Agnon’s Nobel Prize Partner: The Holocaust Poetry of Nelly Sachs

When S.Y. Agnon took the stage in Stockholm in 1966 to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not do so alone. That year, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the prize to two Jewish writers: Agnon, and the German-Swedish Jewish poet and playwright Nelly Sachs.

While Agnon’s literature was written in Hebrew and focused on the Jewish experience in the pre-WWII diaspora and then in Israel, Sachs wrote her poems and plays in German, and her primary focus was the dark experiences of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Sachs was fortunate to escape Nazi Germany (together with her mother) and flee to Sweden in 1940, just a week before they were scheduled to report to a concentration camp.

During the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1966, Sachs remarked that Agnon represented Israel, “whereas I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people.”

During the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1966, Sachs remarked that Agnon represented Israel, “whereas I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people.”

One of Sach’s most powerful poems, “O the Chimneys,” evokes the tragedy that her life represented:

O the chimneys
On the ingeniously devised habitations of death
When Israel’s body drifted as smoke
Through the air—
Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep,
A star that turned black
Or was it a ray of sun?

O the chimneys!
Paths of freedom for Jeremiah and Job’s dust—
Who devised you and laid stone upon stone
The road for refugees of smoke?

 O the habitations of death,
Invitingly appointed
For the host who used to be a guest—
O you fingers
Laying the threshold
Like a knife between life and death—

 O you chimneys,
O you fingers
And Israel’s body as smoke through the air!

Both Sachs and Agnon escaped the horrors of the Nazis, and lived to tell the tragedies and stories of the Jewish people. Their writing was celebrated with the world’s highest honor. Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are left to wonder how many other Sachs and Agnons there were among the six million and more who perished. How many other would-be Nobel prize-winning writers and scientists were reduced to “smoke in the air” in the chimneys of the Nazi death camps? How many others—who had the potential to inspire, to uplift, to heal and to cure—“drifted as smoke”? O the Chimneys.

“The tragedy of the Jewish people” that Sachs wrote about was, indeed, a tragedy for all of humanity.

Rabbi Daniel Bouskila is the Director of the Sephardic Educational Center and the rabbi of the Westwood Village Synagogue. His monthly column on Agnon appears on the first Thursday of the month.