Agnon's Modernity: Death and Modernism in S. Y. Agnon's A Guest for the Night

In 1966 S.Y Agnon received half the Nobel Prize in literature "for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people."¹ Born in Buczacz, eastern Galicia, in 1888, Agnon came of age as a writer under the same influences and constraints experienced by other Jewish writers from the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.² Yet unlike the better-known examples of Franz Kafka or Bruno Schulz, Agnon came from a religious Jewish background and remained within the sphere of Jewish culture and politics. Turning to Zionism at a young age, Agnon immigrated to Palestine in 1907, quickly becoming a central figure in the nascent world of modern Hebrew literature. He would become its undisputed master.³

One might append the Swedish Academy's citation to suggest that Agnon's writing is as "characteristic" of European modernism as it is of the "Jewish people," although he perceives the European crisis through the lens of a Jewish believer in a world perhaps not without God but certainly a world from which God has receded. The result, I would like to argue, can be seen in Agnon's 1939 major novel A Guest for the Night, a work in which crisis and fragmentation are tucked beneath an apparently realistic textual surface.⁴ By examining the sense of death in the novel it is possible to penetrate this surface and see that by telling the story of his return to Europe, Agnon perceives and laments the death of European Judaism, and that this perception necessitates the creation of an allegorical, even post-modern novel in which narrative succumbs to death and destruction.⁵ The novel, I argue, is also a major turning point in Agnon's work. Here he enters his own death as a narrator and becomes an Author. Unconsoled by the rebirth of Jewish life in Palestine, his return to Europe is a return to a literary space of death. The death of Agnon as a narrator who is an author and his rebirth as a modern (already dead) author in the novel, is therefore in a very real sense almost beyond Zionism; at the very least, it is a denial of an organic and redemptive continuity between the Jewish past in Europe and the Zionist present and future in Palestine.

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A Guest for the Night is one of Agnon's central works and his first full-scale novel set in contemporary Europe.⁶ The novel was written in 1938 and published serially in the Haaretz newspaper in 1939, as Hitler invaded Poland. The novel is overtly biographical: it tells the story of a writer, Shmuel Agnon, a native of Shibush who immigrates to Palestine at the beginning of the century and builds a home there. His house is burnt down in the 1929 riots. Now in midlife, he sends his wife and children to Germany to stay with relatives; he returns to his hometown, a literary simulacrum of Agnon's Galician hometown of Buczacz. The town he returns to has changed, and painfully so; its physical features and its once thriving Jewish population have been devastated by the wars, including the Russo-Polish war of 1919–1920, in which the mass killings of Jews have all but fallen into oblivion in the wake of subsequent events.⁷ The writer, supported by the low value of Polish currency, uses the compensation he receives from the British mandate authorities in Palestine to stay in his hometown for almost a year. During this year he resides in a small family-run hotel and attempts to revive the old BeitMidrash (house of study). In the course of this attempt the narrator meets many of the town's inhabitants who invoke the more and less remote past of Jewish life in the town. The novel ends with the narrator's failure to revive the town's Beit Midrash. He returns to Palestine with his wife and children—and with the key to the Beit Midrash, which he thought he had lost.

By examining the sense of...