Shira
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Shira is Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s final, epic novel. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1970, the Hebrew original was published a year later. With this newly revised English translation by Zeva Shapiro, including archival material never before published in English, The Toby Press launches its S.Y. Agnon Library – the fullest collection of Agnon’s works in new and revised translations. “Shira is S. Y. Agnon’s culminating effort to articulate through the comprehensive form of the novel his vision of the role of art in human reality…Enacted against the background of Jerusalem life in the gathering shadows of a historical cataclysm of inconceivable proportions, Shira is so brilliantly rendered that, even without an ending, it deserves a place among the major modern novels.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Agnon's massive, not-quite-finished novel about a German-Jewish scholar's adultery, set in British-occupied Jerusalem in the late 1930s, is a yeasty mix of realism and allegory. In this, his last major work, the Israeli Nobel laureate portrays Manfred Herbst, distinguished Byzantine specialist at Hebrew University, a married man with four children who has an obsessive affair with a blunt, bossy young nurse named Shira. Though her name means ``poetry,'' she is neither pretty nor intellectual, and seems an unlikely object for his affections, yet his liaison with this sickly woman (she develops leprosy) jolts him out of his ivory-tower mentality. Capturing the Jewish refugees' precarious, day-to-day existence in Palestine, the growing menace of Hitler and the rising wave of Arab attacks, the long, digressive narrative is thick with the tales of immigrants, with often ironic philosophical nuggets and with Herbst's reflections, dreams and sadomasochistic fantasies as he transposes Byzantine decadence and splendor onto a world being overtaken by genocidal horror.
