From "A City of the Dead" to A City in Its Fullness: Evolving Depictions of Buczacz in the Long Agnonian Arc

Abstract:This essay offers careful examination of the often overlooked early works of S. Y. Agnon and offers insight into the original raw material from which he crafted a literary universe over his long career. Elements of Agnon's adolescent writing in Yiddish and Hebrew prior to his departure for Erets Yisrael in 1908, aged nineteen, would be rearranged in stories, novellas, and novels from the moment his career is conventionally considered to have begun, with his arrival in Jaffa, up to and including material he was working on shortly before his death in 1970. Through an analysis of an almost completely overlooked 1907 story, "The City of the Dead" (translated and annotated in the article's appendix), we see how Agnon already saw himself as the chronicler of his native Buczacz in ways that occupied the author for over six decades in a long artistic arc that led to the culminating project in the posthumously published A City in Its Fullness.