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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... writes decorously about sexuality. But he leaves no doubt that for Isaac, the product of a traditional upbringing, sex comes as a shock: “Never in his life had Isaac seen a girl's room, and suddenly he finds himself sitting in Sonya's ...
... writes, in what could be the novel's secret motto. Isaac must negotiate the claims of Shifra and Sonya, Jaffa and Jerusalem, Zionism and Judaism. In the midst of this dialectic, however, something totally unexpected happens: Agnon's ...
... writing “Crazy Dog” on his back in Hebrew. The dog Balak takes over the story: wherever he appears, he wreaks havoc, creates panic, and gets pelted with stones. Shifra's father is terrified into a stroke, and Balak has to flee into ...
... writer's private homeland, like Tshernikhovsky's own very concrete birthplace in the southern Ukraine, begins: “A man is no more than a little plot of land / A man is no more than a pattern of the landscape of his homeland.” And that is ...
... 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 wrote a long antinovel that is a mere ...