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
Results 1-5 of 34
... Reb Fayesh, who loves to issue excommunications of anyone he sees as insufficiently Orthodox. Tradition, seen with the eyes of modernity, can look as arid as Jerusalem itself. Yet that is only part of the story, as Agnon shows. After ...
... Reb Fayesh's pious daughter, for whom he conceives a devoted love very different from his guilty feeling for Sonya. In one of the countless Biblical and Talmudic echoes that fill the text, Agnon makes Isaac's first meeting with Shifra ...
... Reb Fayesh, the old couple's son-in-law, is one of those. As for Isaac, all the people of the New Yishuv are related to him, if not by blood, then by heart. Is there anything that brings hearts together like a mutual idea? And aren't ...
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.