S. Y. Agnon’s German Consecration and the “Miracle” of Hebrew Letters

This essay discusses the interplay of German and Hebrew in S. Y. Agnon’s later fiction, particularly Ad henah (To This Day; 1952). In this work, Agnon, who had lived in Germany between 1912 and 1924, revisits the German home front during World War I. He uses this setting to reflect upon the modern status of Hebrew—the sacred language of creation—in a world ravaged by war, including the more contemporary 1948 battles. For this meditation on language, creation, and destruction, he draws on the golem tale, which had become a mainstay of German-language literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As his “golem,” Agnon casts a brain-injured German soldier who has forgotten his name, family, and home. Agnon’s rich rewriting of the golem story, a narrative of animation through language, establishes an unholy alliance between Hebrew and German and invites a reconsideration of Gustav Meyrink’s occult bestseller, Der Golem, first published in 1915. Through translations of his stories into German in the 1910s, Agnon found himself hailed as the “authentic” chronicler of East European Jewish life, particularly as contrasted with the “inauthentic” Meyrink. Pushing back against this dichotomy and the past cult surrounding his works in German Jewish circles, Agnon’s mid-twentieth-century writing reveals the ongoing presence, and even preservation, of German language and culture within modern Hebrew.