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? 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.
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