S.Y. Agnon’s History of His Hometown, Told in Short Stories
https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/arts-culture/2016/07/s-y-agnons-history-of-his-hometown-told-in-short-stories/
July 29, 2016 | A.B. Yehoshua, Ariel Hirschfeld, Alan Mintz, Jeffrey Saks
About the author: Alan Mintz is the Chana Kekst professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S.Y. Agnon will be published by Stanford in June. The present essay, in somewhat different form, will appear in What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew, edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (forthcoming from University of Washington Press).
Jeffrey Saks, the director of ATID and its WebYeshiva.org program, is the director of research at Jerusalem’s Agnon House and the series editor of the S.Y. Agnon Library at Toby Press.
In the posthumously published collection of short stories titled A City and Its Fullness, the Nobel prize-winning Israeli author takes the reader through 300 years of the history of his birthplace, Buczacz. To mark the publication of a partial English-language translation of this work, Ariel Hirschfeld, Alan Mintz, and Jeffrey Saks discuss Agnon’s overall project, his use of the Jewish legal tradition as a source of humor, and some of the individual stories—including one where fish “miraculously” turn into frogs and another where a pious Jew must care for the body of a dead count. The session includes a reflection by the author A.B. Yehoshua, written especially for the occasion, on Agnon’s inventive use of language. (Audio, 76 minutes.)
Read more on Toby Press: https://www.korenpub.com/toby_en_usd/toby/book-categories/s-y-agnon/a-city-in-its-fullness.html
