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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... clothes and footwear, for Isaac's clothing had laid him bare and his footwear wore him down because it was patched. He bought him clothes and ordered him shoes and a hat. Clothes of wool, shoes of sturdy leather, a hat of black felt ...
... clothes and entered the city. From students in his hometown, Isaac had heard of the coffeehouse where our leaders hold their meetings. A big city is not like a small town. In a small town, a person goes out of his house and immediately ...
... clothes like guests at a wedding, and heavy carriages run hither and yon, and people who look like Bishops walk around like ordinary human beings, and if not for the schoolgirls pointing at them you wouldn't have known that they are ...
... clothes sitting on plush chairs, reading big newspapers. And above them, waiters dressed like dignitaries and like lords on the king's birthday, holding silver pitchers and porcelain cups that smelled of coffee and all kinds of pastry ...
... clothes nor his shoes nor his movements were cut to the style of those who sit in coffeehouses, they could even be called ridiculous; yet all his listeners were drawn to his words. Even though they were used to small-town people ...