Ancestral tales : reading the Buczacz stories of S.Y. Agnon / Alan Mintz.

Author
Mintz, Alan L. [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2017]
Description
ix, 425 pages : illustration ; 24 cm.

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PJ5053.A4 C536 2017 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture [More in this series]
    Summary note
    Written in pieces over the last fifteen years of his life and published posthumously, S.Y. Agnon's A City in Its Fullness is an ambitious, historically rich sequence of stories memorializing Buczacz, the city of his birth. This town in present-day Ukraine was once home to a vibrant Jewish population that was destroyed twice over - in the First World War and again in the Holocaust. Agnon's epic story cycle, however, focuses not on the particulars of destruction, but instead reimagines the daily lives of Buczacz's Jewish citizens, vividly preserving the vanished world of early modern Jewry. Its fusion of fiction and history in unique within modern Jewish literature. Ancestral Tales show how this collection marks a critical juncture within the Agnon canon. Through close readings of the stories against a shifting historical backdrop, Alan Mintz presents a multilayered history of the town, along with insight into Agnon's fictional transformations. Mintz relates these narrative strategies to catastrophe literature from earlier periods of Jewish history, showing how Agnon's Buczacz is a literary achivement at once innovative in its form of remembrance and deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. -- from back cover.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 397-415) and index.
    Contents
    • Introduction : "I am building a city"
    • A Baedecker to Buczacz
    • Inventing a narrator
    • Worship and danger : a cantorial tryptych
    • Rabbis and scholars
    • Jews and Poles
    • Austrian mandates
    • Disappeared
    • Moments of redemption.
    ISBN
    • 9781503601161 ((hardcover ; : alkaline paper))
    • 1503601161 ((hardcover ; : alkaline paper))
    LCCN
    2016049624
    OCLC
    960707606
    Other standard number
    • 40027281210
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