The fifteenth and final volume in the S.Y. Agnon Library, this volume opens with "The Outcast," in a first-time English translation, an affecting novella about the clash within traditional Jewish civilization between Hasidism and its opponents, and how that historic confrontation plays itself out within the heart and mind of one sensitive young man. Ten additional stories paint lyrical portraits of traditional Jewish life in Europe and the Land of Israel—worlds on the cusp of seismic shifts and historic transformations. The volume is rounded out with nine nightmarish and surrealistic selections from Agnon's classic Book of Deeds. Miniature masterpieces which caused a complete reevaluation of his art and helped his readers understand how profoundly modern the master of the old-world pietistic stories truly was—a writer of world-class stature, recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1966, Hebrew literature's only laureate.
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 After a house fire in 1924 destroyed his library and the manuscripts of unpublished writings, he returned to Jerusalem where he lived for the remainder of his life.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.
