
Release : 2021-08-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1725278871
“As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile,” S. Y. Agnon declared at the 1966 Nobel Prize ceremony. “But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” Agnon’s act of literary imagination fueled his creative endeavor and is explored in these pages. Jerusalem and the Holy Land (to say nothing of the later State of Israel) are often two-faced in Agnon’s Hebrew writing. Depending on which side of the lens one views Eretz Yisrael through, the vision of what can be achieved there appears clearer or more distorted. These themes wove themselves into the presentations at an international conference convened in 2016 by the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies in New York City, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Agnon’s Nobel Prize. The essays from that conference, collected here, explore Zionism’s aspirations and shortcomings and the yearning for the Land from afar from S. Y. Agnon’s Galician hometown, which served as a symbol of Jewish longing worldwide. Contributing authors: Shulamith Z. Berger, Shalom Carmy, Zafrira Cohen Lidovsky, Steven Gine, Hillel Halkin, Avraham Holtz, Alan Mintz, Jeffrey Saks, Moshe Simkovich, Laura Wiseman, and Wendy Zierler
Author : Tudor Parfitt
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 15,75 MB
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004105447
This book examines new and fascinating archive material on the Jews of Yemen 1900-50. Oppressed by Islamic law and by new political resentments they were persuaded by push and pull factors to leave for Palestine/Israel. Three decades of setbacks culminated in their emigration to Israel 'on wings of eagles' in Operation Magic Carpet.
Author : Marvin Heller
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 405 pages
File Size : 36,84 MB
Release : 1999-02-11
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9004679235
The first study on the subject, this is a bibliographical work on individual tractates published in the first half of the eighteenth-century, and the circumstances of their publication. Included are numerous reproductions of title and representative pages.
Author : Yedida K Stillman
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 589 pages
File Size : 48,76 MB
Release : 2023-12-14
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9004679219
This rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles offers fascinating new insights into the history and culture of Sephardic Jewry both in pre-Expulsion Iberia and throughout the far-flung diaspora.
Author : Abraham Gross
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 30,4 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004100534
This volume depicts the world of a preacher, cabbalist, and biblical exegete who lived during the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. His literary works and thought are analyzed and put in their proper cultural and historical context.
