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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... lives that can be lived in this narrow province. We meet Orgelbrand, the meek bourgeois clerk, who gets roped into supporting a whole group of relatives back home; the entrepreneurial Rabinovitch, who finds Palestine too small a stage ...
... live a normal, secular life. In the end, the improbable and irrational return to the outer reaches of Orthodox society was an anti-utopian move, a dead end, destined to fail, too. In his tongue-in-cheek, “naïve” voice, Agnon takes on ...
... live out their days in Exile and the latter live out their days in Exile, neither of them want to move until the Messiah comes. After he thought about their deeds in general, he began detailing the deeds of every single one of them one ...
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