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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.