And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight

S.Y. Agnon's first book-length, breakthrough work, originally published in Hebrew in 1912 and now available in English for the first time in a fully annotated edition—this novella depicts an impossible moral dilemma faced by the tragic hero Menasheh Chaim, in mid-19th century Buczacz (in today’s western Ukraine). In the framework of a traditional Jewish folktale of old world Eastern European Jewry, Agnon delivers a profoundly modern piece of literature, which benefits from the tension between plot and genre.- New volume of Agnon's fiction in first-time English translation.- Volume 14 in the Toby Press' S.Y. Agnon Library – the fullest collection of the Nobel laureate’s work in annotated English translation.- Critical introduction to the novella by translator, Professor Michael P. Kramer, unlocking the themes of exile and redemption and providing the historical context for Agnon's achievement with this breakthrough work. - 50 pages of annotations, unpacking Agnon's rich symbolism and sources with which he built his intertextual masterpiece.- Annotated bibliography of criticism and scholarship on the work by series editor Jeffrey Saks.- Woodcut illustrations from the 1919 Hebrew edition published in Berlin.

S.Y. Agnon (1888–1970) was the central figure of modern Hebrew literature, and the 1966 Nobel Prize laureate for his body of writing. Born in the Galician town of Buczacz (in today’s western Ukraine), as Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, he arrived in 1908 in Jaffa, Ottoman Palestine, where he adopted the penname Agnon and began a meteoric rise as a young writer. Between the years 1912 and 1924 he spent an extended sojourn in Germany, where he married and had two children, and came under the patronage of Shlomo Zalman Schocken and his publishing house, allowing Agnon to dedicate himself completely to his craft. After a house fire in 1924 destroyed his library and the manuscripts of unpublished writings, he returned to Jerusalem where he lived for the remainder of his life. His works deal with the conflict between traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world, and constitute a distillation of millennia of Jewish writing – from the Bible through the Rabbinic codes to Hasidic storytelling – recast into the mold of modern literature.Michael P. Kramer leads the William Solomon Jewish Arts Seminar in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. He has published extensively on Jewish and American literature and was the editor of Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature.