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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... Jerusalem, to start his new life over again. If Jaffa, with its heat and seashore and oranges, represents the physical appeal of the “delightsome land,” then Jerusalem, the ancient holy city, represents its spiritual demand. Nature ...
A Novel S. Y. Agnon. of Jerusalem? And just as Sonya represents Jaffa for Isaac, so he finds Jerusalem reflected in Shifra, Reb Fayesh's pious daughter, for whom he conceives a devoted love very different from his guilty feeling for ...
... Jerusalem, he wound up back in the Orthodox and antiZionist religious world of the Old Yishuv. Inexplicably, he fell under its spell and eventually married Shifra, the daughter of an extreme Orthodox fanatic, who was paralyzed and could ...
... Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of Exile. But all the time I imagined myself as having been born in Jerusalem.5 Those words, as all readers of Agnon know, are true. But, strangely enough ...
... Jerusalem, where Yosef-Hayim Brenner, the highest literary and moral authority among the Labor-Zionist settlers ... Jerusalem. During the Arabic pogroms against Jews in 1929, Agnon was moved to the center of Jerusalem and his house in ...