Israeli · 1887–1970
Shmuel Yosef Agnon shared the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 "for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people." The Israeli author wrote in Hebrew about shtetl life, Jerusalem, and the loss of the old world. "Only Yesterday" (1945) follows a Zionist settler into strange territory. Agnon's prose draws on religious tradition and modernist experiment.