Only Yesterday
Subtitle: a novel
By: S.Y. Agnon ; translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav ; introduction by Benjamin Harshav ; with a new foreword by Adam Kirsch
Contributors: Barbara Harshav (Translator)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: March 27, 2000
Language: eng
Translation of: Temol shilshom
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 704
ISBN-13: 9780691009728
Subjects: Modern fiction; Other prose: from c 1900 -; Religion; Agnon, Samuel Joseph - Prose & Criticism; Literary Criticism; Fiction - General; Literary; Asian and Asian American Studies; Fiction / Literary; Jewish Studies; Jewish
First sentence: Isaac stood there on the soil of the Land of Israel he had yearned to see all the days of his life.
Description: "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.".

"Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem.

While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him.".

"Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac.

The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise."--BOOK JACKET.