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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... raised families and maintained a Jewish presence, mainly in Jerusalem and Safed. Many of them lived on the minimal “Distribution” (Haluka) given them by “Societies” (Kolel), according to their cities of origin, where the financial ...
... raising a tangle of constructs, to be made by the reader and contradicted again, questioning all major aspects of the human condition. The text is built on a series of ambivalences: Exile as a homeland versus the national Homeland as an ...
... raising the great questions of human existence, the “rules of the game” in God's world, and the hierarchy of values or loss of them. Thus, writing in Hebrew was not just a linguistic matter, but a resort to the totality of ways of ...
... raise his eyes to anyone, like a man who chanced upon great men and wouldn't dare lift his head. But when he heard their talk, his awe of them departed and he saw himself more distinguished than they, for they were traveling for their ...
... raised his eyes. He saw before him dignified people, their beards black and shapely, their hats big and wide, and their shoes polished and shining. They sit comfortably and take cakes and brandy out of their bags and drink a toast and ...