Harold Fisch, S.Y. Agnon (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1975), chapter 4, pp. 44–53 — Plot summary and discourse on centrality of time in Agnon’s works; how “our childhood lives with us in the present.”
Zilla Jane Goodman, “Israel as Redemption in S.Y. Agnon’s A Guest for the Night” in The Holy Land in History and Thought, ed. M. Sharon (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), pp. 150–162 — Analysis of the central motifs and symbols (key, home, Israel, e.g.) as embodiments of the book’s themes: the separateness and unity of all things.
Natasha Gordinsky, “Time Gap: Nostalgic Mode in Hebrew Modernism,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), pp. 443–464 — Comparison of A Guest for the Night with Lea Goldberg’s And This Is the Light (Toby Press, 2011), two novels of fictional homecomings, induced by biographical circumstances of longing for lost hometowns, but also by aesthetic and political choices.
Baruch Hochman, The Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), chapter 5, pp. 112–133 — Plot summary and critique of the personality of the Guest; attention to role of poverty in the society depicted; treatment of how the world of the European shtetl and town is contrasted to new Jewish life in Palestine throughout the novel.
Anne Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return: S.Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), chapter 5, pp. 77–103 — The restorative task of the Guest in the town, through careful analysis of speech, text and intertextuality throughout the novel, correlating these themes as they reach their apex in this novel with some of Agnon’s other writings.
Zipora Kagan, “Halachah and Aggadah as a Cultural-Poetic Code in A Guest for the Night by S.Y. Agnon,” Trumah 10 (2001), pp. 15–30 — Deciphering the various functions of Jewish legal and cultural aspects of Rabbinic literature as a condition for the reader to enter the dialogue of A Guest for the Night, especially as it relates to themes of death in the novel.
Jeffrey Saks, “Agnon’s Shaking Bridge and the Theology of Culture” in Developing a Jewish Perspective on Culture, ed. Y. Sarna (Jersey City: Yeshiva University Press/Ktav, 2013). pp. 143–167 — As part of an essay on Agnon’s religious expression, analysis of A Guest for the Night as an exemplar of his treatment of the theme of tradition in flux.
Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989), pp. 137–146 — Brief plot summary and analysis of the dual voices in the noveclass="underline" A conservative strain marked by the persistence of Agnon’s balanced rabbinic style and many Jewish symbols, twinned with a “revolutionary” literary impulse in its “complex structure and composition of the novel and in the complex relationship between the implied author and the first-person narrator and witness.”
Naomi B. Sokoloff, “Metaphor and Metonymy in Agnon’s A Guest for the Night,” AJS Review 9:1 (Spring 1984), pp. 97–111 — Explores relevance of Roman Jakobson’s theories as they relate to Agnon’s multiple meanings in this novel, and how that forms a collective experience for the many characters and episodes related.
Judith Romney Wegner, “A Guest for the Night: Epitaph on the Perished Hopes of the Haskalah” in Tradition and Trauma: Studies in the Fiction of S.J. Agnon, ed. D. Paterson and G. Abramson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 107–127 — A Guest for the Night as historical criticism, depicting multiple failed responses of 19th century Judaism to the Jewish Enlightenment movement, and Agnon’s statement on the inability to find a sustaining replacement to traditional Jewish culture (until the advent of Zionism).
Aryeh Wineman, “Agnon’s Forest: The Case of ’Ore’ah Nata Lalun,” Hebrew Annual Review 7 (1983), pp. 251–257 — Analysis of the much-overlooked forest-motif in this novel and in other Agnon short stories; forest (scene of the narrator’s frequent strolls) and nature as contrasted to civilized town as well as the House of Study, and the Torah-culture it embodies.
Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 2000), chapter 5, pp. 163–189 [slightly adapted version as: Ruth R. Wisse, “The Yiddish and the Hebrew Writers Head for Home” in Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. E. Budick (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 147–175] — Comparative study of Agnon’s A Guest for the Night with Jacob Glatstein’s two Yiddish “Yash” novels. The two most prominent Jewish writers (Agnon in Hebrew in Jerusalem, Glatstein in Yiddish in New York), almost simultaneously wrote autobiographical novels spun from homecoming visits between the wars.
About the Author
S.Y. Agnon (1888–1970) was the central figure of modern Hebrew literature, and the 1966 Nobel Prize laureate for his body of writing. Born in the Galician town of Buczacz (in today’s western Ukraine), as Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, he arrived in 1908 in Jaffa, Ottoman Palestine, where he adopted the penname Agnon and began a meteoric rise as a young writer. Between the years 1912 and 1924 he spent an extended sojourn in Germany, where he married and had two children, and came under the patronage of Shlomo Zalman Schocken and his publishing house, allowing Agnon to dedicate himself completely to his craft. After a house fire in 1924 destroyed his library and the manuscripts of unpublished writings, he returned to Jerusalem where he lived for the remainder of his life. His works deal with the conflict between traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world, and constitute a distillation of millennia of Jewish writing — from the Bible through the Rabbinic codes to Hasidic storytelling — recast into the mold of modern literature.
About the Translator and Editor
Misha Louvish (1909–2001) was born in Kimpolung, Austria (modern day north-eastern Romania), son of Nathan, a letterpress printer. In his youth the family emigrated to Scotland (where they were also known by the surname Lewis). Louvish graduated M.A. from the University of Glasgow in 1931. After serving with the British Army in Europe he arrived in Israel in 1949, where he worked as a journalist and editor of several publications, including at the Jerusalem Post, and used his English skills as a translator of novels, articles, and political speeches. He was employed as editor of English publications in the Israel Government Press Office during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and as a Deputy Editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica.
Louvish also translated a number of Agnon’s short stories. For his work on A Guest for the Night, he had the cooperation of Professors Naftali C. Brandwein, Allen Mandelbaum, and Oscar Shaftel.
Jeffrey Saks, founding director of ATID — the Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jerusalem, is the Series Editor of The Toby Press S.Y. Agnon Library. His frequent lectures at the Agnon House are broadcast on WebYeshiva.org/Agnon.