Weddings, Sexuality and Eros, According to S. Y. Agnon

Abstract

During their periods of renewal, Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following the upheavals that would herald new eras in Jewish life, denounced the stagnation affecting the dense populations of Eastern Europe. In literature, antiheroes were presented as people paralyzed in all aspects of life, including emotional and intellectual. The central symbol of this paralysis was the problem of Eros, which became a more frequent component of these writings. Passivity and fruitless erotic entanglements were the hallmarks of many characters. Israeli author Shai Agnon, whose literary production spanned decades, developed a complex dialectic between the institutions of Hebrew prehistory and the anguish of modern existence. Some of his themes, such as sexuality and eros, involving marriage, present in novels and short stories published from 1908 to 1971 (posthumously), which became models in modern and contemporary Hebrew literature, will be addressed here.