The Mirror of Literary Art

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach (1892-1957)

During World War II, Erich Auerbach, a German Jew forced to flee his country and settle, temporarily, in Istanbul, wrote what is, in my opinion, the finest book ever written about literature as an art form.  Not the finest work of literary theory--though an argument can be made that Mimesis is that--and not the finest collection of essays on individual literary works--though I cannot think of a better collection--but the most profound and searching examination of how literature is able to represent--to capture and mirror--human reality.  In twenty chapters Auerbach surveys the course of Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf and examines, using the tools of comparative philology (what literary study was before it became literary criticism), the linguistic means through which the West's greatest writers have attempted to picture, or intimate, the world in which they lived.  Auerbach, fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, English, Spanish, and Old French, and with a more than passing familiarity with Hebrew, structured each of his chapters around an extensive passage, quoted in the original, translated by him, and then subjected to what is nowadays called a "close reading" but which was, in an earlier tradition of serious literary study, simply a reading.

I happened upon Auerbach in the course of writing a graduate seminar paper on the Chanson de Roland, the great OF epic that commemorates the eighth- century Battle of Roncesvalles.  I had no critical tools which would allow me to understand the style of the poet.  "It's flat," was the best I could do, but Auerbach offered a vocabulary with which to approach this venerable (the first) work of French literature: "The poet explains nothing; and yet the things which happen are stated with a paratactic bluntness which says that everything must happen as it does happen. It could not be otherwise, and there is no need for explanatory connections.  This, as the reader knows, refers not only to the events but also to the views and principles which form the basis of the actions of the persons concerned....no explanatory discussion is called for...."  Of course.  In a world where principles of action and belief were clear, a poet, even one writing well after the fact, need do no more than state through simple juxtaposition the facts of the case.  "The copious and connected argumentation of which Homer's heroes are so fond is wholly outside of [the Christian knights of the Chanson's] ken."  There are no digressions, "all the categories of life are unambiguous, immutable, fixed in rigid formulations." And beyond the reach of reason.  

I have quoted Auerbach at length to give a sense of his method: his incisive ability to find in literary style evidence not only of an historical view, but a psychological one as well.  Here, for example, is his comment on Dante's style (from Canto Ten of Inferno, the speeches of Farinata degli Uberti as well as of Virgil and Dante):


"The most vital continuity of movement vibrates through the entire passage. Dante has at his disposal an abundance of stylistic devices which no European vernacular before him could equal. And he does not use them singly; he connects them in an uninterrupted relationship  Virgil's encouraging words consist exclusively of principle clauses without any formal connection by conjunctions...But the quick succession, the concise formulation of the individual parts, and their mutual balance [in paired speeches] exhibit to perfection the natural vitality of spoken discourse."


But what does this mean for the "representation of reality"?  Dante, in Auerbach's brilliant reading, succeeds in representing "a mixture of sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity, is monstrous."  Yes, that is exactly right.  Chaucer approaches this odd, but typically medieval marriage of the sublime and the grotesque, but no where, not even in the Troilus, is he able to achieve Dante's comprehensive melding of tragedy and farce.

 Auerbach's twenty essays, each of which might stand alone, survey a remarkably broad collection of works.  My own favorites include his study of Don Quixote ("The Enchanted Dulcinea"), of Henry IV, Part II ("The Weary Prince") [where Auerbach dissects with great precision the "mixed style" of the seventeenth century], and the astonishing reading of Le Rouge et le Noir ("In the Hotel de la Mole") where Auerbach offers this thought: "We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern consciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble."  If anyone else were to write such a sentence I would probably scoff at them; however, Auerbach is persuasive (his chapters are dense with examples), and the argument he makes throughout the 550 pages of Mimesis has long since convinced me--Stendhal did invent modern literary consciousness.

And what does all of this have to do with Talented Readers?  After all, Mimesis falls outside the purview of our concern with discovering lesser known books and their writers.  However, this remarkable homage to literary art demonstrates the depth of meaning, significances, and beauty of literature better than any book I know.  The range and depth and genius of Auerbach, when turned on the Odyssey or Mrs. Dalloway convince me that reading literature is the highest form of philosophizing and perhaps of thinking as well.

Auerbach emigrated to the United States after the War and spent twenty years teaching at Yale before his death in 1957.  He was among that remarkable generation of scholars born at the end of the nineteenth century who transformed our understanding of literature, art, and music by studying in a systematic and highly disciplined way aesthetic forms that had long been the province of dilettantes.  I find the afterword of Mimesis to be moving in its optimism, given the catastrophic circumstances of its composition (not all of which were known to Auerbach as he wrote).

"Nothing now remains but to find him--to find the reader, that is.  I hope that my study will reach its readers--both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it was intended.  And my it contribute to bring together again those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered."  Written in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was translated by Willard R. Trask and published by Princeton University Press in 1953.  It is still in print.


George Ovitt, (8/12/13)

 

Poetic Prose and the Whirlpool of Ego

Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

The prose is gorgeous.

"I tried to string a number of those cries together, to cause them to occur in a mounting sequence. It was a peculiar attempt: it seemed we moved, I moved with her, on dark water, between two lines of buoys, dark on one side, there was nothingness there, and on the other, lights, red and green, the lights of the body advancing on sexual heat, the signs of it anyway, nipples like scored pebbles, legs lightly thrashing, little ohs; nothing important, a body thing; you go on, you proceed."

As with much of Brodkey, the focus is coital ("Innocence"), the writing hovers on the border of mawkishness, and the narrator is--invariably it seems--Brodkey himself.  Wiley Silenowicz, the central figure in Brodkey's autobiographical stories, recounts, with variations, the story of Brodkey's unhappy childhood, romantic (or merely physical) sexual encounters, and, at times, morbidly self-obsessed view of the world.  Brodkey is an acquired taste.  Some of his stories are beautiful in the way that aesthetically-obsessed Japanese arts--bonsai say, or origami--are beautiful: there is an attention to detail, a miniaturization of action, a reduction of others to the often myopic perception of the narrator that can be exhilarating or stultifying, depending on the story.  I was never able to finish The Runaway Soul, Brodkey's 850-page autobiographical account of his childhood, a book that reminded me for three hundred pages of Portrait of an Artist with its lament for an unhappy childhood, and not at all of Proust's more engaging and socialized self-scrutiny in Swann's Way--the writer one would think Brodkey wished to emulate.

And yet when one wishes to read prose that is poetry Brodkey is as good as any other writer in English:

"When I walked next to her, sometimes it was like being next to granite blocks tumbling slowly in melodramatic little avalanches." ("Largely an Oral History of My Mother")  Or this, from "S.L.": "The enameling of the light moves and shifts: I see a bridge downstream--metallic ripples--metal braid--webby glosses of air in a rain haze at this moment, this pedestal of mind: my attention has two forms--as light and as a river on no clear geographical plane."  Perfect.

One is quite familiar with interior monologues, but i.m.'s are often rather prosy since most of our waking thoughts are just that--tedious recountings of daily minutiae, of chores to be done, fears to control, hopes and dreams to fulfill.  Brodkey's interior self speaks in verse, in the sorts of images one finds in Pound or, most memorably, in Wallace Stevens--the greatest poet of the inner voice in English.

"The malady of the quotidian. . .
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate                       
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze,

Once might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent."

("The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad")

I imagine Stevens always in the same fashion: bundled in his Burberry coat (charcoal, as I see it), tramping across a Hartford park--black elms and oaks, lowering sky, children building a snowman--examining impressions which unfold, miraculously, in images that were unprecedented in our language.   And so it is with Brodkey as he (I imagine) trolled the bars on the Lower East Side, or, cocooned in his apartment, turned his painful memories and ramped-up sensibilities and insatiable sexual longings toward the problem of making perfect sentences.

My Brodkey problem isn't with his art but with its resolution, or lack thereof; with the feeling as one reads through his classical stories--classical in the sense of architecturally perfect yet as uninhabitable as the ruins of a Greek temple--that I am suspended in mid-air, required to regard the art, the delicacy of description, but that I will not be allowed an unadorned glimmer of the mind, of the man, whose lovely words I am reading.   It seems odd that confessional writing can hold us at a distance, can substitute beauty for feeling, or at least the sort of deep and unmediated feeling that great writing forces us to experience.

When I read, in 1993, of Brodkey's battle with AIDS--a New Yorker memoir that was turned into a book--I felt for the first time that I had glimpsed something of Brodkey's "authentic" self: the writing was relatively stripped down, less "verbose" (this was the common criticism of Brodkey, a writer whom New York critics either adored or despised).  Over the years I have read and reread sections of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, marveling at the beauty of the prose and feeling suffocated by the weight of the self at the center of Brodkey's lifelong autobiographical effort.

Brodkey is the subject of a fine Paris Review interview, number 126
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2128/the-art-of-fiction-no-126-harold-brodkey

Many thanks to my good friend and colleague Peter Nash for keeping TR alive while I was otherwise occupied.

George Ovitt, 8/9/13

Chekhov and Children

“Oysters”  by Anton Chekhov

In her excellent biography of the Italian novelist, Elsa Morante, Lily Tuck recounts how the author, in a famous interview with Michel David, expressed her belief that reality was much closer or “truer” in childhood. Adults, by contrast, tended to distance themselves from it through their often mindless devotion to their careers, to their wealth and possessions, to vanity, drink, and sex. The best  way to know reality, Morante insisted, was through the eyes of a child.

I think Chekhov might have agreed—at least in part, for he too felt a great affinity for the way that children see and suffer the world. In the Modern Library collection Anton Chekhov: Early Short Stories, 1883-1888, there are no less than ten stories that deal expressly with the experience and perspectives of youth, stories such as “Children,” “Grisha,” “An Incident,” “The Runaway,” and “Oysters,” the subject of this post.

Written to help support himself while in medical school, this lesser known story, “Oysters,” is a perfect example of what William Trevor—in describing Chekhov’s fiction—called “the art of the glimpse.” Less the five pages long, and shot through with pathos and humor, it tells the story of a boy, the narrator, who, while out begging with his father before an upscale Moscow restaurant, spots a sign for ‘Oysters,’ a word he has never seen before and about which he questions his father at length:

“Papa, what does ‘oysters’ mean?” I repeated.

“It is an animal…that lives in the sea…”

           

When pressed further his beleaguered father explains, “They are eaten alive…They are in shells like tortoises, but…in two halves,” a revelation that leaves the boy aghast:

So that’s what ‘oysters’ meant! I imagined to myself a creature like a frog.  A frog sitting in a shell, peeping out from it with big, glittering eyes, and moving its revolting jaws. I imagined the creature in a shell with claws, glittering eyes, and slimy skin…The grown-ups would take it and eat it, eat it alive with its eyes, its teeth, its legs! While it squeaked and tried to bite their lips…”

It is a vision that torments the boy, even in sleep, after some rich men have forced him to sample some of the creatures and he lies nauseous at home in bed. Chekhov renders this moment—the boy’s confusion, his sickness, his horror—with startling authenticity and force. What’s more he does so against the darker, more dreadful background of the boy’s abject and broken father pacing the room beside him, mumbling madly to himself. 

If you have never read Chekhov’s short stories you are in for a treat. A brilliant playwright, he was also a master of the short story, having—in the course of his short career—composed no less than five hundred of them. Writes Raymond Carver: “Chekhov’s stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. They present, in an extraordinarily precise manner, an unparalleled account of human activity and behavior in his time; and so they are valid for all time. Anyone who reads literature, anyone who believes, as one must, in the transcendent power of art, sooner or later has to read Chekov.” Indeed his stories—so luminous, so simple—are sure to sharpen your perception of the world, tightening the ratchet on all you see and feel. 

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), who trained and practiced as a doctor, was a major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. A literary artist of laconic precision, he probed below the surface of ordinary Russian life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters. His stories are distinguished by their simple plots, their psychological treatment of character, and their complex and ambiguous endings. (Thanks in part to Britannica.com)

Peter Adam Nash

Kosher Locust: The Apocalypse and Nathaniel West

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West

Yes, there is such a thing as a kosher locust, an insect suitable for consumption by Jews under the ancient dietary laws known as kashrut. While it is stated in the Torah (Parshat Shemini) that “Every flying insect that uses four legs for walking shall be avoided by you,” there are actually eight different species of locusts that a Jew can munch (see red locust left). But don’t get your hopes up, for in fact the law proscribes that a Jew can only eat these locusts as part of a “continuous tradition,” such as the one practiced by the Jewish community of Djerba in Tunisia. The only other way that a righteous Jew can taste them is to visit and be offered a sampling of such locusts by a member of a Jewish community in which the practice is already established. 

Why include this in a post about Nathaniel West and his novel The Day of the Locust?  I’m really not sure, except that it’s interesting and West was Jewish (born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein) and that in his aforementioned novel he envisions for America a plague of locusts even more destructive than God’s.  

In fact Jews are deeply familiar with locusts (even if most can’t eat them). God, in his desire to punish the Pharaoh of Egypt for enslaving the ancient Hebrews, unleashed upon the stubborn tyrant a rain of plagues (the list recited to this day at each Passover Seder), a nasty cloud of locusts featured prominently among them. West’s satire of 1930’s Hollywood, that garish purgatory where he, like Faulkner, was condemned to do time working as a screenwriter, is a fractured, dizzying journey into American loneliness, vanity, and despair. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald himself praised the novel for its "scenes of extraordinary power"), like Miller’s Death of Salesman, the novel takes the American Dream and turns it inside out.  As Jonathan Lethem puts in in his introduction to the novel, “West explicitly defines Los Angeles as the place where the American (Egalitarian) Dream has ended up, first to replicate itself in the synthetic cartoons of the motion picture industry, and then, under the exposing glare of sunlight, to die.”

And die its does—if fitfully, grotesquely—in the hearts and minds of his desperately yearning characters: an old Vaudevillian, a screenwriter, a starlet, a cowboy, a ghastly child actor, a midget gangster, and a lonely Midwestern businessman, one of the many disappointed and disillusioned who has come to California to die.  At the center of it all is Tod Hackett, an East Coast artist and intellectual outsider who throughout the novel is struggling (like Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse), to complete his masterpiece, in his case an enormous painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles.”

Surely one of the best parts of the story—it will hook you at once—is the surreal and portentous opening in which the protagonist, the love-struck dreamer, Tod Hackett, looks out the window of his Hollywood office where he works to pay the bills as a costume designer and background painter to behold:

     An army of cavalry and foot was passing.  It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat. The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their flat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder. Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabertaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes. Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts.

     While he watched, a little fat man, wearing a cork sun-helmet, polo short and knockers, darted around the corner of the building in pursuit of the army.

     “Stage Nine—you bastards—Stage Nine!” he screamed through a small megaphone.

All is jumbled, irrational, confused; nothing seems real. This is West’s signature, for as a writer he was drawn more to the poetry and vision of the French Surrealists (and through them to Freud) than to that of his social realist compatriots, writer-activists like Walker Evans, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos.  More like Faulkner in his technical and stylistic daring, as well as in his professional marginality, West marveled at what William Peden called “the horrible emptiness of mass lives” and worked hard to find a means, a method, to describe it. What he devised—at least as far as this novel is concerned—was a hallucinatory, often violent (and violence-filled) juxtaposition of images and things, which, when coupled with his own strange compassion for his characters, constitutes nothing less than a revolution in meaning and form. “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance,” reflects Tod Hackett, near the ending of this apocalyptic novel, “no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

Nathaniel West, born in New York City in 1903, published three novels before moving to Hollywood to write screenplays. In addition to The Day of the Locust, he is the author of A Cool Million, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, and Miss Lonelyhearts.  He died in a  car accident in 1940.  The Day of the Locust is published in tandem with Miss Lonelyhearts by New Directions.

* Thanks in part to Guggenheim.org

Peter Adam Nash

Jean Rhys: Caribbean Gothic

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Think of a ‘classic’ you were forced to read in high school or college, some supposedly great book that you hated, that bored you, that left you cold. Now pick it up again, read the first chapter or two, and see what you think. Chances are, the story will be different than you remembered it. That is what happened to me the other day when, sorting the books on my shelves, I discovered my old copy of Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, bought on whim, when I hadn’t a nickel to spare, at the old Brentano’s in Greenwich Village, a choice I remember regretting at once.

What hadn’t I liked about it? For the life of me I couldn't remember. Curious, inspired by my friend David’s recent praise of the novel, I scanned the first few pages and was hooked, so that by three o’clock that afternoon I had read it straight through. I sat amazed: surely someone had changed the story on me, for this novel was brilliant—sharply imagined, poetically crafted, darkly twisted in its setting and characters, in its storyline, phrasing, and detail. A ruined estate, a ghost of a mother, a parrot in flames. What more could one ask for?

What I liked especially about the novel this time around was the fact that, while it is a bold and original story in its own right, set mostly in the British West Indies and conceptually, thematically complete, it is further enriched (if one happens to have read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) by Rhys’ fleshing out of Rochester’s infamous madwoman in the attic, his first wife, the Creole and suicide, Bertha Antoinetta Mason. Rhys herself loved the novel Jane Eyre, read it throughout her life, yet always what moved her most about the story was not the protagonist herself but the minor, obliquely rendered Bertha, Rochester’s violently insane wife. As a woman and writer, Rhys wondered at the cause of this woman’s distress, at the story behind it, restless and dissatisfied with the little she knew.

While such re-imagining of famous novels is now grist for the mills (of Jane Eyre adaptations Rhys herself wrote that “[t]here have been umpteen thousand and sixty already”), what Rhys accomplished with Wide Sargasso Sea is something altogether different. No money-making scheme, she sought to humanize—and in this way more fully understand—this terrifying footnote of a woman she calls Antoinette by moving her center-stage and reducing the men in her life to shadows. In so doing the woman is no less mad, but it is a madness with which one can sympathize, for which one can grieve, a harrowing affliction of mind and heart that one can see for what it is: the residuum—cruelly concentrated in a single person—of nearly three centuries of slavery and oppression, the toxic half-life of British patriarchal and colonial rule.

Jean Rhys was one of the twentieth century’s foremost writers, a literary artist who made exquisite use of the raw material of her own turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and poignancy.  Between 1928 and 1939, Rhys published four novels, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight, which brought her critical acclaim but not fame.  After almost thirty years of obscurity, the successful publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 led to her rediscovery.  She died in 1979. (W.W. Norton)

Peter Adam Nash

S.Y. Agnon: Why Literary Fiction Matters

Nothing To Lose:

        Not Actually a Review of To This Day by S.Y. Agnon

In reading S.Y. Agnon’s short final novel To This Day I suddenly understood more clearly why it is that reading literary fiction is such an important complement (if not antidote) to the all but overwhelming glut of blogs, newspapers, magazines, and commercial non-fiction that defines the intellectual marketplace of American culture today. In the voice of his protagonist, a young Palestinian man (that is, a Galician Jew then living in Palestine) caught in Berlin on the eve of World War I, Agnon writes:

This was the job of the press: to distinguish the living from the dead by reporting on the dead to the living. If you were alive you read the newspapers, through which the lifeblood of the times circulated: birth and marriage notices, anniversaries and obituaries, commodities and stock prices, and the like. Moreover, reading a newspaper spared you the trouble of forming your own opinion… In no time you crisscrossed the world and the world was yours for the price of a newspaper.” 

While surely exaggerated, surely tongue-in-cheek, the passage helped to sharpen for me my long-held belief that literary fiction asks of a reader something radically different from the many other more popular forms of print, something essential, more lasting, unique. Unlike with so much non-fiction these days, a novel by Agnon, Bernhard, Klíma, Kafka, Sebald, Toer, Bellow, Valenzuela, Naipaul, El Saadawi, Kawabata, Castellanos, Dostoevsky, Rodoreta, Müller, Conrad, Mulisch, Emecheta, Bolaño or Mahfouz will not permit you to be passive,  to be persuaded, but will confront you with a character or characters, a problem (ethical, moral, intellectual, spiritual, existential), a world (perhaps familiar or strange), then force you to think about it, to examine the evidence before you, to draw your own conclusions. It will ask you—after what is often a mighty struggle—to form your own opinion. 

Again I turn to Kundera who, in speaking of the novel as form, writes: “Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgment is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop—that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws.” If you, the reader, choose to judge them you may, but “the novelist has nothing to do with it.”  That is the difference with literary fiction: the onus is on you, and you alone. You must decide, you must adjudicate or—if too moved, too shaken—you may recuse yourself instead, find a quiet place to think.

Part of what inspired this post, this tangent, was the realization that hardly a week seems to pass anymore when I don't have at least one intelligent adult tell me (usually as apology for not reading this blog) that he hasn’t the time for fiction anymore, that when he does find the time to read (in itself a mystery to me) it is almost always non-fiction: magazines, newspapers, blogs, and the latest from Gladwell, Friedman, Gilbert, Sedaris, and Larson. While I genuinely believe that all types of reading are good, and I mean all, I also believe that it is important to read widely, eccentrically, independently—independent, that is, of such cultural midwives and mediums as Oprah, Ellen, Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Commercial non-fiction (even the more political/intellectual variety) is largely about trends (spotting them, mapping them, making readers feel a part of them—even creating them, when the conditions are right). As such it is not only (and for all its distinctive urgency) often highly ephemeral in nature (guaranteeing, as with the latest cut in clothes, that whatever it is or implies about the world it will soon be replaced) but is likely to be driven in its popularity less by some practical or aesthetic measure of “quality” or “value” than by corporate marketing and gain. My contention here is that the world needs more people who are less reliant on the marketplace and more reliant on themselves—on their own wisdom, intelligence, and humanity, readers who genuinely trust themselves to think.

Writers invested in complexity (as opposed to demagoguery and self-promotion) do justice to us all by refusing to package up the world and tie it neatly with a bow. It is why their work sells so poorly and is harder, often disturbing to read. While surely the best non-fiction is complex, forcing us to reckon hard with the matters at hand (and on our own brave and lonely terms), only literary fiction refuses to persuade. It—unlike every other form of prose—has nothing to gain, nothing to sell you, nothing to lose.

*lead photo is of Agnon’s study in his house in Talpiot neighborhood in

         Jerusalem, now a museum called Beit Agnon.

S.Y. Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now Ukraine).  In 1908 he immigrated to Ottoman Palestine where he published his first story, “Agunot” under the pen name “Agnon”—a surname he adopted legally.  After an extended stay in Germany from 1913 to 1924, he returned to Jerusalem, where he remained until his death in 1970.  Winner of numerous Israeli prizes, including the Bialik Prize (1934), and the Israel Prize (1954, 1958), he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. To This Day is published by the fabulous Toby Press.  Be sure to check out their list:  http://www.tobypress.com/

 Peter Adam Nash