{"id":7674,"date":"2017-07-29T19:58:14","date_gmt":"2017-07-29T19:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=7674\/"},"modified":"2019-10-16T19:43:31","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T19:43:31","slug":"returning-agnon-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/returning-agnon-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Returning Agnon to Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"In 1966, the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his book A Guest for the Night<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Set in the eastern Galician town of Buchach<\/a> after the First World War, it is the story of a Jewish man who returns to his hometown only to find many of his friends have been taken by war, pogrom, or disease. \u00a0Despite this, he vainly attempts to assemble a congregation for a service in a local synagogue. The character eventually returns to his home in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

A Guest for the Night <\/em>is a confluence of Agnon\u2019s view of his people\u2019s past, present, and hopes for the future. In acknowledging his work, the Nobel Prize committee noted, \u201cAgnon\u2019s unique quality as a writer is apparent chiefly in the great cycle of novels set in his native town of Buczacz [Buchach], once a flourishing center of Jewish piety and rabbinical learning, now in ruins.\u00a0 Reality and legend stand side by side in his narrative art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Buchach played a pivotal role in his literature and Agnon is considered to be one of the central figures of Hebrew-language literature, he remains an enigma in the land of his birth.<\/p>\n

Now a new generation of Ukrainian writers is returning Agnon to Ukraine by going back to his roots, and looking at Buchach through fresh eyes, much as the writer did when he returned to his hometown on a short trip in 1930.<\/p>\n

The Key in the Pocket<\/em> is a collection of nine essays written by Yevheniya Senik, Sophia Andrukhovych, and Andriy Lyubka, who participated in short-term literary residencies in Buchach in August, September, and October of last year. The residencies were part of a larger project called \u201cAgnon: Fifty Steps to Understanding\u201d undertaken by the Agnon Literary Center in Buchach to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Agnon winning the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

\"\"Mariana Maksymiak, the center\u2019s director, says one of the goals of the project and residence was to unveil the rich cultural legacy of Ukraine\u2019s smaller cities.<\/p>\n

\u201cHalychyna [Galicia] is a territory of infinite stories, infinite biographies, and each of them is interesting,\u201d she said in presenting the book of essays at Kyiv\u2019s Arsenal International Book Festival in May. \u201cWorld War Two crossed out the lives of many\u2026the mission is to return Buchach to Ukraine\u2019s cultural map.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the requirements of the residency was that the Ukrainian writers were to have read A Guest for the Night<\/em> so they could recreate in their minds the Buchach (it is called \u201cShibush\u201d in the novel) as seen by Agnon and its residents during the interwar years.<\/p>\n

Yevheniya Senik was the first writer to visit Buchach. The invitation came at a time when she had just completed Jewish studies at the National University of Ostroh Academy, where she learned, among other subjects, Ancient Hebrew.<\/p>\n

She arrived in Buchach in August; in the same month Agnon had eighty-six years before for a brief visit.<\/p>\n

Agnon had left his native Buchach in 1908 for Ottoman Palestine when he was not quite twenty.\u00a0 He lived for a time in Germany (1912-1924) and returned to Buchach twice in 1913, before and after his father\u2019s death. He made another trip in August 1930, when he toured Galicia.\u00a0 He spent seven days in Buchach and never returned.\u00a0 He died in Tel Aviv in 1970.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgnon\u2019s texts were an opening,\u201d said Senik. \u201cHe worked at a time when new words in Hebrew were still being created.\u00a0 He was a creator of words. There are words in Agnon that are only his. And you have to understand that to read Agnon in the original, this is joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senik, who is from Luhansk, a region of Ukraine currently under the control of pro-Russian separatists in Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine, noted the Buchach trip touched her in an unexpected way.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cThrough Buchach, he became closer to me because I am originally from a small village in Luhansk. At this moment I can\u2019t go home, and I very much miss home. When I came to Buchach, I felt to a certain degree at home. And through Agnon\u2019s texts, he became my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sofia Andrukhovych is the author of Felix Austria<\/em>, a Ukrainian bestseller that has been translated into several European languages.\u00a0 She is originally from Ivano-Frankivsk, some seventy kilometers from Buchach.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe city opened from the inside, the city invited me in,\u201d Andrukhovych said of her residency.\u00a0 \u201cWhen I think of that experience, I understand this was one of the most unforgettable trips I\u2019ve taken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrukhovych said she felt she was a participant in Agnon\u2019s novel, keenly feeling the main character\u2019s sadness as he returns to the city of his birth and sees how it has changed, and not for the best.<\/p>\n

Contemporary Buchach, however, is special in that it remains a provincial city where \u201cwe can at the same time see the influences of large subjects and micro-stories,\u201d Andrukhovych said. \u201cWe can take the stories of the shtetl<\/em>, the Jewish cities in western Ukraine\u2026and see what happened during the Soviet period and see how this looks today.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are stories of the conscious and unconscious,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It is the unconscious that Andriy Lyubka writes about in one of his essays, \u201cGalicia, The Undiscovered Troy,\u201d which also appears in his latest collections of short stories, Saudade<\/em>.<\/p>\n

He noted the week he spent in Buchach allowed him to take two trips at the same time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Buchach in 2016, but reading Agnon\u2019s book, I returned almost a century. It was interesting to compare these two cities: the real Buchach of today and the mysterious, mystical \u201cShibush.\u201d Reflections on Buchach are impossible without a wider context. This is like a glass in an eyepiece, through which you can view all of Galicia. Buchach and Galicia were lucky that they had such a chronicler-writer as Agnon, but also Agnon was lucky to have in his life Galicia and Buchach, without which he would not have formed as a writer and thinker,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A Guest for the Night<\/em> was published in 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War. Even though Agnon ventured into new literary territory in new Jewish lands, a longing for Buchach in place and time reverberate throughout his writings. In the final years of his life, Agnon feverishly worked on a series of stories about Buchach, which appeared in newspapers and literary supplements.\u00a0 A City in its Fullness<\/em>, an English-language collection of those stories, was recently published by The Toby Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Agnon Literary Center received support from UJE for its program \u201cAgnon: Fifty Steps to Understanding\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Photos and video from the panel discussion about the book \u201cThe Key in the Pocket\u201d at Kyiv's Arsenal Book Fair, May 19, 2017.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t