Agnon Wrestles with Jeremiah in A Guest for the Night

It is widely known that Agnon drew the title of Oreah natah lalun from the bublical Book of Jeremiah, yet almost no attention has been paid to the actual relevance of this intertext. When we approach A Guest for the Night in relation to its key intertext, we are brought to reconsider two central components of Agnon’s theology and personal identity. First, the dis/respectful allusion to a God who abandoned his “wife” (the people of Israel) and refuses to return home even as a sporadic “guest.” Secondly, A Guest for the Night is Agnon’s most autobiographical work, and hence, its interplay with the concept of aginut plays with Agnon’s chosen identity as a husband whose vocational identity is dedicated to the project of national repair. Through this conversation with the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations traditionally attributed to this prophet, Agnon adjusts and reduces the diasporic weight assigned to the agunah metaphor. In his midlife masterpiece, Agnon enlists the midrashic concept of aginut to explore, among other things, his own composite identity as a traditional Jew and modern Jerusalemite, lover of texts and absent-minded husband.