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
Results 1-5 of 79
... single child. At last nothing was left for her. Sonya said, Yes, yes, Outside the Land, oranges are expensive, while in the Land of Israel they are literally rolling in the street. Once the priest's wife from her hometown ascended to ...
... beauty is unsurpassed throughout the world, or to the Prater, the joy of the whole city, or to the big house called Bunch of Grapes, or to their church that has a clock where every single one of its numbers is Introduction xxvii.
A Novel S. Y. Agnon. a clock where every single one of its numbers is more than two feet high, or to the library where the Book of Psalms is written in gold letters on red parchment, or to the Emperor's palace, or to the Museum. Many ...
... single Jew gives a penny every day to the Jewish National Fund, how many acres can you buy with that small change and how many families could be settled on them. If a customer comes in to ask for some merchandise, Isaac glances at him ...
... single thing is a wonder unto itself. Isaac looked neither here nor there. Like that Hasid, his ancestor Reb Yudel, who blindfolded himself with a handkerchief a few years before his ascent to the Land of Israel because he didn't want ...