Headline of the HaAretz newspaper for Friday, September 8, 1939, one week after Germany’s invasion of Poland (at left). That same day the newspaper, which had run Agnon’s A Guest for the Night in serial form between October 1938 and April 1939, printed its first advertisement for the book edition from the Schocken Press (above): “In his unique style and artistic manner Agnon portrays for us the vanishing past and the shining future.”
This is Agnon’s greatest theme in the novel and, in differing ways, throughout his body of writing: The idea that modern man, modern Jews, are alienated from their spiritual home. While we can’t go home again, that doesn’t mean we can’t move forward through conceiving of a new home — although doing so comes with the great danger of being caught in the disconnect between the old and the new, between what was and what might be. That Agnon could stand at this crossroads, that he was able to author his stories and novels specifically while standing there, as heir to the Beit Midrash, communicating its message in the most modern of artistic forms, is the defining characteristic of his achievement as Hebrew literature’s greatest writer.
Jeffrey Saks
Editor, The S.Y. Agnon Library
The Toby Press
Notes
1. Dan Miron, “Domesticating a Foreign Genre: Agnon’s Transactions with the Novel,” Prooftexts 7:1 (January 1987), pp. 1–27.
2. The journey through Galicia is documented in the letters of S.Y. and Ester Agnon, Esterlein Yakirati [Letters] (Schocken Publishers, 2000), pp. 283–294. For information regarding the 1930 visit to Buczacz, I am indebted to Prof. Dan Laor’s biographical research in Ĥayye Agnon [Biography] (Schocken Publishing, 1998), pp. 231–240, and his Hebrew essay “Masa veShivro: Polin, Kayitz 1930” [“The Shattered Journey: Poland, Summer 1930”] in his collection S.Y. Agnon: Hebetim Ĥadashim (Sifriat Poalim, 1995), pp. 154–174.
3. “In the Prime of Her Life,” recently issued in revised and annotated translation in Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town and Other Novellas (The Toby Press, 2014), pp. 163–222.
4. For Agnon’s reaction to the news of Buczacz’s destruction, as depicted in his fiction, see his story “The Sign” in A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories (The Toby Press, 2008), pp. 397–429. On the role of the Holocaust in his writing see: Dan Laor, “Did Agnon Write About the Holocaust?” Yad Vashem Studies 22 (1992), pp. 17–63.
5. This bilingual, semantic irony was first identified and explored by 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.
A Guest for the Night
The Great Synagogue of Buczacz in 1922.
“In my childhood I thought that there was no bigger building in the world than the Great Synagogue, but now its area had dwindled and its height shrunk.”
Chapter one. I Came to My Home Town
On the eve of the Day of Atonement, in the afternoon, I changed from the express to the local train that runs to my home town. The Jews who had traveled with me got out and went their way, while Gentile townsfolk, men and women, made their way in. The wheels rolled sluggishly between hills and mountains, valleys and gorges; at every station the train stopped and lingered, let out people and baggage, and started up again. After two hours, signs of Szibucz sprouted from both sides of the road. I put my hand to my heart. My hand throbbed against my heart, just as my heart throbbed under my hand. The townsfolk put out their pipes and shoved them into their leggings, got up to collect their baggage, and sat down again; the women elbowed their way to the window, crying “Rubberovitch,” and laughed. The train whistled and puffed, whistled again, then sprawled to rest opposite the station.
Along came the dispatcher called “Rubberovitch”; his left arm had been lost in the war; the new one they gave him was made of rubber. He stood erect, 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. After Rubberovitch had got the name of Szibucz out of his mouth, he licked his mustache as if he had been munching sweetmeats, carefully scrutinized the passengers stepping down, stroked his rubber arm, and made ready to send off the train.
I picked up my two valises and walked to the back of the station yard, looking for a carriage to take me into town. The yard lay in the sun; the smell of pitch and steam mingled with that of grass and plants, the odor of railway stations in small towns. I looked this way and that, but found no carriage. This is the eve of the Day of Atonement, I said to myself, time already for the Afternoon Service, so the coachmen are not going out on the road; if you want to get to town you will have to use your feet.
It takes an ordinary man a half hour to walk to the center of town; carrying baggage, it takes a quarter of an hour more. I took an hour and a half: every house, every ruin, every heap of rubbish caught my eye and held me.
Of the large houses of two, three, or four storeys, nothing was left except the site. Even the King’s Well, from which Sobieski, King of Poland, had drunk when he returned victorious from war, had its steps broken, its commemorative tablet cracked; the golden letters of his name were faded, and sprouted mosses red as blood, as if the Angel of Death had wiped his knife on them. There were no boys and girls standing on streetcorners, there was no singing, no laughter; and the well spouted water, pouring it into the street, as water is poured in the neighborhood of the dying. 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.
The streets stood empty, and the market too. The town was already resting from its everyday labors, and the shops were locked; surely at that moment the men were reciting the Afternoon Service and the women preparing the final meal before the fast. Except for the noise of the ground echoing my footsteps, there was no sound.
I paid no attention to the echo from the ground, and walked on, wondering where I could put down my baggage and find lodging. Looking up, I saw a group of men standing around. I went up to them and asked, “Where can I find a hotel here?” They looked at my two bags and the clothes I was wearing, and did not answer. I asked again, “What hotel can I stay in here?” One of them spat out a shred of tobacco from his lips, rubbed his neck a little, stared at me and said: “D’you think there are so many hotels here that you can choose the one you want? Of all the places in town, only two are left.” Another said to him: “In any case, the divorcee’s is not the right place for this gentleman.” “Why?” “D’you hear?” said the second to his fellows. “He asks why. All right, if he wants to go there, no one will stop him.” He folded his arms and turned his head away from me, as if to say: From now on I wash my hands of you.