A Guest for the NIght

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A Guest for the Night was singled out by the Nobel Prize Committee as S.Y. Agnon’s “greatest achievement” as a novelist. It is certainly his book which most closely reaches the perfection of form of the modern novel as conceived when written in the 1930s — a form which, critic Dan Miron has pointed out, Agnon struggled to “domesticate.”1 As opposed to his other novels — on which he worked sometimes for years, sometimes for decades — A Guest for the Night seems to have been written with the least struggle, and also supplies the most definitive and unambiguous ending of all of his books.

In the Spring of 1930 Agnon travelled to Leipzig, Germany, the center of Jewish and European publishing, where the Schocken Press was issuing the first edition of his collected writings in four volumes. An inveterate reviser of his own works, he supervised the preparation of the manuscripts, polishing his prose and editing the writing even as the type was being set for print.

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