S. Y. Agon, was a leading writer in Hebrew fiction. This Nobel Laureate (1966), a Polish native, emigrated to Palestine and was Israel's first fiction Laureate. His publishers sent him an annual stipend, so highly regarded was this writer.
From an article in a 1961 Commentary Magazine, we get some context on S. Y. Agon, and a glimpse of a feline.
'...Back before the outbreak of World War I, Martin Buber—who was to become Agnon’s friend and his collaborator in research on Hasidic tales—described the young writer as “the Hebrew Homer of modern literature” .... [In fairness though] some distinctively modern analogue had to be found, and the nightmarish expressionist stories that he began publishing in the 30’s and continues to write today have invited the description of Agnon as the Hebrew Kafka. ..., the truth is that the qualities which raise any Hebrew writer above the usual second rank of his colleagues are not likely to be found in any such resemblances, but, on the contrary, in the characteristics unique to him as an individual artist, as a user of the Hebrew language, and as a Jew.
'Influences from the outside, of course, or even coincidental similarities with the outside, are not irrelevant to criticism. .... Agnon is generally very coy about the sources and intentions of his writings and is said to have denied having any knowledge of Kafka, though this seems highly improbable in a man who has been an avid lifelong reader of German literature. (There is even a personal link between Agnon and Kafka in Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and biographer, who has been an acquaintance and admirer of the Hebrew author since the 20’s.)
'The Book of Deeds, in the manner of Kafka, introduces its readers to a dreamlike world where the ordinary laws of time and place, of logical sequence and causality, seem to be suspended. Although Agnon has little of the neurotic intensity that distinguishes Kafka’s writing, he possesses something of the same sense of a world where terrible things are waiting to spring out from the shadows of experience. .... A good example is afforded in the story “A Whole Loaf”:
'Again the clock rang out. My ears ached with tiredness and the lamp smoked and a black stillness filled the room. In the midst of the silence, I heard the scraping of a key in the lock, like the sound of a nail being driven into flesh, and I realized that they had locked me in and forgotten me.
Agnon seldom elaborates a detailed image of the action he describes, but his quiet, orderly, almost detached contemplation of horror creates a strange and disturbing effect by the very contrast between the manner and matter of narration. The same character who finds himself shut up for the night in an empty restaurant goes on to tell what happens after the final turn of the key in the lock.
'I heard a kind of rustling and saw a rat that had jumped up on the table and was nibbling at the left-over bones. Now he’s feeding on the bones, I told myself. Afterwards he’ll chew up the tablecloth, then the chair I’m sitting on. Afterwards he’ll start on me. First he’ll chew up my shoes, then my socks, then my feet, then my calves, and finally the whole body. I fixed my eyes on the wall and saw the clock. I waited for it to ring again, hoping it would frighten away the rat before he got me. A cat appeared and I thought I was saved. But the rat ignored the cat and the cat ignored the rat. The two of them crouched there and gnawed away.
'The narrator of this story, like most of the protagonists in both Agnon and Kafka, is a wholly passive figure, at the mercy of demonic forces that mock him or threaten to destroy him. ....
'A similar kind of helplessness is discernible in the heroes of those later novels by Agnon which have realistic social backgrounds. Also reminiscent of Kafka is the passivity of his male figures in contrast to the domineering and sometimes demonic females who enter their lives. ....
'Valid as these points of comparison with Kafka may be, Agnon, the distinctive artist is, it need hardly be said, much more than a Hebrew Kafka. Even his “Kafkaesque” stories bear the unmistakable marks of Agnon’s own special vision; in any case, they comprise only one segment of his varied literary production over the last fifty-three years. But beyond all similarities, while Kafka exemplifies the distress of rootlessness that has characterized so many Jews in modern times, Agnon’s uniqueness derives from the fact that he is so deeply rooted in a tradition. Agnon is in many ways the most profoundly Jewish writer to have appeared in modern Hebrew literature, and it is in his role as heir to a Jewish religious and cultural heritage that his artistic distinctiveness is to be sought. During the same period when he was conceiving the first stories of The Book of Deeds, Agnon published a charming little anecdotal essay, “The Sense of Smell,” which included a short section entitled “The Secret of Writing Stories.” Here he discloses the religious impulse of his fiction:
'Out of affection for our language and love of the holy, I burn midnight oil over the teachings of the Torah and deny myself food for the words of our sages that I may store them up within me to be ready upon my lips....I devote myself to the Torah, the Prophets, the latter Scriptures, the Mishnah, Halachah and Aggada, the Tosefta, rabbinical commentaries and textual glosses. When I look at their words and see that of all our precious possessions in ancient times only the memory is left us, I am filled with sorrow. And that sorrow makes my heart tremble. And from that trembling I write stories, like a man banished from his father’s palace who builds himself a small shelter and sits there telling the glory of his ancestral home.
......
'By a strange double coincidence, Agnon has had two experiences in his own life paradigmatic of the violent destruction of order which has been such an important element in the history of our times. In 1924, when the Hebrew writer was living in Hamburg, his house burned down, and everything he owned went up in the flames, including his library of four thousand books and the manuscript of an autobiographical novel (which he never attempted to begin again). The suddenness and totality of the loss shocked Agnon profoundly. Within five years, the same thing was to happen to him again. This time it was his home in Jerusalem that was ravaged, and the agents of destruction were the Arab rioters in the Palestine pogroms of 1929.
'...[And still] Agnon is able,... to conclude his visions of disaster on a note of affirmation. It is not a loud or insistent note: it seems to waver somewhere between the reliance of faith and the devout hope of prayer. But the modest affirming voice has the ring of authenticity, and in these “war days,” [1961] as Agnon often designates the last half-century, it is a rare and precious sound.'
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