Agnon's Story

Agnon's Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional 'objects' of his life, in particular his 'father-teacher,' his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after her and his adopted 'home-land' of Israel. Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to 'sublimate' his emotional pain into works of art. This biography seeks to investigate the emotional character of his literary canon, his ambivalence to his family and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous 'modesty.'