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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... kind of self-contained life suits Isaac well, since, like many heroes of modern fiction, he is a withdrawn man, an ... kinds of lives that can be lived in this narrow province. We meet Orgelbrand, the meek bourgeois clerk, who gets ...
... kind of Zionist, pining for his homeland. At the same time, he is a Job figure, demanding answers from a God who remains silent: “Balak complains to Heaven and shouts, Arfarf, give me a place to rest, give me righteousness and justice ...
... kind of bird” or “a kind of tree.” The great European fiction with its immense wealth of differentiated descriptive details of the physical world, nature, and civilization, as well as of states of mind, did not reach traditional Jewish ...
... kinds of business, and on their journey they started getting close to one another, as human beings would who chance to be in the same place and see one another as partners, if not in reality, then in conversation. Some talked about ...
... kinds of pastry. Everything Isaac had pictured in his imagination was nothing at all compared to what his eyes saw, and everything he saw with his eyes was nothing compared to the terror he felt at that moment. He began shriveling and ...