A City in its Fullness

In time for the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to S.Y.Agnin – the first and only such award to a Hebrew author – The Toby Press presents this first-time edition of his posthumous magnum opus A City in Its Fullness. This English edition contains 27 short stories and novellas, a literary reimagining which spans 400 years of the history of his old world home, Buczacz:

“This is the chronicle of the city of Buczacz, which I have written in my pain and anguish so that our descendants should know that our city was full of Torah, wisdom, love, piety, life, grace, kindness and charity,” begins this epic literary memorial which Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon devoted to his Galician city (in today’s western Ukraine). In the last years of his life, Agnon returned in his fiction to his ancestral hometown in order to re-imagine Buczacz in the days of its greatness. This new collection contains annotated translations of the major stories of A City in Its Fullness, a nuanced and complex picture of the past of one Jewish community.