S. Y. Agnon and Saul Bellow

Agnon, the Israeli Nobel prize winning writer, and Saul Bellow, the American Jewish Nobel prize winning writer had very different takes on their 'native ground'. Agnon, then known as Shmuel Josef Czaczkes, packed his bags in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, and moved to Palestine. Saul Bellow, 27 years his junior, was firmly rooted in Chicago. Granted that Agnong then moved to Germany, where he was part of the circle of Martin Buber, Sholem Gershom and Salman Schocken, and absorbed European literature, but he moved back to Palestine, where he wrote stories of magic realism with a traditional Jewish Hebrew background. He mined the cultural landscape of Galicia he grew up in in a new Jewish country that he totally adopted, whereas Bellow, a seemingly completely assimilated American Jew wrote about the Jewish world of Chicago. So which was the native ground of each?  Buczacz of Agnon, which is no more, destroyed in Agnon's lifetime or Chicago of Bellow, or did both only exist in the imagination of these writers?  Agnon grew up among Zionists who could not imagine moving to Palestine, but he moved there and became the preeminent Hebrew writer. Bellow could not imagine living anywhere but in America, where his immigrant parents built a new life and gave Saul the opportunity to succeed. Why would anyone give up the good life in America and move to Israel? Why would anyone move to Israel from a benign peaceful country like New Zealand? Where are our native grounds? Can an imaginary Israel become and immigrant's native ground?