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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2014
Approaching A Guest for the Night from the point of view of the Book of Jeremiah––from which this novel draws its title––leads us to revisit two central components of Agnon's theology and stylized identity. First, his majestic evocation of a deity (Jeremiah's “guest”) who abandoned his “wife” (the people of Israel); and concomitantly, Agnon's lifelong preoccupation with the “‘agunah problem” as a metaphor for national rupture, in ways that for Agnon were linked to his vocational identity as a modern writer dedicated to the project of national repair. Through his conversation with the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations traditionally attributed to this prophet, Agnon adjusts and reduces the diasporic weight assigned to the ‘agunah metaphor. In his midlife masterpiece, he enlists the midrashic concept of ‘aginut to explore, among other things, his own composite identity as a traditional Jew and modern Jerusalemite, lover of texts and absent-minded husband.
1. Yehoshua, A. B., ’Esh yedidutit (Bnei Brak: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2007)Google Scholar, 274; trans. by Schoffman, Stuart as Friendly Fire: A Duet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 278–79.Google ScholarAltshuller, Tehilla Shwartz discusses its references to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Song of Songs in “Why did Jeremiah Cry? Bible and Intertextuality in Friendly Fire,” in Mabatim miẓtalvim: Essays on A. B. Yehoshua's Oeuvre, ed. Banbaji, Amir, Ben-Dov, Nitza, and Shamir, Ziva (Bnei Brak: Ha Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2010), 441–450.Google Scholar
2. Regarding this deep indebtedness of Yehoshua and other contemporary Israeli writers to Agnon, see Ben-Dov, Nitza, Vehi tehilatekha: Studies in the Works of S.Y. Agnon, A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2006)Google Scholar and Halevi-Wise, Yael, “The ‘Double Triangle’ Paradigm in Hebrew Fiction: National Redemption in Bi-generational Love Triangles from Agnon to Oz,” Prooftexts 26 (2006): 309–343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Gershon Shaked underscores that “for Agnon, intertextuality was… the very source of his creativity, perhaps even its main subject,” Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: NY University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, 24; in “Sofer be-divrei torah” Shaked discusses 'Oreaḥ natah la-lun's oppositional stance toward traditional Jewish attitudes to ḥurban, exile, redemption, and messianism, yet he too does not engage with the Jeremian intertext, Meḥkarei Yerushalayim be sifrut ‘ivrit 20 (2006): 237–252.Google Scholar Among the most notable studies of Agnon's intertextual conversations with the Bible and the gamut of Jewish literature are Ben-Dov's, NitzaAgnon's Art of Indirection: Uncovering Latent Content in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Leiden & New York: Brill, 1993)Google Scholar; Shamir's, ZivaShai òlamot : ribui panim bi-yeẓirat Agnon (Tel Aviv: Safra and Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2011)Google Scholar; and Ḥoshen, Dalya, Agnon: sipur (‘eino) sugya ba-gemara (Jerusalem: Re'uven Mas, 2006)Google Scholar. According to Gerard Genette's palimpsestuous categorization of intertextual devices, Agnon's relationship with the book of Jeremiah falls under the category of “commentary,” Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln, NE & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
4. The biblical source of the title is mentioned in a “Publisher's Note” appended to the English translation of the novel, A Guest for the Night, trans. Louvish, Misha (Madison, WI: Schocken Books/University of Wisconsin Press, 1968)Google Scholar, 485; and by Agnon's biographers, Band, Arnold, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar, 289, and Laor, Dan, Ḥayei ‘Agnon: biografiah (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998)Google Scholar, 314. Dov Sadan analyzed a few other cases in which Agnon chose biblical phrases as titles for stories and collected volumes, ʿAl Shay Agnon: masah, ʿiyyun va-ḥeker (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 1967), 160–172 and 194.Google Scholar
5. Halkin, Shimon, “ʿA l 'Oreaḥ natah la-lun,” in Le-ʿAgnon shay: dvarim ʿal ha-sofer ve-sfaraiv, ed. Sadan, Dov and Urbach, Efraim (Jerusalem: Ha-vaʿad ha-ẓiburi le-yovel ha-shivʿim shel Shay ‘Agnon, 1958–9), 91–123.Google Scholar
6. Halkin, Shimon, Barukh ben Neriyah: po'emah (Tel Aviv: Shen, 1934)Google Scholar.
7. Brueggemann, Walter, Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Eerdman's, 1998)Google Scholar.
8. Regarding Agnon's dynamic of exile and return, see Hoffman, Anne Golomb, Between Exile and Return: S. Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Barzel, Hillel, “‘Ereẓ Yisra'el-Golah,” in Sipurei’ahavah shel S. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Bar Ilan University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, 78ff.
9. Dan Laor, Ḥayei ʿAgnon, 299–300.
10. As Stephen Katz has shown, Agnon scribbled the initial pages of the new novel on the dorso of typescripts for Days of Awe, which he had just finished proofreading, and that anthology's focus on reflection, repentance, and renewal remains a conceptual—but ultimately oppositional— backbone for the new novel, The Centrifugal Novel: S. Y. Agnon's Poetics of Composition (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 36.Google Scholar
11. Arnold Band notes this date discrepancy (Nostalgia and Nightmare, 5 n.5), but see Dan Laor for a more detailed recounting (Ḥayei Agnon, 19).
12. Although Agnon completed the manuscript before anyone could fathom the extent of destruction in Europe, his revisions for the full volume do lend “an air of deeper despair toward the world of Shibush while increasing a tendency to color favorably all aspects of the Zionist enterprise” (Katz, Centrifugal Novel, 58). Still, I would maintain that Agnon presents a retrospective rather than prophetic vision of catastrophe, even though he puts himself in conversation with a prophet of destruction whose words of consolation were few, and even then rather vengeful.
13. Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 7–8; Laor, Ḥayei ʿ Agnon, 321.
14. Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 284–85.
15. Mintz, Alan, Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 21.Google Scholar
16. After Bialik began to publish what Dan Miron calls his pseudoprophetic poems, David Frishman attacked the idea that the ancient rhetorical style of the prophets could be revived or even imitated in the modern world. Frishman aligned himself in this matter with Aḥad Ha-‘am, who also felt that “Biblical prophecy … emerged from a mental world so alien to ours that it could not, in any real way, be revived and continued,” Miron, Dan, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 119. See also Miron's extended study of The Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2010)Google Scholar; as well as Sidra Ezrahi's comparison of Bialik's and Agnon's lamentations in “Agnon Before and After,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 84–85Google Scholar; and Shaḥam's, Reu'ven “Motivim Bialikayim be-‘Oreaḥ natah la-lun,” in S. Y. Agnon: Critical Essays on His Writings, vol. 2, ed. Barshai, Avinoam (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1991), 244–250.Google Scholar
17. Cohen, Uri S., “Agnon's Modernity: Death and Modernism in S. Y. Agnon's A Guest for the Night” MODERNISM/modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 657–71.Google Scholar
18. Laor, Ḥayei ʿAgnon,, 301.
19. Laor, 316ff; Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 284. For a comprehensive analysis of Agnon's fictionalization of his visit to Poland in 1930, see Laor, Dan, S. Y. ʿAgnon: Heibetim ḥadashim (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Ha-po‘alim, 1995), 154–174.Google Scholar
20. In the original Hebrew, the repetition of the term ḥurban to describe the destructions of the narrator/protagonist's homes renders the reference to the temple much more obvious. For an extended analysis of this house symbolism, see Anne Golomb Hoffman, “Housing the Jewish Past in A Guest for the Night,” in Between Exile and Return, 77–103.
21. Agnon, S. Y., A Guest for the Night, 207–209; ’Oreaḥ nata la-lun (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), 151–52.Google Scholar
22. Guest, 442; 'Oreaḥ, 322.
23. It was Jeremiah, for example, who advised the exiles in Babylon to “Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit.… Multiply there … seek the welfare of the city … and pray to the Lord in its behalf, for in its prosperity you shall prosper” (Jeremiah 29:5–7). Further on I will discuss Jeremiah's sexualized portrayal of Israel's relationship with God.
24. This double-edged relationship to Jeremiah's legacy to some extent resembles that of American puritans from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, whose “cries of declension and doom were part of a strategy designed to revitalize their errand,” despite a profound inner disquiet, as Berkowitz, Sacvan puts it in The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar, xii. I am grateful to Miranda Hickman for bringing this to my attention.
25. Jeremiah 14:7–9.
26. Hagby, Yaniv, Language, Absence, Play: Judaism and Superstructuralism in the Poetics of S. Y. Agnon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
27. Bialik's Be-‘ir ha-haregah (In the City of Slaughter) is the most notable appropriation of a prophetic and divine stance that requires its reader, as Dan Miron observes, to “work through the entire first part of the poem before grasping … [that] the speaker is none other than God himself.” But whereas in Bialik “the poet-prophet is … a ‘son of man’… inferior to and distant from the Godhead,” in Agnon's novel the conflation of God (as Guest) and narrator (as guest) via the Jeremian intertext cannot be pried apart and hence it is as daring as Bialik's later antitheological poems. Dan Miron, The Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry, 130. For an analysis of what Alan Mintz calls Bialik's “presumption,” see Ḥurban, especially 142; and also Re'uven Shoham's “Motivim Bialikaim.”
28. Agnon, Guest, 469; 'Oreaḥ, 342, my emphasis.
29. Guest, 4 and 34; 'Oreaḥ, 7 and 28.
30. Kaufman, Yeḥezkel, Toldot ha-‘emunah ha-‘isra'elit, V. III (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1937), 80.Google Scholar
31. On Agnon's relationship to the Kabbalah, see Shiloh's, ElchananHa-kabbalah bi-yeẓirat S. Y. ʿAgnon (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2011)Google Scholar and regarding Agnon's relationship to the Song of Songs, Pardes, Ilana offers an important new historicist approach in Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
32. See Oz's, Amos discussion of this ambivalent attitude in The Silence of Heaven: Agnon's Fear of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
33. Guest, 180; 'Oreaḥ, 133–34.
34. Mintz, Ḥurban, 35. Particularly relevant to my argument here is Mintz's observation that “Lamentations, taken generically rather than as a particular text, can be understood as a record of man's struggle to speak in the face of God's silence,” 41. For a broader comparison of Lamentations and its midrashic treatment in Lamentations Rabbati, see Cohen's, Shaye “The Destruction: From Scripture to Midrash,” Prooftexts 2, no. 1 (1982): 18–39.Google Scholar
35. For example in Jeremiah 12:1–2.
36. Guest, 38; 'Oreaḥ, 31, my emphasis.
37. For an analysis of this dream see Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 324.
38. Guest, 40; 'Oreaḥ, 32.
39. Sokoloff, Naomi B., “Metaphor and Metonymy in Agnon's A Guest for the Night,” AJS Review 9, no. 1 (1984): 97–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40. See the narrator's conversations with Shibush's rabbi in Guest, chapters 31 and 75.
41. Guest, 231; 'Oreaḥ, 169.
42. Uri S. Cohen argues that “A Guest for the Night is the place where Agnon transforms the Author, tearing him away from the narrator” (“Agnon's Modernity,” 665); see also his extended discussion of this issue in Hisardut: Tfisat ha-mavet bein milḥamot ha-ʿolam be-’Ereẓ Yisra’el u-ve-'Italiah (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007)Google Scholar, 70ff. Unquestionably, a persistent ironic distance separates these two constructs throughout the novel, but the tension that Agnon maintains between the narrator's confusion and the reader's expectations of a clarification-of-confusion, are nevertheless attenuated in the novel's final pages, where the semi-autobiographical author rears his head not only to articulate, but to also enact the practical responsibilities of a modern resident of Jerusalem, paterfamilias, and Hebrew writer.
43. Jeremiah, 3:14–20; 3:8; 2:2.
44. For analysis of this theologized marital discourse, see Halbertal, Moshe and Margalit, Avishai, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9–36.Google Scholar See also Lyke's, Larry L.I Will Espouse You Forever: The Song of Songs and the Theology of Love in the Hebrew Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007)Google Scholar, and Moughtin-Mumby's, SharonSexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
45. Katsman, Roman discusses another Agnonian manifestation of ‘aginut in Literature, History, Choice: The Principle of Alternative History in Literature (S.Y. Agnon, “The City with All That is Therein”) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013)Google Scholar, 291ff.
46. Guest, 3; ’Oreaḥ, 6.
47. Guest, 206; ’Oreaḥ, 151.
48. Guest, 395; ’Oreaḥ, 288.
49. Jeremiah 31:22.
50. Agnon, Guest, 138; ’Oreaḥ, 104.
51. Reuven Alcalay defines the archaic ʿagnin as a “killick,” a rock or big stone once used to anchor ships, The Complete Hebrew Dictionary (Tel Aviv: Yedi‘ot ’ahronot, 1996)Google Scholar.
52. Yael Feldman astutely observes that the original key to the beit midrash functions as an “opener” (mafteaḥ), yet after it is lost and remade, the substitute key functions primarily as a “closer” (shlüssel). It is the original key, the “opener,” that turns up in the protagonist's backpack in Jerusalem. “The Latent and the Manifest: Freudianism in A Guest for the Night,” Prooftexts 7, no. 1 (1987): 29–39.Google Scholar Regarding the key motif in Agnon's novel see also Baruch Kurtzweil's seminal analysis in Masekhet ha-roman (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Shocken, 1953), 50–65;Google Scholar as well as Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 314–21, and Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 96ff.
53. The abstract ‘aginut of this story has been widely discussed, for example, by S. Y. Penueli,“Teḥilato shel Agnon—“Agunot,” Davar, July 25, 1958, 5–6; Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 57–63; Fisch, Harold, “The Abandoned Wife,” in S. Y. Agnon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975), 16–17Google Scholar; Mintz, Alan and Hoffman, Anne Golomb in their introduction to “‘Agunot,” in A Book that Was Lost and Other Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 33–34Google Scholar.
54. S. Y. Agnon, “Agunot,” in A Book that Was Lost and Other Stories, ed. Mintz and Hoffman, trans. Baruch Hochman, 35. For an analysis of tensions between Agnon's opening midrash and the body of his story, see especially Shaked's, Gershon “Midrash and Narrative: Agnon's ‘Agunot,’” in Midrash and Literature, ed. Hartman, Geoffrey H. and Budick, Sanford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986): 285–303.Google Scholar
55. For an analysis of the puzzling relationship of this story to its historical moment of composition see Golan, Arna, “Ha-sipur ‘Agunot’ ve-ha-ʿaliyah ha-shniyah,” Moznayim 32 (1971): 215–223Google Scholar.
56. Agnon, “‘Agunot,” 46.
57. The scholarly debate about whether or not A Guest for the Night ends optimistically can be revisited in light of the novel's conversation with Jeremiah. Yael Feldman, for example, argues contra Arnold Band's optimistic interpretation of the novel's ending, see “The Latent and the Manifest,” 37. For a comprehensive discussion of Agnon's sense of an ending, see Miron, Dan, “Domesticating a Foreign Genre: Agnon's Transactions with the Novel,” Prooftexts 7 (1987): 1–27Google Scholar and especially Michal Arbel, “Sof ha-ma'aseh: ‘al ’ofane ha-siyum bi-yeẓirotav shel Shai ‘Agnon” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1999).
58. Agnon, Guest, 472; ’Oreaḥ, 344.
59. Kurtzweil interpreted A Guest for the Night as the record of an existential crisis during which the narrator wrestles with his childhood's beliefs, Masekhet ha-roman, 49–55; see also Shimon Halkin, “Àl 'Oreaḥ natah la-lun,” 122.
60. Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 80.
61. Band, Nightmare and Nostalgia, 18. In addition to Uri Cohen's discussion of the figure of the author in A Guest for the Night, mentioned earlier, see Shirli Sela-Levavi, “Guests in their Own Homes: Homecoming, Memory and Authorship in A Guest for the Night by S. Y. Agnon and the Yash Novels by Jacob Glatstein,” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2013). In Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, Todd Hasak-Lowy conducts such an investigation of Brenner's semi-autobiographical ‘Oved ‘Eẓot.
62. A maritime-oriented analysis of Agnon's representation of the “‘agunah problem” could further illuminate the enormous role played by the sea in his opus, particularly in his return-to-Zion stories such as Bi-lvav yamim (In the Heart of the Seas) and the maritime episodes within Guest itself. Hananiah from Bi-lvav yamim misses a ship to Jaffa because he runs off to release an ‘agunah while his fellow travelers are busy divorcing and remarrying their wives in an effort to avoid leaving ‘agunot. Hananiah's own family status is pointedly unclear, but his efforts to release an ‘agunah onshore (which causes him to miss the boat) are rewarded by his miraculous sailing to the Holy Land on a kerchief. In the Midrash on the Song of Songs, “the sea,” moreover, functions as code for the perfect moment of union when God “kissed” Israel by the Red Sea, Neusner, Jacob, “Song of Songs in Song of Songs Rabbah,” in Judaism and the Interpretation of Scripture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), 145Google Scholar.
63. Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 248.
64. A. B. Yehoshua, Friendly Fire, 278–79.
