S. Y. Agnon

Shmuel Yosef Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888 in Buczacz, Galicia, into a family of merchants and scholars. In 1908 he came to Jaffa, where his story Agunot ("Forsaken Wives") gave him the pen name Agnon. He lived in Germany from 1912 to 1924, where a fire in his home in Bad Homburg destroyed his library and manuscripts, then settled in Jerusalem, in the Talpiot neighbourhood. His novels and stories, written in a Hebrew rich with the language of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Midrash, portray the world of Galician Jewry and the new life in the Land of Israel: The Bridal Canopy (1931), A Guest for the Night (1939) and Only Yesterday (1945).

In 1966 he shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with Nelly Sachs, the first Hebrew writer to receive it. In Stockholm he said that although he was born in a city of the exile, he always regarded himself as one born in Jerusalem. He died in 1970, and his portrait was on the 50-shekel note.