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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... fellow Austro-Hungarian novelist, pronounced: “The place of Only Yesterdayis among the greatest works of world literature.” Those were not parochial sentiments of a “minor literature”; similar opinions were voiced by Leah Goldberg ...
... fellows of the Second Aliya who brought our Salvation, our redemption from Exile. Indeed, in Hebrew, Geula, Salvation, is the opposite of Gola,Exile, locked in an interdependent binary opposition. It is the basic religious terminology ...
... fellow and without the wherewithal to bribe the army commanders, and serving in the army meant profaning the Sabbath and eating forbidden foods. In spite of himself, Simon went back to pondering the journey. Thus he went to the pawn ...
... fellow from Poland saved us from the Arabs. And they said to the girls, Where is he, etc. But as he lay down alone on the big ship and the offspring of the sky looked graciously upon him and the waves of the sea rocked him, his heart ...
... fellow belonged to the cult of Zionists who want to strip the Land of its holiness and make it like all other lands. He began fulminating at Isaac, like old Jews of that generation, who looked at us as if we came, God forbid, to turn ...