Resumo de The Bridal Canopy - Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Shmuel Yosef Agnon was born in Buczacz, Galicia,
Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine). His father had
received rabbinical training, but was a fur trader by
profession. Agnon received a traditional education. He
studied in his youth the Talmud under the tutelage of his
father and a local rabbi. From this Eastern European
background that placed the study of Scripture at the center
of communal life, Agnon acquired a deep knowledge of the
rabbinical texts. His first poems, written in Hebrew and
Yiddish, were published in a newspaper when he was fifteen.

In 1907 he moved to Jaffa, Palestine, where he served as the
first secretary of Jewish Court in Jaffa. He took the
surname Agnon, and published the short novel AGUNOT (1908)
in Hebrew under his pen name. From the title of the story
Agnon took his name, which he adopted as his legas surname
in 1924. In 1912 Agnon went to Berlin. There he continued
his studies of literature and moved in literary and
scholarly circles. He lived in Germany throughout World War
I and served as a research assistant to scholars, and helped
to found the journal Der Jude (The Jew). During this time he
met the businessman Salman Schocken, his lifelong patron and
publisher. In Germany he also met and married his wife,
Esther Marx.

Agnon returned in 1924 to Jerusalem, remaining there for the
rest of his life. His large novel, an allegory on the
decline of the Jewish religious life in Poland, HACHNASATH
KALLAH (The Bridal Canopy), appeared in 1931. The plot
chronicled the travels of a Jewish Don Quixote, Reb Yudel, a
Hassidic, who starts to seek a dowry for his daughters in
the early 19th-century Europe. Frummet, his wife, has
complained: "How much longer, said she to him, will you be
as unfeeling as a raven toward your children? Have you no
pity for your hapless, hopeless daughters who sit sighing
and weeping like wives whose husbands have vanished, an who
know not whether they are widowed or not? Why, the girls
have all but wept their eyes away and the hair on their head
is turning white, yet here you sit like a lump of clay in
form of a man, without lifting a finger to marry them off."
Yudel's inner, religious world, is at odds with his
surroundings. Finally he returns home, and finds a buried
treasure, making him into a wealthy man. Nowadays the novel
is regarded more complex than merely as a homage to the
traditional religious world and a portrait of simple faith
in God. Agnon weaves together in the story references to
biblical and rabbinic texts, balancing between pious fable
and comedic farce. KOL SIPURAV SHEL SH. Y. AGNON (1931) was
the first four volumes of the author's collected works,
which was published in much enlarged form in 1966. SIPUR
PASHUT (1935, A Simple Story) a bittersweet romance, was set
in the small town of Szybucz, Agnon's fictional name for his
hometown of Buczacz.

Agnon's greatest novel is generally considered TEMOL
SHILSHOM (1945, The Day Before Yesterday). The story is set
in the period of the second aliyah, the wave of Jewish
emigration to Palestine between 1907 and 1913, and
anticipated the emergence of Israel out of the Holocaust.
The novel contrasts old and new ways of Jewish life and
intertwines two plots - a story of Yitzhak Kummer, would-be
pioneer, and the wanderings of the dog Balak. Kummer
journeys from Europe to Palestine and dies of rabies after
being bitten by Balak.

The short story 'At the Outset of the Day' appeared three
years after the establishment of the State of Israel, and
its mood of bewilderment reflects the uncertainty of the
future. In the story the narrator flees from enemies with
his daughter to the city. In a courtyard fire burns her
daughter's dress and she trembles from cold. The father has
nothing to cover her and he asks clothing from his friend,
Reb Alter, a religious leader. He is turned away
empted. The story ends in the open courtyard of the
Great Synagogue. The father sees the House of Study full of
Jews, the doors of the Ark are open. My soul fainted with
me, and I stood and prayed as those wrapped in prayer and
ritual gowns. And even my little girl, who had dozed off,
repeated in her sleep each and every prayer in sweet
melodies no ear has ever heard.

SEFER HAMAASIM (1951) was a collection of 21 short stories,
in which Agnon used a technique akin to stream of
consciousness. Critics have found from these stories
connections to the world of Kafka and noted that Agnon and
Kafka actually shared the same cultural background - that of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the late 1950s critic Edmund
Wilson proposed that Agnon receive the Nobel Prize. In 1962
the city of Jerusalem made him an honorary citizen, and he
came to be regarded as an Israeli national institution.
Among Agnon's other works is the unfinished SHIRAH (1971),
set in the German-Jewish academic community of Jerusalem.
Agnon died of a heart attack on February 17, 1970. He was
buried on the Mount of Olives

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