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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... Jews of Palestine before World War I numbered about 70 thousand, less populous than a ZIP code. (The Arabs of ... Jewish homeland was one that Agnon shared. He spent most of his adult life living in Palestine and then Israel, and ...
... Jewish hopes and dreams—into an actual homeland. Yet in doing so, it risked losing touch with the piety that fueled those hopes and dreams to begin with. Isaac, like most Zionist pioneers, begins his life in Palestine by forsaking Jewish ...
... look as arid as Jerusalem itself. Yet that is only part of the story, as Agnon shows. After all, how can a Jew come to the Jewish homeland and not feel the allure of Jerusalem? And just as Sonya represents Jaffa for Isaac, Foreword ix ∙
... the story of a young man's coming of age, or a study of the psychology of love—all of which it contains. For readers interested in modern Jewish experience, Only Yesterday is an indispensable work; and some familiarity x Foreword ∙
... Jewish history and religion certainly make it easier to appreciate. But like the greatest twentieth-century novels, it will speak to any reader willing to submit to its unique vision of the modern world. Adam Kirsch NOVEMBER, 2017 The ...