Call number
FICTION Agnon
Publication
New York : Schocken Books, 1985.
Description
Szybusz, a small town in Jewish Galicia, is the scene of a bitter-sweet romance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Few of Agnon's stories are told as effortlessly as A Simple Story, yet this engaging tale reveals the profound psychological and social insights of the Nobel Laureate's finest fiction.
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Enjoyable story set in the Jewish community of a small Ukrainian town at the turn of the century. It opens with a poor young Jewish girl being sent to live with her better-off shopkeeper relatives, after being left an orphan. However she is not the central character of the book - that is her
The tale is narrated in a way that makes you feel, at times, that you are listening to a village story-teller entertaining an audience. From the opening sentence ('The widow Mirl lay ill for many years') it's as if he is talking to people who are familiar with the characters. Rhetorical questions and little homilies punctuate the writing.
I love the comic asides -one character, feeling 'out of it' at a party 'was perfectly presentable, yet unaccustomed to society as he was he kept touching himself to make sure that his tie was still in place and that his socks had not fallen down. He stood there uncertainly, running a hand over his clothes as though he had lice.'
Yet life is far from easy: as one character observes 'What a pitiful thing human life was. A man slept all night in order to rise in the morning, and looked forward all day to sleeping again at night. And between sleeping and waking, what a lot of guff he had to take.' When you finish reading this 'simple story', it makes you think about the way we are required to knuckle down to what society demands of us, and assume the mantle of adulthood.
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relatives' teenage son, Hirschl. Will he and the good (but penniless) Blume be able to make a match? Or will he succumb to parental pressure for someone better for their son?...The tale is narrated in a way that makes you feel, at times, that you are listening to a village story-teller entertaining an audience. From the opening sentence ('The widow Mirl lay ill for many years') it's as if he is talking to people who are familiar with the characters. Rhetorical questions and little homilies punctuate the writing.
I love the comic asides -one character, feeling 'out of it' at a party 'was perfectly presentable, yet unaccustomed to society as he was he kept touching himself to make sure that his tie was still in place and that his socks had not fallen down. He stood there uncertainly, running a hand over his clothes as though he had lice.'
Yet life is far from easy: as one character observes 'What a pitiful thing human life was. A man slept all night in order to rise in the morning, and looked forward all day to sleeping again at night. And between sleeping and waking, what a lot of guff he had to take.' When you finish reading this 'simple story', it makes you think about the way we are required to knuckle down to what society demands of us, and assume the mantle of adulthood.
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Days of awe; being a treasury of traditions, legends and learned commentaries concerning Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur and the days between, culled from three hundred volumes, ancient and new by Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Status
Available
Call number
ISBN
0805239995 / 9780805239997