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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... thought hot means beautiful, an in the poem of our bard, the marvels of a land where spring blooms eternal. For he is going to a place where they didn't know him and his clothes will show that he is from a fine home. Then Simon has six ...
... thought that in the whole world there was no Citadel stronger than the one in Przemysl, and now that the train was arriving in Przemysl, he pressed to the window to see the Citadel, and was stunned to find that you don't see towers or ...
... thought of his hometown, for it is the way of the stars to lead the thoughts of a person as they are wont. Isaac wondered and pondered, Now that I'm lying here, my brother Yudel is alone in Mother's bed, for ever since Mother passed ...
... thought a great many other thoughts, and all his thoughts were about his hometown. The streetlamps have been lit by now and the city elders are sitting down to get a breath of fresh air, and girls are strolling between the marketplace ...
... thought about their deeds in general, he began detailing the deeds of every single one of them one by one. Here's ... thoughts and started thinking of sleep that would certainly not come, since he was lying in a new place and was lying ...