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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... father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Genesis 12:1). The double root Lekh-lekho(“Get going! Get out of here!”), with its drastic, harsh ring in the East European context, sounded as an expulsion, and in Jewish Diaspora ...
... father's home” (a sense of guilt that haunts him throughout the book), he says: “from his town,” the decaying town that was Agnon's emblematic representative of Exile. As the language of the Bible betrays, Abraham was expelled to the ...
... father of Isaac Kumer, sitting in front of his son you never saw a father's grief. Before his son Isaac was grown up, his wife was his helpmate, and when she passed away leaving behind her a house full of orphans, Simon expected his son ...
... father began to think that perhaps God sent him to be a sustenance and a refuge for us. When Simon considered the journey, he started worrying and groaning and sighing, May I drop dead if I know where I'm going to get the money for the ...
... father's house there were only four beds. In one bed Father slept with little Vove, the son of his old age, and in another bed Isaac slept with his brother Yudel; and in the other two beds his sisters slept. And never in his life had ...