Agnon builds this major novel around the Beit Midrash, which serves as the organizing structure for the efforts of its narrator to bring about a restoration that is both personal and communal. The key to the Beit Midrash provides a symbol for the lost potency of the town and its inhabitants. Nevertheless, the narrator’s efforts to reverse that loss and to bring about a renewal of the town are treated with a wry combination of seriousness and irony. Agnon uses the novel to acknowledge the traditions of learning and piety that the Beit Midrash represents, but also to mark the futility of attempting to preserve them in eastern Europe. Written in the 1930s, A Guest for the Night is set in the period immediately following World War i. In a sense, it can be said to straddle history by recording the devastation of the period immediately following World War i, while in retrospect conveying a sense of the greater destruction that was yet to come.
For Agnon the writer, the ultimate destruction of the town in the Holocaust became the occasion for its recreation in art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the posthumously published volume Ir Umeloah (A City and the Fullness Thereof).[5] Agnon arrived at the commitment to produce his own ongoing Book of Buczacz, a work of epic proportions that came eventually to include legends, folktales, family sagas, and grotesque renditions of popular culture. While this compendium has not yet been translated into English, the present anthology breaks new ground with its inclusion of “Pisces,” “Buczacz,” and “The Tale of the Menorah,” all from A City and the Fullness Thereof.
At the turn of the century, Buczacz found itself responding to the rumblings of Jewish nationalism. Zionist congresses from 1897 on captured the imagination of the young Czaczkes. He would have been part of communal responses to the 1903 massacre in Kishinev, the death of Theodor Herzl in 1904, and the 1906 riots in Bialystok. A development of some importance occurred in the spring of 1906, when Elazar Rokeah came to Buczacz to publish Der Yidisher Veker; a Jewish weekly, and took on the young Czaczkes as his assistant. Rokeah’s hiring must have given a significant boost to the youth’s literary ambitions. We have evidence through these early years in Galicia of numerous pieces in Hebrew and Yiddish published by the young writer. The Israeli critic Gershon Shaked has analyzed Agnon’s maturation through the development of a more complex and ironic relationship to his early romantic tendencies.[6] In later years, Agnon distanced himself from his early romantic effusions, even occasionally inserting an early poem into a novel where it serves to demonstrate a character’s youthful enthusiasm and naiveté.
Introduction
The first manifest break in the writer’s life took place in 1907, when Agnon left Buczacz for Palestine at the age of nineteen. Along the way, he passed through Lemberg and Vienna, where he encountered important figures in Jewish public affairs, such as the Hebrew writer Asher Barash and the Hebraist and educator Eliezer Meir Lifschütz. But while his visits with these men and others seem to have yielded opportunities for employment and study, Agnon appears to have kept his gaze fixed on the goal of reaching Palestine.
Indeed he appears to have sustained his resolve in the face of the astonishment of Galician Zionists, who were unaccustomed to actual decisions to emigrate to Palestine. For an insight into the period, we might consider Agnon’s account of the aliyah of Yitzhak Kummer in the as-yet-untranslated novel Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday): this youthful idealist sets sail for Palestine filled with expectations of fraternal solidarity. But despite his fervent echoing of the refrain Kol Yisrael haverim (“All Israel are friends”), he is set back by encounters with self-important Zionist functionaries in Europe and Palestine.
During his first sojourn in Palestine, from 1907 to 1913, Agnon encountered the pioneers of the Second Aliyah, who had come to work the land. While he never joined them in their physical labors, he came to know the land intimately over the years. In this first period, Jaffa was his preferred milieu, and he found work as a tutor, as secretary to the editor of a literary journal in which he published his first story, and as secretary to a variety of groups involved in Jewish settlement. The novella “Betrothed” gives us something of the cultural mix of Jaffa in those years. In Jaffa, he extended his readings in European literature and, in a striking break with his background, abandoned Orthodox dress and practice. He also spent time in Jerusalem, where he drank in the lore of the city’s neighborhoods.
These years bear evidence as to the impact of relationships with influential older men. In particular, the writer Yosef Hayim Brenner played an important role in the publication of Agnon’s early stories in Palestine. Agnon looked up to Brenner as a man of uncompromising integrity. In later years, he described their first meeting in Lemberg, where he stopped on his way to Palestine and sought an introduction to the older writer whose work he so admired.[7] Noting the brilliance of Brenner that shone from the pages of contemporary journals, Agnon describes Brenner’s utterly unassuming figure and mocks his own youthful expectations of the impressive figure of an author. As thoroughly secular a writer as Brenner came to figure for Agnon as the type of uncompromising authenticity.
It was during this first Jaffa period that Czaczkes first adopted the pen name Agnon. During these years, several long stories found serial publication in the Hebrew-language newspaper Hapo’el Hatzair. Despite these indicators of early success, however, the young writer apparently failed to find firm footing in the Land of Israel, and his abrupt departure for Berlin in 1913 remains something of a mystery. This is the second break in Agnon’s development. Unlike the departure from Buczacz for the Land of Israel, this departure appears to be surrounded by confusion, rather than any clear sense of direction.
From 1913 to 1924 Agnon lived in Germany, and these years constitute the writer’s major European period. Living in Berlin, with interludes in Munich, Leipzig, and a small town near Brückenau, Agnon absorbed a variety of cultural influences — secular and Jewish — that stayed with him, however he may later have chosen to represent his relationship to them. Gershom G. Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, recalled his impression of the young Agnon in Berlin, “in the reading room of the library of the Jewish Community Council where he tirelessly leafed through the Hebrew card catalogue. Later I asked him what he had so intensively searched for there. ‘Books that I have not read yet,’ he replied with a guileless and yet ironic gleam in his eyes.” [8]
Introduction
In the fall of 1913, Agnon attended the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna. Shortly after, he was called home because of the death of his father, but he arrived one day too late for the funeral. Whatever the circumstances, this delay suggests an ambivalence never to be fully overcome, an ambivalence that is as much a part of his character as the unqualified reverence for his father that he expressed elsewhere. Looked at retrospectively, in light of the proliferation in his fiction of themes of lateness and delay in fulfilling important obligations, Agnon’s failure to arrive on time for his father’s funeral takes on dramatic resonance. Literary reverberations of this theme can be felt in the stories that comprise the last section of this anthology; there you will find stories that vary from the dreamlike to the realistic but convey nevertheless a sense of lapses or losses that can never be made good.