Description
Book SynopsisAgnon’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, whom he left when she was very ill, and about whose death he felt guilty all his life, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after his mother, and his adopted motherland, “the 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 unconscious emotional forces that drove his stories, his ambivalence about his family, and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”
Trade Review"A brief review of Falk’s lengthy biography cannot possibly do justice to the book’s full complexity and richness. For those individuals keen to know all about Agnon’s life and personality, warts and all, this book is heartily recommended." - David Rodman, Independent Scholar,Israeli Affairs, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2019.1670459.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon 1 The Home Town as Mother 2 The Land of Israel as the Idealized Mother 3 The Adoptive German Motherland 4 The Wife as Mother 5 A Daughter Named Faith 6 Catastrophic Change and Traumatic Flight 7 The Nobel Prize as Mother’s Love 8 Escape to Germany 9 Back to the Dead Mother 10 The Turning Point: Agnon, Kafka and Freud 11 The Writer, His Wife, and Her Psychoanalyst 12 Agnon vs. Freud: Hostility and Fascination 13 The Middle-Aged Hebrew Writer 14 Nobel Ambitions and the Quest for Mother’s Love 15 A Heart Attack in Sweden 16 My Way of Life is Fallen into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf 17 Losses, Eulogies and Stories 18 The “Jewish Messiah” and the “King of Flesh and Blood” Epilogue: After Life’s Fitful Fever Figures Bibliography Index
