This is a handwritten sign by Shai Agnon posted outside his home. The cardboard sign has string threaded on the top and says:
Here lives a Jew who observes Shabbat. Do not disturb his Shabbat.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, known as S.Y. or Shai Agnon, was a Nobel Prize winning author who lived in Jerusalem. Agnon was a very famous author, and this drew many people to come and see where he lived. Agnon, who was an orthodox Jew and a very private person, did not enjoy this Shabbat “tourism,” and for this reason he wrote this sign.
Unfortunately for Agnon, the sign did not deter people from coming to his home, and they even enjoyed the sign, viewing it as signed souvenir from the famous writer. Each week Shai Agnon put up a new sign outside his home, and each week the sign was taken by a passer-by, forcing him to write another one the following Friday.
This was not the only sign to be posted near Agnon’s home. In later years, the writer complained that the noise in his Talpiot neighbourhood was disturbed his writing. The municipality subsequently closed Agnon’s street to cars and posted a sign saying: “No entry to any vehicles, writer at work!”
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Shai Agnon - Shai (Shmuel Yosef) Agnon was one of the most important writers of modern Israeli fiction. He was born as Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888 in Polish Galicia and immigrated to Israel in 1908. His stories deal primarily with the conflicts between Jewish traditional life and the modern world, and his stories, such as “A Simple Story” and “A Guest for the Night,” often take place in shtetls (small Jewish towns or villages in Eastern Europe). Other stories written by Agnon, such as “Tmol Shilshom” and “Tehilla,” describe his life after he arrived in Israel. In 1966, Shai Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.” The Jewish poet Nelly Sachs received the prize together with Agnon. At his acceptance speech Agnon said:
As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.
Agnon died in Jerusalem in 1970, and his archive was transferred to the National Library of Israel.
