The New Wandering Jew

A GUEST FOR THE NIGHT by S. Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by Misha Louvish. 485 pages. Schocken Books. $6.95.

That ancient exile the Wandering Jew has never been harder to track. He may travel less from country to country; but, hung up in a no man's land between a fixed Talmudic past and a restless, skeptical present, he suffers from a different kind of Diaspora.

As 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.

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 character speaks to the guest: "When a man sees that there is no place in the world that he loves, he deceives himself into thinking he loves his town." The guest is soon disillusioned. War and time have done their disfiguring work. The town is poor. Its sickly citizens limp about on wooden legs, use grenade-smashed faces as beggars' blackmail. Gone are the old fireball discussions of Zionism, socialism, and who will be the next rabbi.

Only in the Beit Midrash, the holy "house of study," does the guest find the home he was looking for: it seems to be the "one place in the town where you find no suffering." Yet the house of study is, in fact, abstracted from life in the village, perhaps from all life. Its aura is otherworldly--a "light that has been severed from the light of the universe and shines by itself."

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 find themselves in a new exile.

"Man," 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.

A Guest for the Night is like a Chagall painting. Its rather passive characters, combining the flat faces of peasants with the wings of angels, hang suspended between two worlds. They soar rarefied above the commonplace cows and rooftops of their village in some ultimate quest they never really asked for, looking down wistfully at the pungent, monotonous landscape below. Displaced persons all, their quiet agony consists in not knowing--just as Agnon does not know--which world God truly wants them to live in.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.