S. Y. Agnon

Appearing in English translation for the first time, the Nobel Laureate's novel follows an idealistic man as he emigrates to Palestine in the early part of the century, determined to revive Hebrew culture and build a homeland for Jews.

Only Yesterday

A Simple Story

The fifteenth and final volume in the S.Y. Agnon Library, this volume opens with ¿The Outcast,¿ in a first-time English translation, an affecting novella about the clash within traditional Jewish civilization between Hasidism and its opponents, and how that historic confrontation plays itself out within the heart and mind of one sensitive young man. Ten additional stories paint lyrical portraits of traditional Jewish life in Europe and the Land of Israel¿worlds on the cusp of seismic shifts and historic transformations. The volume is rounded out with nine nightmarish and surrealistic selections from Agnon¿s classic Book of Deeds. Miniature masterpieces which caused a complete reevaluation of his art and helped his readers understand how profoundly modern the master of the old-world pietistic stories truly was¿a writer of world-class stature, recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1966, Hebrew literature¿s only laureate.

The Outcast and Other Tales

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated. The Parable and Its Lesson is one of the major stories from this work. Set shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Jewish communities in the Ukraine in 1648, it tells the tale of a journey into the Netherworld taken by a rabbi and his young assistant. What the rabbi finds in his infernal journey is a series of troubling theological contradictions that bear on divine justice. Agnon's story gives us a fascinating window onto a community in the throes of mourning its losses and reconstituting its spiritual, communal, and economic life in the aftermath of catastrophe. There is no question that Agnon wrote of the 1648 massacres out of an awareness of the singular catastrophic massacre of his own time—the Holocaust. James S. Diamond has provides an extensive set of notes to make it possible for today's reader to grasp the rich cultural world of the text. The introduction and interpretive essay by Alan Mintz illuminate Agnon's grand project for recreating the life of Polish Jewry, and steer the reader through the knots and twists of the plot.

S. Y. Agnon

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