Emuna Agnon Yaron, who died last week, was the daughter of the Nobel-prize-winning Israeli author S. Y. Agnon and the guardian of his legacy. Jeffrey Saks describes her role in the posthumous publication of many of her father’s works:
[Yaron] was . . . one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hebrew letters. Before his death in 1970, Agnon he appointed Emuna as his literary executor, and began sharing his vision for both finishing uncompleted projects and collecting and anthologizing stories that had not yet appeared in book form. Most pressing to the octogenarian author, who had been slowed by a stroke in his final year, was crafting an ending for the long novel which had vexed him for decades. Shirah is set in and around the Hebrew University of the 1930s, and while chapters had been serialized on and off since 1948, he struggled to bring it to a close. When the novel appeared a year after his death it caused a sensation, as Israel’s academic and literary elite debated its interpretation, and gossiped about which actual figures Agnon had in mind behind each fictional character.
But Shirah was controversial for another reason: literary scholars . . .criticized Emuna for undertaking the work on her own, preferring to see Agnon’s unfinished legacy placed in the hands of ivory-tower academics. While Emuna was aided by a close circle of experts, she weathered the critique and forged on, ultimately publishing fourteen posthumous volumes—novels, short stories, correspondences, and anthologies of rabbinic literature and ḥasidic tales. In short, she was responsible for bringing more of her father’s writing to the public than he himself succeeded in doing.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/emuna-yaron-agnon-1921-2015