The “Divorcee” — Former wife of Reb Hayim, who runs the “other hotel” in town, implied to be a brothel.
Daniel Bach — Son of Reb Shlomo; walks on a wooden leg, having lost his own in an accident, after his faith had been lost through witnessing the atrocities of the War. He is a sympathetic skeptic and voice of the feeling of despair in the town.
Elimelech Kaisar — An embittered and sarcastic figure; gives the key to the Beit Midrash to the Guest.
Zommer — The innkeeper and his wife who run the pension the Guest resides in through most of his stay in town.
Dolik and Lolik — The innkeeper’s course sons.
Babtchi — The innkeeper’s elder daughter; a lawyer’s secretary.
Rachel Zommer — The innkeeper’s sensitive and charming youngest daughter, and object of the Guest’s attention. Marries Yeruham Freeman.
Yeruham Bach — The dead son of Reb Shlomo; brother of Daniel. He had left for the Land of Israel where he was killed in the Arab riots prior to the beginning of the novel’s action. His comrades at Kibbutz Ramat Rahel offer to bring his father to live with them.
Reb Shlomo Bach — The serenely pious, old Cantor of the town, a patriarch of the central family in the novel. He leaves Szibucz for the Land of Israel where he takes up residence at novel’s end.
Sara Pearl Bach — Daniel’s wife; a midwife by training.
Krolka — The non-Jewish maid in the Zommer’s hotel.
After the ninth chapter we encounter:
Schuster — The tailor, and his wife, both returned from Berlin to Szibucz after years of absence; he makes a winter coat for the narrator.
Yeruham Freeman — In Hebrew his last name is Hofshi, rendered into English as Freeman, i.e., free of the yolk of commandments; a young leftist who had been expelled from the Land of Israel, and now repairs roads for the local municipality; he marries Rachel Zommer.
Freide the Kaiserin — Elimelech Kaiser’s mother, once the governess for the narrator’s mother; she dies on Shavuot, at the end of spring.
Hanoch — The humble wagoner, who is lost at the beginning of winter; his body is not discovered until spring.
Reb Hayim — Once a great rabbinic authority, but now a bent, mute figure living in the Beit Midrash after his return from Siberia; he dies toward the end of the novel.
Erela Bach — Daniel’s daughter, a schoolteacher in town.
Raphael Bach — Daniel’s sickly son, prone to hallucinations.
The Town Rabbi — An unimportant but pompous man who uses the Torah as a weapon against his adversaries.
Sarah — Widow of a famous scholar; impoverished, she sells the narrator a manuscript of a rabbinic study written by her late husband’s grandfather. It had often been used as a charm for women in childbirth.
Pinhas Aryeh — The rabbi’s son, an important official in religious politics in the large cities, now home on a brief visit.
Zvi — Leader of a group of Zionist pioneers in a nearby village.
Aaron Schutzling — A boyhood friend of the narrator’s, now a traveling salesman, back in Szibucz for a visit to his sister, Genendel.
Knabenhut — The saintly socialist leader who had died several years earlier in Vienna; he had been a major figure in the narrator’s and Schutzling’s youth.
Leibtche Bodenhaus — A ludicrous self-styled poet.
Zippora and Hannah — Reb Hayim’s daughters.
Zechariah Rosen — A fodder merchant, with an inflated concept of his ancestors’ importance.
Dr. Kuba Milch — A kindly, poor doctor, the narrator’s boyhood friend.
Anton Jacobowitz — A Gentile pig-breeder.
Zwirn — A rapacious lawyer.
Ignatz — A beggar; his nose was destroyed in the War, leaving a gaping hole on his face.
The list of minor characters following chapter 9 is adapted with permission from: Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 294–295.
Bibliography of Works in English on A Guest for the Night
Like all of Agnon’s novels and important stories, A Guest for the Night has been the object of analysis and interpretation by the major scholars and critics of Hebrew literature. Readers who would like to sample some of that body of scholarship and commentary, but are limited to material available in English, would find the following works to be worthwhile.
• The most comprehensive, nearly encyclopedic, book on Agnon in English remains: Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968). A lengthy overview of the plot, themes, motifs and symbols of A Guest for the Night can be found there in chapter 7, pp. 283–327.
• The only book-length study of this novel in English, with a particular emphasis on the history of the composition of the text, and Agnon’s compulsive revision of his writing over time, can be found in: Stephen Katz, The Centrifugal Noveclass="underline" S.Y. Agnon’s Poetics of Narrative (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 219 pages. Katz also shows how A Guest for the Night sits at the center of a number of interrelated works by Agnon (including “The Doctor’s Divorce”, Shira, A Simple Story, Days of Awe, and stories from the Sefer HaMa’asim collection), and explores how each illuminates the others by a web of latent links.
Book chapters and essays:
Uri Cohen, “Agnon’s Modernity: Death and Modernism in S.Y. Agnon’s A Guest for the Night,” Modernism/Modernity 13:4 (2006), pp. 657–671 — The novel as a turning point in Agnon’s career; “by examining the sense of death in the novel it is possible to see that by telling the story of his return to Europe, Agnon perceives and laments the death of European Judaism,” leading to an allegorical, post-modern novel with narrative succumbing to death and destruction.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Agnon Before and After,” Prooftexts 2:1 (January 1982), pp. 78–94 — In an essay on the impact of the Holocaust on Agnon’s writing, an analysis of the centrality of World War I (as depicted in A Guest for the Night) as the point of origin of all subsequent catastrophe.
Yael S. Feldman, “How Does a Convention Mean? A Semiotic Reading of Agnon’s Bilingual Key-Irony in A Guest for the Night,” Hebrew Union College Annual 56 (1985), pp. 251–269 — Explores the key-motif in the novel and its ability to represent the contrariness in: truth vs. deception, authenticity vs. substitution, and continuance vs. annihilation, and Agnon’s ironic ability to generate meanings out of symbols contrary to their expected ones.
Yael S. Feldman, “The Latent and the Manifest: Freudianism in A Guest for the Night,” Prooftexts 7:1 (January 1987), pp. 29–39 [earlier and lengthier version as conference paper in: Yael S. Feldman, “Agnon’s Freud: From Parody to Suppression” in Modern Hebrew Literature in English Translation, ed. L. Yudkin (New York: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1987), pp. 119–138] — Analyzes the manifestations of Freudianism in A Guest for the Night; role played by the key motif in establishing the ironic or grotesque symbolism in the novel; Agnon’s accommodation of his playful paradoxes and ironic statements in the novel; comparison between Freud’s theorizing principle and Agnon’s narrative.