Word: agnon
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Listlessness of Limbo. Agnon's nameless Wandering Jew in this 1939 novel is a fortyish exile returned from Palestine after World War I to the East European town of his youth. Moving into a small hotel, the wanderer becomes "that man who was a guest for the night and stayed for many nights." Agnon himself was born in the Galicia region of Austro-Hungarian Poland, went to Palestine as a very young man, then back to Europe during World War I before returning to his adopted homeland. Obvious elements of disenchanted autobiography are present in the words that another...
...GUEST FOR THE NIGHT by S. Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by Misha Louvish. 485 pages. Schocken Books...
...foremost chronicler of this new Wandering Jew-this spiritually displaced person-Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 79, won a Nobel Prize in 1966. An unhurried Jewish anecdotist, a patient sketcher of modest, baffled characters, a leisurely Talmudic dialectician, Agnon is not the sort of writer to have spectacular impact. But he has the cumulative aftereffect and the stubbornly expanding grip on common experience that measure a substantial talent...
Ultimate Quest. Here is the recurring dilemma that Agnon never quite resolves in his stories. His scholar-heroes dream of locking themselves up with some sanctified absolute discipline that will freeze change and make even time stand still. Yet, like the guest, they feel disturbing tugs toward the world outside-toward the everyday pleasures of walking in the forest or smiling once more at Rachel, the hotel-keeper's daughter. It is as if what keeps security in also keeps the very flavor of life out. And so, at the moment they discover their sanctuary, Agnon's characters...
...Agnon half-concludes, "is defined as a being that moves." In the end, the guest returns to Palestine, but with a kind of sad hesitancy. For in Agnon there is no confident resolution between the perfect closed circle of ancient ritual and the improvised present tense of life...