To This Day

Published in 1952 and now translated into English for the first time, Agnon’s final novel presents an eccentric tour through First World War Berlin. The narrator, a Galician-born Jew from Palestine, is stranded in Germany, passing his days in search of a place to spend the night amid a severe housing shortage. As he moves through a series of apartments, convinced that there is "a grand conspiracy of rooms" against him, the narrative introduces, drops, and periodically reëncounters characters, among them a famous stage actress running a hospital for invalid soldiers; a young man under her care, too traumatized to speak; and a landlady who fills the bathtub with vegetables and dirty linen. All have stories of their own, leading the novel away from any central thread. Still, Agnon’s young exile, whose thoughts "jumbled everything while forgetting nothing," gives voice to an idiosyncratic allegory of spiritual homelessness.