To This Day, Nobel prizewinner S.Y. Agnon’s last novel
(first published in Hebrew in 1952), is also his last to be
translated into English. It is a brilliantly accomplished
and haunting work. On the surface it is a comically
entertaining tale of a young writer—a Galician Jew
who has lived in Palestine, returns to Europe on the
eve of World War I, and is now stranded in Berlin—
who wanders from rented room to rented room in
a city with a severe wartime housing shortage. On
a deeper level it is a profound commentary on exile,
Zionism, divine providence, human egoism, and other
typically Agnonian concerns. A truly satisfying novel
to complete the Agnon canon.
To This Day (Ad Hena) has been translated by the
eminent translator and critic, Hillel Halkin, who has
also contributed an outstanding analysis of the work
in an extensive introduction.
About the Author
 Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-
1970) who was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1966, was born in Buczacz,
Eastern Galicia. Raised in a mixed
cultural atmosphere in which Yiddish
was the language of the home, and Hebrew
the language of the Bible and the
Talmud which he studied formally until
the age of nine, Agnon also acquired
a knowledge of German literature from
his mother, and of the teachings of Maimonides and of the
Hassidim from his father. In 1907 he left home and made
his way to Palestine, where, except for an extended stay in
Germany from 1913 to 1924, he remained.
Agnon began writing the stories which form a chronicle of
the decline of Jewry in Galicia at an early age. Included among
these is his first major publication, Hakhnasat Kalah (The
Bridal Canopy), 1922, which re-creates the golden age of Hassidism,
and his apocalyptic novel, Oreach Nata Lalun (A Guest
for the Night), 1939, which vividly depicts the ruin of Galicia
after the First World War. Nearly all of his other writings are
set in his adopted Palestine and deal with the replacement
of the early Jewish settlement of that country by the more
organized Zionist movement after the Second World War.
The early pioneer immigrants are portrayed in his epic Temol
Shilshom (Only Yesterday), 1945, and also in the nightmarish
stories of Sefer Hamaasim (The Book of Deeds), 1932.
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