Agnon's Birthday Jeremiads

During a year in which he planned to exercise and study Talmud in anticipation of his fiftieth birthday,Footnote ⁹ Agnon was seized instead by an impulse to give fictional form to a meditation on his private identity, history, and mission as a modern Zionist writer. He had just finished proofreading Yamim nora'im (Days of Awe, 1938), an ambitious collection of Halakhah and lore successfully marketed by Schocken as a companion to the prayer book for the High Holidays.Footnote ¹⁰ In the wake of that laborious accomplishment, and instead of resting as he had hoped, Agnon wrote the bulk of A Guest for the Night in one fell swoop; he then augmented, revised, and polished it with the intention of completing the new novel in time for his birthday, which he always claimed fell on Tisha be-'Av. As Agnon's biographers have shown, Agnon was actually born a few days after the Ninth of Av.Footnote ¹¹ Yet in keeping with his general tendency to round things off to the nearest symbolic figure, he portrayed himself as being born on the day that marks the destructions of the First and Second Temples, yet also promises restitution through the birth of a messiah. In ways that relate to the Jeremian intertext, Agnon's midlife novel meditates on the implications of being allegedly born on such an ominous date.

When considered from the perspective of his vocation as a modern Jewish writer, Agnon's claim to be born on Tisha be-'Av becomes a bold way of appropriating for himself a redemptive mission that had practical significance in an age of national reconstruction that was still dogged by persistent threat of ḥurban (destruction) both in the Land of Israel and abroad. More interestingly, by claiming to be born on Tisha be-'Av, Agnon personally linked himself to an ancient history of trauma and hope that Jeremiah expressed in terms of a ruptured marriage between the people of Israel and God. Jeremiah's concept of ‘aginut as a suspended relationship with God was later amplified in the book of Lamentations and the Midrash on the Song of Songs; jointly, the core conceptual underpinnings of these works inform the stylized identity of the writer who named himself Agnon. Therefore, to focus on Agnon's conversation with Jeremiah in his midlife retrospective is to explore a historical, symbolic, and autobiographical network of references through which Agnon links and separates himself from traditional Jewish attitudes toward national ‘aginut.

From the moment that A Guest for the Night’s semi-autobiographical narrator enters his Galician birth town on the eve of Yom Kippur (after an absence of twenty years) to the novel's final scenes in Jerusalem right after Tisha be-'Av, Agnon combines and contrasts the High Holidays' (personal) dynamic of introspection and repentance with Tisha be-'Av's (national) dynamic of loss and renewal, in ways that have been traditionally associated with Jeremiah as the prophet who witnessed the destruction of the First Temple. Unlike prophets who began their careers as adults, Jeremiah spent his entire life exhorting family, king, priesthood, and people to place the covenant at Sinai above every political and social consideration; he begged Judeans and the remnants of Northern Israel to accept the Babylonians' yoke and lay low until geopolitical forces would enable them to regain sovereignty, while maintaining the gamut of Sinai's humanitarian and theological stipulations. He refused to leave the Land of Israel with the exiles to Babylonia, yet was forcefully dragged down to Egypt by the remaining Judeans after the murder of Gedaliah. And since he witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, the book of Lamentations is also traditionally attributed to him, although it is unlikely that he was among its actual authors. The book of Jeremiah itself, however, is a compendium of his prophesies, actions, and life story scrambled into one of the Bible's most difficult documents.

Although Jeremiah's rhetoric of punishment escalates as the situation in Judea worsens, and he certainly comes across as God's most cantankerous mouthpiece, throughout his life Jeremiah also acted as a harbinger of hope. When his hometown ‘Anatot on the outskirts of Jerusalem was destroyed, for instance, he obeyed God's command to purchase property there at great personal expense in order to signal the area's eventual reconstruction. This dynamic of destruction/reconstruction, which already informs the book of Jeremiah, was amplified in Tisha be-’Av's liturgical commemoration of the fall of Jerusalem, and so, by melding Jeremiah with Second Isaiah, the liturgy of Tisha be-'Av promises messianic redemption on that day.

With this background in mind, and given A Guest for the Night's moment of composition in 1938, it is tempting to compare the warnings issued by the book of Jeremiah at the end of the fifth century BCE with Agnon's anxieties about Hitler's intentions in the late 1930s. Agnon's novel was initially published in daily installments in Haaretz from October 1938 to April 1939, amidst reports of escalating conflict with the British and Arabs in Palestine, and surrounded by news of Hitler's expansion abroad.Footnote ¹² Undeniably, Agnon's awareness of potential catastrophe is corroborated by the fact that during the summer of 1939, Agnon and his wife Esther managed to move all of his siblings from Germany to Mandatory Palestine at a time when it was almost impossible to obtain visas.Footnote ¹³ Nonetheless, to read Agnon's novel as prophesy of the Holocaust is to project later events back into it, as Arnold Band rightly argues.Footnote ¹⁴ The historical catastrophe to which A Guest for the Night compares the Fall of Jerusalem is first and foremost the destruction and disorientation wrought on the people of Shibush/Buczacz by World War I and its aftermath, a war that Agnon witnessed from the sidelines as a young man living in Germany, and whose corrosive effects on the lives of European communities he continued to deplore even after the Holocaust became fully known.

The cognitive disorientation to which A Guest for the Night compares the fall of Jerusalem is, therefore, less centered on the fear of any potential future catastrophe, than on a detailed representation of the devastation wrought upon the Galician Jewish community of Agnon's boyhood and youth by the combined effects of the Great War, the pogroms, and the process of modernization. As Alan Mintz observes in regards to the rhetoric of the book of Lamentations itself, it was the cognitive disorientation provoked by the Fall of Jerusalem that turned that historical event into a pivotal catastrophic concept.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, in Agnon's novel a series of combined historical and autobiographical disasters—WWI and its aftermath as well as the destruction of the author's homes in Germany and Jerusalem—provoked his reevaluation of traditional attitudes toward catastrophe and redemption anchored in Jeremiah.

Like the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations, and to a certain extent also like Bialik, Tchernikhovsky, and Greenberg's cycles of pseudoprophetic modern poems,Footnote ¹⁶ Agnon's novel records the effects of ḥurban in order to insist on social renewal and reconstruction in the Land of Israel. For despite the undeniable presence of an anxious modernist pessimism which Uri Cohen and others have noted in their assessments of this novel,Footnote ¹⁷A Guest for the Night confirms a Zionist ethos of exile and homecoming: the bare-boned plot of the novel revolves around a married man, who after making Aliyah with his family, returns to his birth town in Galicia after their new home in Jerusalem is destroyed in the Arab riots of 1929. For almost a year, he lingers in his diasporic hometown (Shibush), fussing about a new coat and a lost-and-found key, which opens his grandfather's beit midrash. After his birthday on Tisha be-’Av, the anonymous narrator/protagonist takes leave of all those with whom he had conversed during his stay in Shibush, and meeting up with his wife and children, boards a ship back to the Land of Israel.

But why does he linger away so long? And does anything change for him when he returns to Jerusalem? Exploring these questions in relation to Agnon's conversation with the book of Jeremiah leads us to pay particular attention to ‘aginut as a multilayered metaphor of suspended marriage, both within the plot of the novel, and ideologically, in relation to Agnon's nuanced identity as a lover of Zion and Buczacz, a traditional Jew and modern Zionist, a busy writer and an absent-minded husband. Within the plot of the novel, the narrator/protagonist manages to overcome his year-long existential crisis through a gradual process of introspection and renewal that enables him to deal with his ambiguous civil status and traumatic experience of destroyed houses. On its intertextual and historiosophic plane, this dynamic of homecoming and repair overturns the midrashic concept of ‘aginut by opposing a maskilic rhetoric of practical renewal to a rhetoric of retrenchment and repentance à la Jeremiah.

Dan Laor relates that when Agnon first mentioned his new novel to the critic Dov Sadan, he described it as a story “about the events of 1929.”Footnote ¹⁸ In the completed novel, however, references to the destruction of the narrator's Jerusalem home during the riots of 1929, and the family's ensuing dispersion, occur only halfway into the volume—so that only at this late point the reader learns about the event that set in motion the protagonist's journey abroad. Moreover, from a biographical perspective, the existential and theological crisis that the narrator/protagonist undergoes in the aftermath of the destruction of his Jerusalem home mirrors not only the destruction of Agnon's Jerusalem home in 1929, but especially the shock and disorientation that Agnon had actually experienced five years beforehand, when his apartment and manuscripts in Germany had burnt down. In 1924, in Bad Homburg, Agnon reacted to the loss of his library and manuscripts as a wakeup call that sent him back to the Land of Israel, where he had lived four years as a young man, and also back to the religiously observant lifestyle of his boyhood, which he had maintained in a somewhat slacker manner from the time he left Buczacz at the age of nineteen until that second and final immigration to the Land of Israel in 1924.

After the destruction of his German apartment in 1924, Agnon moved to Jerusalem alone, separating from his wife and children for nearly a year—so long that she feared permanent separation and their closest and most influential friends, Zalman Schocken and Gershon Scholem, intervened to help the Agnons build a new life in Jerusalem. Five years later, however, in marked contrast to the crisis he had suffered after the destruction of his German home and library, Agnon merely reacted to the destruction of his family's new Jerusalem home (in the riots of 1929) as a nuisance, and took the opportunity to travel back to Germany to oversee the Schocken publication of his collected stories. It was at the end of this “business trip” that Agnon visited Buczacz, and was received there with enormous public fanfare barely reflected in the semi-autobiographical novel.Footnote ¹⁹A Guest for the Night thus transforms the five to seven days that the author spent as a lionized writer in Buczacz, into a year that the narrator/protagonist spends in Shibush after the destruction of his Jerusalem home—which in turn mirrors the existential crisis and cognitive disorientation that Agnon suffered after the destruction of his home and manuscripts in the first (but not the second) fire.

With this biographical background in mind, it is fascinating to observe the novelized transformation of these experiences. As Anne Golomb Hoffman emphasizes, the language that Agnon employs to describe his protagonist's history of lost homes reverberates with allusions to the destructions of the First and Second Temples:Footnote ²⁰

This sequence, as we have noted, resembles but does not fully align with Agnon's own experience of damaged homes, for the novel not only connects its author's experience of two destroyed houses with the historical fall of the First and Second Temples, but also repositions their relationship to Agnon's existential crisis by melding the destruction of his Jerusalem home in 1929 with the existential crisis he experienced when his diasporic home and library burnt down five years earlier. These personal losses are moreover subsumed into the national loss mourned on Tisha be-'Av, Agnon's alleged birthday, through references to lamentations attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. Most important, however, is that Agnon insists on the redemptive dimension of this day: “the Fast of Av passed and the days of consolation arrived. I felt as if the whole world were new, for I was born on the Ninth of Av, and every year, at this season, this man's heart renews itself and reawakens.”Footnote ²²

The conversation that A Guest for the Night conducts with Jeremiah thus conflates Agnon's personal experience of destroyed houses with Tisha be-'Av's national symbolism of loss, dispersion, and renewal in ways that enable Agnon to subject Orthodox Jewish attitudes toward Jeremiah's heritage to a modern Zionist reflection. By going all the way back to Jeremiah and the destruction of the First Temple, Agnon is able to reinterpret historiosophic and theological paradigms articulated by this prophet in ancient times, revisiting a foundational marital and sexual rhetoric that Jeremiah and other prophets used to describe the relationship between God and the House of Israel. For it was Jeremiah, moreover, who offered a blueprint for life in the Diaspora when exile became inevitable and a promise of reconciliation between a few faithful survivors and their now conditional God.Footnote ²³ It is this blueprint—crystallized into a stale rhetoric of atonement and redemption—that Agnon (and modern Zionism) challenges through a practical program of national renewal.Footnote ²⁴

Speaking in the Name of God

Critics have automatically associated the idea of guesthood in this novel with the semi-autobiographical narrator who habitually calls himself ’oto ’adam or ’otoh ’oreaḥ (“that man” or “that guest”) and is thus labeled by several characters in the novel. But this tendency to refer to the novel's narrator as “the guest” is the first thing one is obliged to reconsider when examining Agnon's title in its biblical context.

Early on in the book of Jeremiah, the prophet pleads with God on behalf of the people:

The first and most substantial point that emerges here is that Jeremiah's “guest” refers to God. Agnon is therefore in some way equating his protagonist with Jeremiah's God. But in so doing, is he replacing God with a character that acts and speaks in the place of one who not only threatened, but also actually departed like a guest, since the days of Jeremiah? Or is there rather a suggestion that God is still immanent in the world of the novel as a beloved husband/traveler expected to return at any moment?

The second point that emerges from the biblical context is that Agnon shifted Jeremiah's interrogative plea into a declarative sentence: whereas Jeremiah begs God not to abandon His land and people, Agnon's title and its four reappearances within the novel assert an absence: 'Oreaḥ natah la-lun—a guest who stayed just a night or two. According to the Derridean terms first deployed by Anne Golomb Hoffman in her analysis of this novel and more recently by Yaniv Hagbi in Language, Absence, Play, we are confronted here by an absence that has left a powerful trace, testifying to something that had been present once upon a time, thus drawing our attention to the writer's responsibility as a recorder and (re)creator of the past in the present.Footnote ²⁶ The modern writer—a creator himself—puts God “in his place” by assigning Him the role of “honored guest” in a narrative that otherwise acknowledges his absence. Reality and pious rhetoric are thus at odds in Agnon's novel.

A modern writer cannot promise the physical protection expected from Jeremiah's God, nor is he able to speak for God or even with God like an ancient prophet.Footnote ²⁷ Agnon's narrator/writer nevertheless insists on speaking respectfully in the name of God, even when this is shown to be futile, and thus creates an illusion of harmony that replaces divine guidance when all seems hopeless. This comes across vividly in the novel's penultimate chapter, when the narrator is reunited with his family in Jerusalem, but is still stressed about the predicament of his young friend Zvi, imprisoned by the British police for attempting to enter Palestine despite the restrictions of the White Paper:

According to this passage's refrain, we are enjoined to wonder whether God will turn out to be just as useless, or whether He is eternally useful as a calming last resort after all practical venues have been exhausted. At the very beginning of the novel, Daniel Bach, one of Shibush's inhabitants, announces, “I don't believe the Almighty cares about the welfare of His creatures,” and later he asks, “is it to the glory of God if a lump of rotting flesh or a skinful of stinking blood cries out, ‘Thou art our righteous, no matter what befalls me, and I have been wicked,’ and even then He does not lift His hand from me and continues to afflict me?”Footnote ²⁹ The narrator's consideration of God's usefulness, or lack thereof, via Zvi's predicament at the end of the novel, flirts with Daniel Bach's rejection of theodicy at the beginning of the novel—but the narrator refuses to categorically endorse such a position.

Also in the age of Jeremiah, the people are frustrated by their relationship with God: “Why are You like a man who is stunned?” they ask. God is angry because the chosen people have turned their back on the covenant, and the special relationship He affirmed with them at Sinai is on the verge of breaking apart. However, the people point out that the relationship cannot be dissolved, for a common history already exists: “Your name is attached to us.” Appealing to God's vanity, they beg him to help them, at least for the sake of His own reputation as their protector. However, as Yehezkel Kaufman has argued, the God of the prophets differed from other regional deities because this god does not need people: he can exist on his own terms and it is the people's problem if they renege on Sinai's guidelines.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, according to Kaufman's model, the relationship between God and the people of Israel is not symbiotic, and even when the prophets portray the people of Israel as God's adulterous wife, this is a relationship of choice rather than dependency.

Agnon was interested, nevertheless, in the notion of a symbiotic relationship between God and the people of Israel—an eroticized model expressed in the Kabbalah and the Midrash on the Song of Songs.Footnote ³¹ Yet even in what Band calls the “signature” story, “Agunot” (1908), which opens with the exquisite (pseudo)midrash to which we will turn at the end of this essay—even then, and certainly in his midlife masterpiece two decades later—Agnon questioned the usefulness and liability of the symbiotic model. While for Jeremiah, God remains a palpable and approachable entity despite the withdrawal of His protection, for Agnon the choice to lean on “the Holy One blessed be He” and speak majestically in His name is reasserted as a deliberate choice maintained in the face of an absence traced here as far back as Jeremiah.

In the course of conversations with interlocutors who represent a spectrum of beliefs—from the naively pious to the politically manipulative and atheists of various types—Agnon's narrator consistently evokes God in majestic terms.Footnote ³² He does so regardless of whether he finds himself in the company of the Marxist Yeruham (whom he likes) or at the home of the town's anti-Zionist rabbi (whom he detests). To convince the rabbi that the Labor Zionists are acting in consonance with God's plan, he speaks about God's will as if it were palpable, insisting, for example, that the Labor Zionists “have been privileged to have the Holy One, blessed be He, appoint them as guardians over His Land,” thus seeming to position himself against Daniel Bach's aforementioned opinion about God's lack of interest in His creatures. But when the rabbi brushes aside his guest's modern Zionism and begs him to travel “throughout the communities of the Exile to restore Israel to the good way,” the narrator/protagonist falls closer in line with Daniel Bach in order to detach himself from Shibush's rabbi:

To rebuff the rabbi's jeremiad, Agnon's narrator accuses God of unacceptable negligence, as does Daniel Bach, who had experienced the horrors of the trenches; but Agnon's narrator still insists on employing majestic rhetoric to evoke this negligent God—“it is the Holy One blessed be He—if I might say so—who ought to repent.” Although the main criticism is directed here against the political agenda of Shibush's rabbi rather than against the God he allegedly represents, Agnon's narrator blatantly rejects a post-ḥurban tradition that exhorts the people to “submit to the yoke and wait in silence for deliverance.”Footnote ³⁴ Jeremiah, too, had accused God of unfairness and negligence.Footnote ³⁵ But on account of his hysterical tone and because he witnessed the destruction he warned about, Jeremiah is evoked primarily as a voice of punishment and lamentation. In A Guest for the Night the town's rabbi represents this rigid and negative type of jeremiad and the protagonist/narrator rejects it.

Unpacking the Terms of Comparison

Wrestling with interpretations that immobilize the prophets' figurative language, Agnon unpacks metaphors traditionally used to describe the relationship between God and the people of Israel, as well as between this people and their various homes, past and present, in Israel and the Diaspora. If God can be “like a stranger in the land / Like a guest”—then is He or isn't He a guest, a stranger? When does simile become reality? And what exactly is at stake in this process of metaphorization?

Such questions about the relationship between reality and symbol are central to Agnon's narrative, and he examines them, among other ways, through direct references to the prophet Jeremiah. Along with A Guest for the Night's four unattributed repetitions of the title phrase within the body of the novel, Agnon twice explicitly refers to Jeremiah, first in connection with the book of Jeremiah itself and then in connection with the book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to this prophet. Both references deal with a discrepancy between truth and empty rhetoric under the shadow of Jeremiah's legacy.

Early on in the novel, Daniel Bach argues with his pious father, Reb Shlomo:

A witness to this conversation, the narrator worries that Reb Shlomo's piousness will not withstand relocation to his younger son's secular kvuẓah in Ramat Rachel. That night he has a nightmare in which he falls into the sea, while look-alikes of both pious father and disillusioned son are equally unable to cast the drowning dreamer a saving hand.Footnote ³⁷ In the context of Agnon's conversation with Jeremiah, it is interesting to note that when the narrator is drowning, the only phrase that comes out of his mouth echoes the book of Lamentations: “Comfort the city that is mourning and burnt.”Footnote ³⁸ Like the pious formula used to comfort a Jewish mourner, the dreamer's call for help takes the shape of complete identification with Jerusalem during its worse moment.

The narrator, too, is evidently undergoing a war of Gog and Magog in his own heart, a crisis that worsens as the novel progresses. God is still evoked majestically and respectfully in his mouth, yet his heart entertains a panoply of doubts. He cannot help this, for he sees that all the things he lovingly associated with a godly universe—justice and righteousness; prayer and study in a beit midrash that is harmonized with practical good deeds; and healing connections to the childhood experiences he expected to find in his old hometown—are all so palpably absent that the narrator/protagonist/writer finds himself stepping into this absence, haphazardly speaking and acting in the name of a haphazard God.

Ironic discourse is defined precisely as such a deliberate discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, and Naomi Sokoloff has shown how Agnon systematically trains his readers to deduce the opposite of what is said—as when his narrator preposterously affirms, “I am not one of those who compare the present to days gone by.”Footnote ³⁹ Yet this discrepancy between what is said and what is felt or meant enables Agnon to soften and round out every character, including the town's rabbi, who as he takes leave from the departing narrator, sheds tears of longing for Jerusalem while continuing to withhold any endorsement of the narrator's Zionism.Footnote ⁴⁰

Exactly in the middle of the novel, during the second half of the year he spends in Shibush, the narrator/protagonist musters strength to visit five impoverished widows whose husbands were the most righteous and powerful men that he knew as a child. This visit to the widows occasions the novel's second explicit reference to Jeremiah, exposing most clearly the Jeremian metaphor of ‘aginut to which Agnon opposes an active model of national repair:

First of all, great effort is made here to emphasize that these bereaved women are actual widows and not ʿagunot. Secondly, this narrator has shown himself to be perfectly capable of spinning a consoling rhetoric of messianism and piety to confront the physical and psychological war of Gog and Magog that surrounds him, yet here he is unable to attenuate the shock that he experiences when he visits the fallen matrons of his youth: “since the word of comparison had been taken away he found no consolation.”

But who gives or takes away this “word of comparison”? Is it not the narrator/author himself?Footnote ⁴² And, why does this encounter in particular, among the constant stream of characters and situations that illustrate Shibush's downfall, paralyze the narrator's ability to continue juggling metaphors about the relationship between God and the people of Israel, in their various lost and found homes, in Israel and the Diaspora? To answer these questions we must pay greater attention to the concept of ‘aginut threaded all the way from Jeremiah through the Midrash on the Song of Songs, which stitches together Agnon's entire corpus and vocational identity as a modern “anchor” during an era of heightened national consciousness.

Jeremiah and the National ‘Agunah Problem

From the beginning of his career as a modern Hebrew writer, Agnon obsessed over the concept of ‘aginut as a suspended marriage between God and Israel. He used it to hint at the midrashic relationship between God and the people of Israel in exile and Zion, and thus project historiosophic resonance unto complicated love stories, which he thereby turned into teleological accounts of return and redemption. In “Agunot”—the first story S. Y. Czaczkes signed under the penname that eventually became his family's official name—Agnon portrays the concept of ‘aginut as an existential condition of ruptured harmony within individual psyches whose private sufferings disrupt the life of an entire community. An ‘agunah, at a basic level, is a married woman whose husband has disappeared, leaving her without a writ of divorce, so she cannot remarry until he either sends her a get or it is established that he is dead. In some ways, her status is worse than a widow's, for although her daily struggles are like a widow's, she remains officially married and therefore cannot make free decisions about the course of her life. It is considered a great mitzvah to release an ‘agunah either by finding the missing spouse or proving that he is no longer alive.

The book of Lamentations’ opening verse, comparing the people of Israel to an ‘agunah—“‘She has become as a widow,’ not a true widow, but like a woman whose husband has gone overseas and intends to return to her”—therefore sets in motion a national framework with legal and theological implications that have colored Jewish attitudes toward freedom and national renewal since ancient times. The problem of the husbandless ‘agunah is that she is tethered to an absent entity. This paradoxical situation—applied to the national situation in a strict manner as does Shibush's rabbi in A Guest for the Night—stipulates that the repentant people of Israel must accept the stricter Halakhah of exile until the husband (God) sees fit to call his wife back to their mutual home in Zion. By contrast, Guest's narrator wishes to hasten the resolution of this national ‘agunah status by first returning the people to Zion and then hoping that God has or will return too, or in any case deferring the matter of God's practical role in this process, as we have seen in connection to Zvi's imprisonment. Agnon's play with the concepts of absence and guesthood—God's and the narrator's—is therefore just another means of revisiting his lifelong preoccupation with exile and return as an ‘agunah problem. In challenging the legacy of Jeremiah's ‘aginut, Agnon thus articulates his own vocational identity as one who not only anchors the people to God but also paradoxically works to release the people from a fallow state of ‘aginut to that God.

The ‘agunah metaphor—perceived as a suspension of marital harmony between God and the people of Israel—derives from traditions much older than the book of Lamentations. Following Hosea, Jeremiah brought this theologized marital discourse to new levels of imagery and rhetorical force. He explains to the northern Israelites, for example, that “the Lord … espoused you” and would “bring you to Zion” except “you have broken faith with [Him] as a woman breaks faith with a paramour”; and “because Rebel Israel had committed adultery,” God “cast her off and handed her a bill of divorce.” Nonetheless, her “love as a bride”—when she accepted the covenant at Sinai—is “accounted in [her] favor.”Footnote ⁴³ Examples of this marital and sexual rhetoric abound in the book of Jeremiah. Its warning that the divine husband might turn into a wandering traveler, or departed “guest,” thus forms part of a wider use of marital metaphors that reach their most tragic expression in the book of Lamentations.

Enter the Midrash on the Song of Songs—which takes an ancient collection of erotic love poems and interprets them systematically as a metaphor for a ruptured relationship between God and Israel.Footnote ⁴⁴ The erotic content of the Song of Songs—interpreted as a theologized marriage between God and the people of Israel—was transformed by the book of Lamentations and its midrash into a national rhetoric of loss, atonement, and redemption after the fall of the First and Second Temples. This post-ḥurban rhetoric of ‘aginut, which the prophets themselves had begun to spin, acquired a mystical dimension in kabbalistic discourse. It is from these combined sources—crystallized in the Midrash on the Song of Songs—that Agnon derives his ‘agunah metaphors.

From “Agunot” and “And the Crooked Shall Become Straight” (Va-hayah he-àkov le-mishor), to the actual and metaphorical Agunot in At the Handles of the Lock, and indeed across his entire opus, Agnon reworked various forms of the “‘agunah problem.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In his midlife summa, A Guest for the Night, he thus naturally returns to this metaphor of loss of home and spousal abandonment in order to conduct a deeper cultural archaeology of the ‘agunah construct—and this brought him to the metaphor's earliest constructions in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations.

Within the fictional plot of A Guest for the Night, an actual ‘agunah problem develops during the winter of the narrator's stay in Shibush, when the wood-carrier Hanoch disappears in the snow with his horse and cart, and nobody knows whether he is dead or alive. The townspeople organize a search followed by a fast and collection on behalf of Hanoch's wife. Reb Haim, a broken man who had returned to Shibush after many years in the army, takes charge of the education of Hanoch's children. But when the snow thaws and Hanoch's body is discovered hugging the carcass of his beloved horse, Hanoch's wife becomes a full-fledged widow free to remarry, for example, this lonely Reb Haim, except he too dies shortly afterwards.

Reb Haim, a broken man even before the war, had scrupulously avoided turning his own wife into an ‘agunah by sending her a get as soon as he became a prisoner of war: “we don't know whether he's alive or dead, for we've heard nothing from him all these years, except for the time when he sent his wife a bill of divorce, so that she wouldn't remain tied all her life to a missing man.”Footnote ⁴⁶ And so it is fitting that upon reappearing in Shibush, this same Reb Haim encourages the narrator/protagonist to resolve his own ‘agunah problem.

For as now becomes clear, the central character of A Guest for the Night is also its chief wandering husband—at least on the surface level of what passes for plot in this novel. When he stays so long in Shibush that his underwear begins to disintegrate, he imagines that Krolka, the inn's servant,

Upon this cue—right in the middle of the novel, and just before the inconsolable visit to the widows pointedly described as not ʿagunot—the narrator finally discloses that his own affairs are in grave disarray: his home in Jerusalem has been destroyed and he has wandered away from his wife and children without any concrete plans for the reconstruction of their home.

Several months later, Reb Haim exhorts him, ’And when are you leaving, sir?’ ‘Where to?’ said I. ‘Home,’ said he. I replied quoting the Prophet [Isaiah], ‘For my house is a house of prayer.’ ‘A man's house—that means his wife,’ said he, and then he added, ‘The sooner the better.’ I laughed and said, ‘Are you afraid the sea will freeze?’Footnote ⁴⁸ Reb Haim's talmudic reminder that a man's home is his wife—before the beit midrash or God—is one of Agnon's perfectly pious statements that invite reinterpretation of the Orthodox anchoring of Israel (wife) in God (husband) by suggesting alternative attitudes toward the prophets' theologized marriage metaphor.

Nevertheless, even after “the guest” is reminded that he has a wife and she is his home, he still delays their reunion and continues to mull over past and future, until one day his wife takes the initiative by sending him money for their journey back to the Land of Israel. A new world order, Jeremiah had said disparagingly about a situation where the “woman courts the man.”Footnote ⁴⁹ At any rate, this family eventually boards a ship headed to the Land of Israel, and their resolution to act, constitutes one of Agnon's subtle challenges to the manner in which Jeremiah's legacy was used by Orthodox institutions to impede change. Regardless of whether the reunion of husband and wife at the end of Agnon's novel signals a symbolic reunion of God (wandering husband) returning to the Promised Land with His wife, or a practical enactment of Isaiah's Messiah announcing that God is ready to view with favor the reestablishment of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland—the fact of the matter is that the wife (not the procrastinating narrator), takes the initiative of return.

By contrast, the Orthodox establishment, leaning on the book of Jeremiah and responding to the reality of exile that shaped the book of Lamentations and the Midrash on the Song of Songs, stipulated that the wife must wait patiently for the offended husband to call her back to Zion. Hence, when Agnon's narrator tells the town's rabbi that “if anyone should return [repent] it is God,” he is revising the exilic interpretation of Israel as a faithless wife condemned to wait. Indeed, according to the modern Zionist program in all its variations, it is the people (the wife) who must undertake a practical return, and even national-religious Zionist leaders—toward which Agnon was ambivalently sympathetic—interpreted the possibility of return as an active sign of redemption on a grand historiosophic plane, thus enacting prophesies of restitution that do “anticipate the coming of the Messiah instead of waiting for salvation”—as the anti-Zionist itinerant preachers who passed through Shibush had (correctly) warned.Footnote ⁵⁰

A Guest for the Night ends with the narrator/writer at his desk in Jerusalem, composing stories about Israel's past, present, and future, with a tiny key dangling next to his heart to keep him anchored, albeit lightly, to the heritage of his childhood world. According to Agnon's multilayered frames of reference, childhood can refer to the national childhood during the days of Jeremiah, as much as to the narrator's own childhood in Shibush. His tiny key may be thus likened to a symbolic anchor—not the unwieldy ʿagnin used to stabilize ships in ancient times,Footnote ⁵¹ but a practical modern object whose weight is sufficient to draw this writer and dreamer back into the old beit midrash, pulling him all the way to Jeremiah's ancient rhetoric to reconsider ‘aginut through the problems of his own times.Footnote ⁵²

Anchored to a Lighter Key

Before closing this analysis of A Guest for the Night's conversation with Jeremiah, and given that Agnon's preoccupation with the Jeremian oriented ‘agunah problem was a lifelong affair, it might be helpful to compare, briefly, his play with the ‘agunah metaphor in his midlife retrospective with his early and best known construction of ‘aginut in “Agunot,” the first story to which the nineteen-year-old Czaczkes almost offhandedly appended the singular penname that would henceforth characterize him.

Unlike “And the Crooked Shall Become Straight” (Va-hayah he-ʿakov le-mishor), where Kreindel Tcharni mistakenly believes her husband has died and starts a new family—or “In the Heart of the Seas” (Bi-lvav yamim) and A Guest for the Night, where different scenarios of ‘aginut are at once realistic and metaphorical—in “Agunot” none of the characters are actually ʿagunot or ‘agunim in an halakhic sense.Footnote ⁵³ As Gershon Shaked emphasizes, the harmonious wholeness desired by each of the characters in “Agunot” is mercilessly thwarted so as to challenge the story's opening midrash about a delicately woven relationship between “the deeds of Israel, and the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, in His glory, sits and weaves … a tallit of grace and all mercy, for the People of Israel to deck herself in.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In the context of “Agunot's” moment of composition in Hebrew, and in Jaffa, at the beginning of the twentieth century—and in light of the author's arrival there with his parents blessing and relatively good prospects—the blatant misalignment between the celebratory tone of the opening midrash and the bleakness of the story's ending—Sire Ahiezer's failure to establish a beit midrash in Jerusalem and the subsequent dispersion of all the characters—signaled a modernist critique of traditional mores disguised under the narrator's pious rhetoric, as well as the expression of fears of the “second” aliyah group, to which Agnon belonged.Footnote ⁵⁵

When Agnon's interest in the concept of ʿaginut is interpreted as a call for systematic social reevaluation, it immediately becomes clearer that A Guest for the Night takes this agenda of (personal) introspection and (national) repair a step further. “Agunot” ends badly for all its characters: “Ahiezer left Jerusalem with his daughter. He had failed in his settlement there; his wishes had not prospered. He went forth in shame, his spirit heavy within him. His house was deserted, the house of study stood desolate.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The desires of the young lovers are crushed and even the rabbi's wife becomes an ʿagunah when her husband wanders away to atone for his mistakes.

By contrast, A Guest for the Night ends well for all the principal characters.Footnote ⁵⁷ The existential crisis and state of ‘aginut that plagued the narrator/protagonist during his year in Shibush is repaired in his own lifetime; Daniel Bach's pious old father thrives in Ramat Rachel, renewed by contact with the land; Yeruham and Rachel give birth to a baby in Shibush, which had experienced a shortage of weddings and births since the Great War; the narrator/protagonist, reunited with his wife and children, takes up his pen again to write stories about the Land of Israel and his adventures there.

To be sure, the narrator/protagonist still talks about diasporic houses of study destined to roll into Jerusalem and readies his key for their arrival. But since he hears no imminent rumblings of return, he becomes impatient and turns instead to the real world outside his window, consoled and connected mnemonically to Shibush's beit midrash through light contact with the diminutive anchoring key that now hangs near his heart: “I did not hang the key of the old Beit Midrash over my heart, for it was too heavy for my heart to bear; the early craftsmen used to make their keys too big and heavy.… It can wait, but I, who am flesh and blood, find it hard to endure.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Wrestling with a tradition that fossilized the trauma of destruction into an eternal moment of loss and hope, Agnon's A Guest for the Night uses Jeremiah's legacy to hint at historical specificity, and thus flexibility, in the metaphorical relationship between God and His people. The unfortunate Jeremiah, chosen from his youth to serve as God's tool, undergoes no psychological transformation through the course of his long life as a prophet, except perhaps for the progressive despair to which he is driven as the national situation turns from bad to worse. Agnon's naïve narrator, on the other hand, does undergo a psychological process of maturation when he realizes that his memories of a harmonious Shibush were childish illusions; he admits now that the world of his past changed and progress, even if partial, is possible and inevitable.Footnote ⁵⁹ In Anne Hoffman's words, Agnon's midlife novel “undertakes a journey to the past in order to restore a flawed present.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The conversation that Agnon conducts with Jeremiah and his rabbinic legacy in A Guest for the Night revolves around his lifelong preoccupation with the concept of national ‘aginut in ways that have yet to be fully resolved: Why was the concept of ‘aginut so important to Agnon that he used it vocationally as a marker of identity, and thematically as the basic plot of so many of his narratives? In what way did S. Y. Czaczkes confront the jeremian concept of ‘aginut via the neologism that became his name and around which he subtly dances in his semi-autobiographical midlife masterpiece?

A proper answer to this not-so-irrelevant question requires a more extensive intertextual, biographical, historical, and literary-historical investigation of “the inner relationship” between Agnon's name and “artistic temperament” as Arnold Band put it years ago.Footnote ⁶¹ One point of departure, however, is to note that to be ‘agun is to be at the same time attached and detached: anchored, that is, to a spouse whose absence precludes moving on freely with life choices. To be Agnon, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean to be a bereaved ‘agun/ah. Rooted both in ‘ogen (anchor) and the archaic word ‘agnin, Agnon's neologism connotes an active anchorer that employs olden-time materials to balance a ship always headed to the Land of Israel.Footnote ⁶² Agnon's characters may be ‘agunim—souls in limbo, full of doubt—but the author serves as a stabilizing anchor for questions that have hazy and multiple answers, however unconvincing, and thus he vigorously participates in the “inner struggle of a man who is bound by his figurative umbilical cord to the tradition but acknowledges the revolutionary power of modern life.”Footnote ⁶³ Confronting the absence of Jeremiah's God, yet still speaking in His name, Agnon turned his work into an anchor for renewed attachment to the Land of Israel, its language, and its history, thus modeling himself vocationally into a substitute for messianic hopes.

“Little Sister,” says A. B. Yehoshua's Yirmiuahu to his sister-in-law in Friendly Fire, using terminology from the Song of Songs to rail against the prophet who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE:

Agnon, who teaches us to pay attention to what is said between the lines of all ideologies of national and personal renewal, signals in his midlife retrospective the coordinates of his own vocational and existential struggle with the business of repairing the national state of ‘aginut, associated since ancient times with the prophet Jeremiah.

In this way, the little key dangling from the neck of Agnon's semi-autobiographical narrator in A Guest for the Night becomes a symbol for a practical agenda of national restitution that still anchors the bearer to tradition without wearing him down. Agnon's narrator in A Guest for the Night thus equips himself to become a spokesman, and even a substitute for Jeremiah's absent Guest, refining our understanding of the historical sense of responsibility that Agnon, the author, took upon himself as he reworked Scripture in an age of national modernization.