Agnon’s Story

Avner Falk is an internationally-known scholar in psychohistory and political psychology. He studied clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1960–1966) and at Washington University in St. Louis (1966–1970). After returning to Israel in 1971 he worked for three decades as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Jerusalem. He has published ten scholarly books, including psychoanalytic studies of Jewish history, the Arab-Israeli conflict, antisemitism, Islamic terror and the Crusades, as well as psychoanalytic biographies of Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, Napoleon Bonaparte and Barack Obama. His book Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict won an award from Choice magazine.

"A brief review of Falk’s lengthy biography cannot possibly do justice to the book’s full complexity and richness. For those individuals keen to know all about Agnon’s life and personality, warts and all, this book is heartily recommended." - David Rodman, Independent Scholar,Israeli Affairs, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2019.1670459.

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresIntroduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon1 The Home Town as Mother2 The Land of Israel as the Idealized Mother3 The Adoptive German Motherland4 The Wife as Mother5 A Daughter Named Faith6 Catastrophic Change and Traumatic Flight7 The Nobel Prize as Mother’s Love8 Escape to Germany9 Back to the Dead Mother10 The Turning Point: Agnon, Kafka and Freud11 The Writer, His Wife, and Her Psychoanalyst12 Agnon vs. Freud: Hostility and Fascination13 The Middle-Aged Hebrew Writer14 Nobel Ambitions and the Quest for Mother’s Love15 A Heart Attack in Sweden16 My Way of Life is Fallen into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf17 Losses, Eulogies and Stories18 The “Jewish Messiah” and the “King of Flesh and Blood”Epilogue: After Life’s Fitful FeverFiguresBibliographyIndex