Of course, the plot is reminiscent of other literary works as well. Long before I could have read it, I recall being enchanted by the evocative title of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again, which always occupied a central place on my grandparents’ well-stocked bookshelf. Although a decidedly American, Southern author, Wolfe, like his Hebrew counterpart, was known for his highly poetic prose, for depicting the changes sweeping the tradition-bound society of his youth, and for a heavy autobiographical element in his writing. To be clear, I doubt either author was aware of the existence of the other; yet like Heraclitus, Wolfe and Agnon remind their readers that they cannot step into the same river twice.
In Wolfe’s version, an author returns home after making a name for himself writing thinly disguised novels about his hometown (a reflection of Wolfe’s own experience). Unlike Agnon, and his writer protagonist, this character doesn’t experience a very warm reception, having alienated many locals who feel they have been misrepresented by their fictional counterparts. Towards the novel’s end the narrator tells us of the awful realization that George, the novelist character, reaches: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile… back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” That’s a passage that could just as easily have been lifted out of A Guest for the Night.
For Agnon’s Guest, the return to Szibucz offers no escape because the town has become a waking nightmare. From the moment the train arrives in the station in chapter 1, ominously on the eve of Yom Kippur, the very first character we meet, Rubberovitch, telegraphs to the reader the uniquely Agnonian mix of nostalgia and nightmare (to borrow Arnold Band’s phrase). Nostalgic in that depiction of the dispatcher who stood on the platform, “waving the flag in his hand, and called: ‘Szibucz!’ It was many years since I had heard the name of Szibucz coming from the lips of a man of my town. Only he who is born there and bred there and lives there knows how to pronounce every single letter of that name.” Nightmarish in the man’s very name: Rubberovitch has lost an arm in the war, had it replaced with a rubber prosthesis. Like the character Daniel Bach and his false leg and lost faith, Rubberovitch (whose name in our translation has been Anglicized from the Hebrew Gummovitch, to capture the essence of his deformity) greets the Guest upon arrival, representing a society maimed in body, but also in soul.
In search of lodging, the Guest walks from the train station into the town. “Every place was changed — even the spaces between the houses. Nothing was as I had seen it when I was little, nor as it had been shown to me in a dream shortly before my return. But the odor of Szibucz had not yet evaporated — the odor of millet boiled in honey, which never leaves the town from the day after Passover until the end of November, when the snow falls, covering all.” Like Proust’s mad-eleines, the evocative smells of his youth, and their pull on his memory, emphasize how Agnon’s tale, too, is one of a “search for lost time.”
The day after his arrival, the Guest stands in the old Beit Midrash at the close of Yom Kippur. “A sound of weeping rose from the darkness, like the voices of a crowd supporting the cantor in his prayer. The doors of the Ark stood open, like a heavenly ear attentive to Israel’s prayer… [When the Cantor, Reb Shlomo Bach, Daniel’s father] came to the verse ‘Every city is builded in its place and the City of God is degraded to the depths of hell,’ he wept for a long time.” The weeping is for Jerusalem, the City of God in the prayer, but the reader knows it is for Szibucz as well, for religious life in the town has disintegrated along with its material ruin. In fact, only on Yom Kippur itself, the year’s holiest day, does a minyan assemble any longer in the Beit Midrash. Hoping to revive religious life in the prayer and study hall, the Guest is entrusted with the old, heavy metal key to the building by its last disdainful bearers, as they abandon the town for foreign, presumably American, shores.
As winter sets in the Guest pays to heat the Beit Midrash, which draws the many old, infirm, and otherwise indigent townsmen to study and prayer — not so much for the revived religious services, but for the warmth of the furnace. The Guest knows that he is, at best, running a spiritual halfway house. As the story unfolds in its episodic way we encounter some of the most beautifully portrayed characters in Hebrew literature; yet all of them are broken people (see the “Cast of Characters” appended to this edition). Take the case of old Reb Hayim who was once a great Torah scholar, taken off by the Russians to Siberia (during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21, another tragic period with mass killing of Jews, similarly overshadowed by subsequent events). Fearful that he would never make it back, he sends a get (writ of divorce) to his wife so that she shouldn’t be left an abandoned agunah. Miraculously, he gets out of Siberia to return as one of the broken, now divorced from his wife, sitting in the Beit Midrash — having returned to his spiritual home too late and awaiting death, which meets him by novel’s end.
In the course of a few chapters the Guest loses the key to the Beit Midrash, and bewails the fact that the building still exists, yet he and the others are locked out and cannot enter — so symbolic of an old world and its values which we who stand on the other side of some historical divide cannot return to. The missing key becomes the central symbol which unlocks the entirety of A Guest for the Night, which is quite literally a roman à clef, a novel with a key. With the key the townsmen may still gain access to the world behind the door — an earlier world where tradition still has the force that it once did. But one needs a key, or a passport, or an enchanted cave, or floating handkerchief (all symbols used elsewhere by Agnon) to magically transport oneself.
In regard to the key there seems to be a particularly interesting linguistic device at work. In Hebrew the lost object is a mafte’aĥ, whose etymological root p-t-ĥ literally means “to open,” so that the Hebrew reader sees the word mafte’aĥ, and understands it principally as an “opener.” In terms of the history of language that is an interesting choice, because a key always serves two opposite yet equal functions — it is simultaneously an “opener” but at the same time a “locker” or “closer,” and we can easily be mindful of the fact that every time a key opens something it can just as easily be locked. Indeed, in other languages, the etymology of those shiny metal objects on a ring in your pocket corresponds to this latter function. While in English the origins of the word “key” happen to be unknown, in Yiddish (borrowing from German) a mafte’aĥ is called a shlissel, meaning “that which closes.”5
While the reader considers the symbolism of the book’s lost “opener,” we should recall that despite the fact that Agnon of course writes in Hebrew, the dialogue of the novel “takes place” in Yiddish — or would have if we were witness to its events as they actually happened, were it to be an actual historical record (which it is not). So we read in Hebrew, if we can, and hear about the mafte’aĥ-opener being lost, and understand that without it we are divided from the inaccessible world within the Beit Midrash. Yet here Agnon may likely have been packing multiple hidden meanings into his prose. For despite the associations that the Hebrew text carries, he was aware that for many of his readers, the hidden Yiddish dialogue would have poked its way from between the lines, broadcasting a very different and opposite connotation — for every Hebrew opener there is a shadow Yiddish closer. If we interpret the novel through the Hebrew it is written in, the language of the newly revived Jewish world in Eretz Yisrael, it means one thing. But if we “hear” the novel in the language of the old world, it means something very different. When the key is replaced or recovered, it is only through the new Jewish language (or the altneu, if you will) that the Beit Midrash stands a chance of being accessed and revived. In the old language of European Jewry, the shlissel leaves it eternally sealed.