S. Y. Agnon

Born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Buczacz, then Austro-Hungarian Galicia and now Ukraine, he grew up steeped in both traditional Hasidic and Enlightenment Hebrew learning, and emigrated to Ottoman Palestine at twenty, adopting the pen name Agnon (from agunah, a Hebrew term for a wife bound to an absent husband) that he later made his legal name.

A fire that destroyed his home and manuscripts during a stay in Germany sent him back to Jerusalem for good in 1924, where he settled in the Talpiot neighborhood and wrote steadily for four more decades. A Simple Story (1935) turned his Buczacz childhood into a spare, ironic tale of a shopkeeper's son maneuvered into a loveless marriage, its folk-tale plainness masking a quietly devastating study of a life narrowed by custom.

He shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with Nelly Sachs, the first Hebrew-language writer so honored, and died in 1970; his Jerusalem home is now a museum, and his portrait has appeared on Israeli currency.