Customer Reviews (6)

A Masterful Read
Agnon's Only Yesterday requires a close and careful reader.But the benefits of reading this novel and finishing it far out weigh the effort.

First there is the problem of translation. Agnon's Hebrew was deeply layered and rich, mining much of the long tradition of Hebrew literature in every age.Of course, a translation does not covey this.But this translation gives a sense of the faux simplicity of Agnon's Hebrew prose.Beneath the deadpan delivery is a multi-layered work that taps into a three-thousand year history of Hebrew prose writing.

Second, Agnon has produced a work that is an invaluable document about the early days of the New Yishuv in Palestine.Rich in local color and detail, Agnon is not afraid to take the reader on carefully crafted detours into the lives of the odd characters of the early Zionist movement, men and women who would resurrect a language and create a state.

Finally, Only Yesterday belongs in the pantheon of large social novels that while exemplifying a certain time and place, capture human universals.The problems of human life, the pains, joys, loves, losses, are the ultimate subject of this book.Taken together, all these elements make for a masterful read.

Hard going but worth it
I had only read one other SY Agnon book before embarking on Only Yesterday. I had read Two Tales, which as the name suggests consists of two short stories. Therefore, it was with some trepidation that I embarked on reading Only Yesterday at over 600 pages.

However despite its length, I enjoyed this book for a number of reasons. First, as some other reviewers have said, the language in the book is often like poetry. I found myself reading passages aloud to get the full effect of the poetic language.Second, I found it to be a quite humerous book.There are many passages and stories in the book which are quite funny, particularly the narrative by Balak. Finally, I enjoyed the multitude of characters which Agnon describes in the book.

The only criticism I have of the book is that I think it is a bit overlong.I think that the story got a bit bogged down in the middle before picking up again and ending in a strange and unpredictable way. I think the book's length will be too intimidating for most readers and as a result they will not experience the rich and rewarding experience which reading Only Yesterday provides.

Inside the irony is another midrash
Agnon is one of those writers who to be truly read needs to be read in the language he writes. The Hebrew of Agnon is a multi-layered language in which he employs many different kinds of traditional language and text. Part of his great ironic power is playing his own texts off against the tradition he is continually evoking and moving in out and away from. In this work he tells the story of a Second Aliyah pioneer to the Yishuv and in doing so makes a rich and complex commentary not only on the Zionist enterprise but on the role and place of the Jew in the modern world.This is work also fits the well- known theme of ' The Dreamer and his disappointments in meeting reality'. But Agnon is a writer who often tries to appear more simple than he is, and often the disappointments too give a kind of insight and meaning which makes having them valuable. The wanderings of Kumer, his search for dignity in building the land, his search for love, his wandering between the new world and the traditional world, between Tel Aviv of the secular pioneers and the Jerusalem of the Old Yishuv are all parts of the richness of this work.
It is however precisely Agnon's intellectual playfulness and irony which would seem to stand as barriers before the reader's direct identification and sympathy with the characters.
I in any case prefer some of Agnon's stories to this larger and more ambitious work.

Pure Poetry
"Only Yesterday" is, perhaps, Agnon's greatest work.In it, he displays the skill of a consummate novelist with the sensibilities of a poet.For those who are familiar with Hebrew poetry, particularly Biblical poetry, "Only Yesterday" conveys in English the rhythms and structure of classic Hebrew poetry while transmitting a sensual and, ultimately, tragic story.It is really not comparable to Singer; it is something far above and beyond Singer's work.

Agree and Disagree
As a lover of Yiddish writers I disagree with the reviewer who compared S.Y. Agnon to Isaac Bashevis Singer.I enjoyed Only Yesterday but don't think it compares at all to anything written by Singer.I found many passages in this book seemingly pointless and rambling, the grammar, in parts, was simplistic as was the style.This could have been the "fault" of the translators.I did enjoy parts of the books and wanted the whole book to be as good as the best parts but it wasn't the case.If you love books written by Yiddish authors I wholeheartedly recommend reading Only Yesterday by S.Y. Agnon but I urge you to read everything by Isaac Bashevis Singer. ... Read more

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texto en español , cuentos israeliesspanish text , israeli stories ... Read more

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Nobel Prize-winning author S. Y. Agnon was the foremost Hebrew writer of the twentieth century. His work navigated the world of Jewish tradition and that of secular modernity, capturing the conflict between old and new. In Language, Absence, Play, Yaniv Hagbi explores Agnon's theological and philosophical attitudes toward language, attitudes that to a large extent shaped his poetics and aesthetic values. Drawing on anthologies compiled by Agnon, among others, Hagbi examines his theoretical orientation and the ways he integrated into his poetics ideas about language that are rooted in Jewish theology. In doing so, Hagbi casts light on profound parallels between religiously inspired Jewish hermeneutics and the language-centered superstructuralist theories that have dominated academic discourse in the humanities since the mid-twentieth century.

With deep insight and lucid prose, Language, Absence, Play demonstrates how the traditional and the contemporary forces shaping Agnon's literary art inform and transform each other. ... Read more

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This is the first serious attempt to analyse the development and variation of themes in the work of S. J. Agnon (1888? - 1970), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. In particular, the author looks at psychological themes, allowing his approach to be determined by the nature and style of the works themselves, rather than attempting to fit them into any one psychoanalytical framework. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An insightful reading of Agnon
This work is an insightful reading of Agnon which enriches our understanding of this very complicated writer. Agnon makes use of all the historical resources and levels of the language, and to really comprehend what he is doing it helps to have a commentary like this one. ... Read more

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The fascination and enigma of Agnon's work is the inspiration for studies in this volume, which illustrate the importance of a writer who remains perhaps the central figure in Hebrew literature, but who has not gained prominence on the larger stage of world literature. The research and analyses collected in this book aim to foster an understanding and appreciation of Agnon's work amongst the English-reading public. ... Read more

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This monograph is a revised and expanded version of an article entitled, "Between Historical Reality and Literary Fantasy - Polish-Jewish Relations in the writings of S Y Agnon" which was first published in Hebrew in Gal-Ed XI (1989), pp109-160. The text was translated by Ora Wiskind. For ease of reference all titles of Agnon's work quoted in the text appear in transliterated form; the original Hebrew titles and translations are included. The illustrations present in the text are from the 'Yad Agnon' collection. ... Read more

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Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970), winner of the Nobel Prize forLiterature in1966 and the undisputed master of the Hebrew novel,still remains largely anunknown or even misunderstood figure. Agnon'sinnovation was to construct anintricate dialectic between Hebrewtradition and the modern predicament,thereby producing a verydistinctive mode of modernist narrative. Agnondeployed a technique ofrich allusiveness drawn from traditional Hebrew loreand languageusing free-association, especially by means of imaginative dream-sequences designed to unveil the ambivalent but fateful meaningsin theapparently inconsequential events and thoughts which determinethe lives ofhis characters.This book explores the methods andmaterials of Agnon's art so as to providethe English reader withinsight into his unique fictional world, and itproposes a freshapproach to the reading of Agnon which will also be ofinterest tothose familiar with his work and the crucial literature on it. ... Read more

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This broad selection of Agnon's fiction introduces the full sweep of the writer's panoramic vision as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emerging society of modern Israel.
Expanded Edition, Including all stories from Twenty-One Stories. ... Read more

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Agnon, A Book That was Lost
This is an excellent collection of Agnon's short stories. I found them fascinating. They give insight into Agnon's world. The included commentaries add to the value of the text. ... Read more

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In The Silence of Heaven, the world renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz introduces us to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature that is just now appearing in English, S. Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday. For Oz, Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today's writers, yet deeply meaningful for his wonderment about God, the submerged eroticism of his writing, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library. This collection of Oz's reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics, is a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another.

Oz admires Agnon especially for his ability to invoke and visualize the religious world of the simple folk in Eastern European Jewry, looking back from the territorial context of the Zionist revival in Palestine. The tragedy of Agnon's visions, Oz maintains, lies in his perspicacity. Long before the Holocaust, Agnon saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. He knew, too, that the Zionist project was far from being a secure conquest and its champions far from being happy idealists. Oz explores these viewpoints in a series of thick readings that consider the tensions between faith and the shock of doubt, yearnings and revulsion, love and hate, and intimacy and disgust.

Although Oz himself is interested in particular ideological questions, he has the subtle sensibility of a master of fiction and can detect every technical device in Agnon's arsenal. With the verve of an excited reader, Oz dissects Agnon's texts and subtexts in a passionate argument about the major themes of Hebrew literature. This book also tells much about Oz. It represents the other side of Oz's book of reportage, In the Land of Israel, this time exploring the ideologies of Jewish identity not on the land but in texts of the modern classical heritage. The Silence of Heaven hence takes us on a remarkable journey into the minds of two major literary figures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great student on a master of Hebrew literature
This book is at least on part based on public lectures given by Oz at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Oz is a tremendously powerful and beautiful speaker and reader of Hebrew. These lectures sounded not so much like academic criticism but as a kind of long prose-poem. I do not know Agnon's work well- enough to argue with the reading Oz makes of it. Agnon was a religious Jew who was deep inside the Tradition as is evidenced in some of the anthology work he did especially ' Days of Awe' . Oz has gone somewhere else, and does not have Agnon's midrashic and talmudic background. Yet the thesis that Oz proposes in regard to the contradiction between the ideals of the religious and Zionist return to the land, and the reality which was met and made in the Yishuv is a very real one. It is also true that Agnon's work is a chronicle of the collapse of Eastern Jewry written before the great destruction comes. Oz knows the Agnon text well, and his power as writer makes it seems as if his reading of Agnon is the most convincing one. I think however it should be balanced against the reading of other commentators including Baruch Kurzweil, Arnold Band, Hillel Weiss and a host of others.
However reading this work of Oz will give not only knowledge of two of the Hebrew language's greatest writers in modern times ( Agnon and Oz) it will illuminate the whole ideological dimension of the Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael. ... Read more

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The emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century and the evolution of Zionist society in Palestine were profoundly influenced by the Hebrew literature of the day. As Todd Hasak-Lowy cogently argues in this book, Hebrew authors wrote with the belief that accurately representing Jewish society--including its history--in their texts would both record the past and establish its future course.

Hasak-Lowy traces the tensions between the extraliterary--the historical, social, and political--and the literary--the aesthetic, formal, and stylistic--in Hebrew fiction. Focusing on canonical texts by S. Y. Abramovitz, Y. H. Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, and S. Yizhar, the author establishes how modern Hebrew writers galvanized Jewish nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe and later articulated its character in twentieth-century Palestine. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Technical Treatement
Hasak-Lowy's Here and Now is a technical treatment of figures in early modern Hebrew and Israeli fiction.The author's main thrust is to show that even mainstream Hebrew writers have a subversive agenda to their works, making it difficult to form a "canon" of Jewish Hebrew fiction.

This work is not for everyone; it is filled with technical jargon and is written largely for professionals in the field.This was Hasak-Lowy's dissertation topic, so in places the work feels cramped and overworked, as if the author is using short hand for much longer discussions that took place outside the work in seminars and conferences (a typical problem for dissertations that are worked into book form).

But if the reader sticks to it, this author has some interesting things to say about modern Hebrew fiction.This is particularly the case with the chapter on Agnon's Only Yesterday.Here Hasak-Lowry makes some interesting points in a readable format about Hebrew modernism. ... Read more