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 87
... Walls in Jerusalem. Yet in this most unbelievable margin of all margins, the great themes of twentieth century literature reverberated. Among the main concerns of the book are “the death of God,” the impossibility of living without Him ...
... walls too: Some created neighborhoods outside the Old City walls—a symbolic as well as practical move—and established the first agricultural colony in Petach Tikvah (“The Opening of Hope”), some were artisans and supported their ...
... walls of the Old City. He set out to write the great epic of the Second Aliya, but wrote a novel about the escape from it. As Dostoevsky intended to write in The Brothers Karamazov “The Life of a Great Sinner,” but didn't get to it and ...
... Wall of China.” Kafka's narrator is paradoxically both a simple laborer, ordered to do monotonous physical work on a national project, and a scholar of Chinese history, both within the process and above it in time. Isaac is both a ...
... wall and electric lights turned on in the daytime and marble tables gleaming, and people of stately mien wearing ... walls of his house among the other pictures of the heads of the Zionists. When he realized that there was no mistake ...