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? |
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... Sonya said, Yes, yes, Outside the Land, oranges are expensive, while in the Land of Israel they are literally rolling in the street. Once the priest's wife from her hometown ascended to the Land of Israel and came to see Sonya. Sonya ...
... Sonya's room.” To Sonya, Isaac is just one of a series of dalliances, and she finds it easy to leave him in the end. But he is hit much harder, especially by his obsessive guilt toward Sonya's previous lover, his friend Rabinovitch ...
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 Sonya ...
... Sonya was Russian, and for some reason she flirted with this Galician simpleton and later rejected him capriciously. But when he ascended to Jerusalem, he wound up back in the Orthodox and antiZionist religious world of the Old Yishuv ...
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