And how is the key replaced? “One day Daniel Bach came up to me. He hunched over his wooden leg and said, ‘You should do as I did. If you have lost the key, get another key made.’ That was a simple piece of advice Bach gave me, a solution that no one else had offered before he came along. And Daniel Bach went on, ‘I will send you the locksmith and he will make you a new key.’” Just as arms and legs and noses have been replaced, so too keys. Bach represents a world where in place of what once was, ersatz copies take their place. One can get around on a peg-leg, but it’s not the same thing as a leg of flesh and blood, and while a replacement key can open the door, the lost world remains inaccessible.
After nearly a year the Guest sets to return to Jerusalem. In his final days in Szibucz a baby had been born to Yeruham and Rachel, secondary yet important characters to the story. Time and again we had heard that new babies were nearly unheard of in Szibusz; the gravediggers are overworked while the midwives are idle. Honored as the sandek to hold the baby at the circumcision of the boy, the Guest gifts the (replacement) key to the child, in the hope of rebirth and future vibrancy in the Jewish town. This scene is set in 1930, and was written in 1938 at the latest. If it is meant to be a closing note of optimism we now know it is a tragic one. Despite the pessimism of the novel, even Agnon could not have foreseen what the next few years would bring. We who read the novel standing on this side of history cannot do so ignoring the knowledge that Kristallnacht — and all that followed — took place just three weeks after A Guest for the Night began its serial run in the newspaper.
And yet there is an optimistic epilogue to the novel, albeit one pregnant with anticipatory anxiety. Upon his return to Jerusalem, the Guest’s wife finds the original key hidden in a tear of the lining in his suitcase. He decides it is pointless to send it back to Szibucz, where the one key they have anyway sits unused. Recalling the Talmudic legend (Megillah 29a) “In the future, the synagogues and the study halls in Babylonia are destined to be transported and reestablished in Eretz Yisrael… in reward for their actions, all the more so should the synagogues and study halls in Babylonia, in which the Torah is read and disseminated, be relocated to Eretz Yisrael,” he decides to keep the key in Jerusalem, awaiting the day of redemption and ingathering.
“The key being put away in its place,” says the narrator (at the end of the penultimate chapter), “I returned to my work, and whenever I remembered it, I would repeat to myself: ‘The synagogues and the Batei Midrashot are destined…,’ and I would open my window and look outside to see if perhaps they were making their way to establish themselves in the Land of Israel. Alas, the land was desolate and silent, and the sound of the steps of the synagogues and Batei Midrashot was not heard. And still the key lies there, waiting with me for that day. However, it is made of iron and brass, and it can wait, but I, who am flesh and blood, find it hard to endure.” Some await the white donkey of the messiah, others the Great Shofar of Judgment Day; our Guest awaits the day when Szibucz will return to its true self by coming back to the Land of Israel.
In a novel with such elegiac reflections on Diaspora Jewry, we should not be surprised that Agnon also included a strong note of optimism for the Zionist enterprise and the return to the Land. In the eightieth and concluding chapter we hear of the old cantor, Reb Shlomo Bach, Daniel’s father, as the only character from Szybucz to both successfully settle the Land, having gone on aliya mid-way through the novel, and retain his commitment to tradition. A different son, Daniel’s brother, had previously emigrated, yet tragically fell defending Kibbutz Ramat Rachel during the Arab riots of 1929. In an epilogue to the novel, this final chapter recounts the Guest’s visit to Reb Shlomo, himself now settled in Ramat Rachel in old age, tending the kibbutz garden, reflecting that “There is no Torah like the Torah of the Land of Israel. Here I am, some seventy years old, and I was not privileged to understand the truth of the Torah until I came to the Land.”
For Agnon, who loved to embed meaning in the names of his characters, it is no accident that Reb Shlomo’s family name is Bach 
, written unusually but deliberately as an acronym, the meaning of which seems to clearly hint at the rabbinic work of the same name, Bayit Ĥadash, or “new home” — as if to say after the destruction of traditional society from within and without, the only hope for the continuation of the world of the Beit Midrash is in a new home, one where “learning leads to doing” as Reb Shlomo states. For “there is no Torah like the Torah of the Land of Israel” only has meaning in a Jewish society in which no key is needed to unlock that hidden away in the Beit Midrash, since in the Land “wisdom [Torah] calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares” (Proverbs 1:20).
Tragically, there’s a coda to the novel in a posthumously published and not-yet translated novella, Kisui HaDam (“The Covering of the Blood”), a modern-day iteration of the Biblical Job. In this story, Agnon’s only with extended action set in America, we discover, parenthetically, that Shlomo Bach lived out his days in Ramat Rachel, but his surviving son Daniel, who remained behind in Szibucz, perished in the Holocaust.
“French Cannons Attack German Reinforcements. Berlin Announces Surrender of Polish Garrison in Westerplatte (Gdańsk)”
A Guest for the Night is Agnon’s depiction of how all modern movements aside from Zionism — secularism, Haskalah, socialism, communism — failed to provide a viable alternative to traditional life. But, he is clear, even traditional life was untenable, because it all fell apart from within before the first furnaces were ignited in Auschwitz. Even the Guest’s well-intentioned attempt to revivify and to re-engage the lost world of piety is also doomed. The Alte Heim, the old home, can no longer exist — it is a place where we can only be passing guests for the night. Therefore “you can’t go home again,” but not for the reasons that Wolfe suggests; rather, because home no longer exists. It has to be rebuilt, but it can only be rebuilt in the Bayit Ĥadash, in the new home in the Land of Israel.