Tales by Shai Agnon

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who died a little over forty years ago after sharing the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an eminent Hebrew writer who often drew from Jewish tradition and folklore, creatively re-crafting traditional materials for his own purposes and effects. We plan to read in translation (or in the original for advanced Hebrew readers), discuss and analyze a number of his short stories, situated often between realistic fiction and the world of Jewish folklore, and, above all, to allow ourselves to delight in reading some of the examples of his literary genius.

 Aryeh Wineman has written many works in the fields of Hebrew literature and Jewish Mysticism, including Agada and Art (in Hebrew, published in Israel),a collection of his studies on Agnon’s works.