Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Buczacz, Galicia, in 1888, became the leading Hebrew novelist of the twentieth century and the first Hebrew-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1907 and adopted the pen name Agnon after publishing his first story there in 1908. From 1913 to 1924, he lived in Germany, where the businessman Salman Schocken became his principal patron. After a fire destroyed his manuscripts and library, Agnon returned to Jerusalem, where he spent the rest of his life writing major works about Jewish history, religious tradition, and the Zionist return. He remained in the country after his home was looted during the 1929 riots and opposed proposals for a binational state. In 1966, he accepted the Nobel Prize in Hebrew and publicly affirmed his enduring connection to Jerusalem. His literary achievement established modern Hebrew fiction as a major presence in world literature.
