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
... voice, Agnon takes on the great themes of Modernity in European literature from the most marginal margin possible. The Jews seemed absurd and alien in Christian Europe; they were further marginalized when they procreated and multiplied ...
... voice, and always hovering just above him, yet shifting from reproducing his internal monologues to taking a distance and mocking him. Indeed, there is no specific person behind the “We,” but an empty slot of a grammatical first person ...
... voice, But not through the wicked heretics in our time. And because he feared lest the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He didn't know the Holy tongue, he translated his words into Yiddish, Di epikorsim vus zaanen in inzere tsaatn. The train reached ...
... voice that sounded like chanting pierced the air, and at the peaks of the towers, clocks began drowning each other out with their sounds. And hour after hour comes rolling in, and you listen, and how do you know whether it's for good or ...
... voice of the waves in the sea. Never in his life did Isaac lie down alone and never in his life had he slept outside. Never in his life did Isaac lie down alone because in his father's house there were only four beds. In one bed Father ...