The fiction of Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon is the foundation of the array of scholarly essays as seen through the career of Alan Mintz, visionary scholar and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Mintz introduced Agnon's posthumously published Ir Umeloah (A City in Its Fullness)?a series of linked stories set in the 17th century and focused on Agnon's hometown, Buczacz, a town in what is currently western Ukraine?to an English reading audience, and argued that Agnon's unique treatment of Buczacz in A City in its Fullness, navigating the sometimes tenuous boundary of the modernist and the mythical, was a full-throated, self-conscious literary response to the Holocaust. This volume is an extension of a memorial dedicated to Mintz's memory (who died suddenly in 2017) which combines selections of Alan's work from the beginning, middle and end of his career, with autobiographical tributes from older and younger scholars alike. The essays dealing with Agnon and Buczacz remember the career of Alan Mintz and his contribution to the world of Jewish studies and within the world of Jewish communal life.
Sheila Jelen, Zantker Professor in Jewish Literature, Culture, and History, is an associate professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky. Jelen has published a variety of monographs and edited volumes including, most recently, Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies. Jeffrey Saks is the founding director of The Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education, in Jerusalem, and its WebYeshiva.org program. He is the editor of the journal Tradition, series editor of The S.Y. Agnon Library at The Toby Press, and Director of Research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem.Wendy Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion in New York. She is the author of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation. In 2017 she became coeditor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
I. Alan Mintz on Agnon and Diaspora Hebraism
"Agnon on the Individual and the Community," from Response, 1967
"Late Agnon and the Reimagining of Galician Jewry" (Fourteenth Annual Band Lecture, UCLA, February 12, 2015)
"My Life with Hebrew" (Mosaic Magazine, April 13, 2017)
II. Tributes
David Roskies, "A Prophet in His City"
Anne Golomb Hoffman, "Remembering Alan Mintz"
Sidra Ezrahi, "For Alan"
Buczacz
Avidov Lipsker, The Heavenly City: A Historiographic Paradigm in the Scholastic Cartography of S.Y. Agnon
Sheila Jelen, Salvage Poetics: Agnon's 'Imaginary Real' in A Guest for the Night
Nitza Ben-Dov, Divine Compassion From an Ironic Perspective: The Experience of the Shoah in Agnon's "The Sign,"
In his Generation
Omer Bartov, Tales From Half-Asia: Small Town Galicians Encounter the World
Wendy Zierler, "Breaking the Idyll": Rereading Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Agnon's Sippur pashut Through Baron's "Fradl"
Maya Barzilai, Last Translations: Gershom Scholem's Renditions of S. Y. Agnon's Polish Tales
Early and Late
Jeffrey Saks, From "A City of the Dead" to "A City in its Fullness": Evolving Depictions of Buczacz in the Long Agnonian Arc
Michal Arbell, Szybusz and the Crisis of Parenting"
Glenda Abramson, "Our Town": Mr. Stern and Buczacz in Mr. Lubin's Store
A Revolutionary Traditionalist
Haim Beer, New Faces: A Study of Sippur pashut
Ariel Hirschfeld, The Source and the Depth of Oblivion: Story and Folktale in Two Stories by Agnon
James Diamond, "Agnon's Yamim Nora'im: Then and Now"
IV. Agnon Himself
The Partners
Excerpts from The Parable and Its Lesson
Alan L. Mintz, List of Publications, Compiled by Menachem Butler (July 2020)
