קורות בתנו לש"י עגנון: שורשים מזדמנים

As part of his trip to Poland in the summer of 1930 Agnon met with his uncle Azriel Yaakov in Tarnepol. He had earlier corresponded with his uncle in hopes of acquring information about his father`s ancestors. According to Agnon`s report, he brought back documentrary material from his visit when he returned to Jerusalem. It was only after the Holocaust in 1947 that Agnon published some narratives purportedly based on these materials, to which he appended an introduction explaining their source. The amterials Agnon received from his uncle are not extanat, and we cannot compare them to the stories Agnon tells in Korot Bateinu. which appeared in book form in 1979. Rather than examining these texts as historical documents, I propose to read them in the contet of Agnon`s larger program of refashioning the myth of his childhood, which he began to undertake in earnest in the twenties and early thirties in such stories as "Hamitpahat." This paper will describe how Agnon retrofitted these genealogical materials to the shaping of his autobiographical myth.