Only Yesterday: A NovelPrinceton University Press, 2019 M02 26 - 696 pages When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? |
From inside the book
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... Balak complains to Heaven and shouts, Arfarf, give me a place to rest, give me righteousness and justice. And when Balak's shout is heard, they assault him with stones and sticks.” He can even be taken as a symbol of symbolism itself ...
... Balak takes over the story: wherever he appears, he wreaks havoc, creates panic, and gets pelted with stones. Shifra's father is terrified into a stroke, and Balak has to flee into exile, to non-Jewish neighborhoods, where the Hebrew ...
... Balak's predicament are among the most powerful chapters in the novel; the dog has been interpreted as an allegory of Jewish Exile, as Isaac's erotic projection, as the embodiment of the irrational, demonic force that subverts all ...
... Balak's consciousness in the second part of the book, interprets his innermost thoughts and observes him from the outside as well. There is no omniscient narrator here, for at every junction, the omniscience is suspended for the sake of ...
... Balak). From here on (at least), all rationality is thrown to the dogs. But we must leave this part to the reader. The discussion of the specific Hebrew substance of the novel, its ascetic minimalism, focusing on a nonintellectual ...