Israeli Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon's famous masterpiece, Only Yesterday, here appears in its first-ever English translation. Published in 1945, the novel tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine during the Second Aliya - the period between 1904 and 1914 when many jewish idealists returned to work the Hebrew soil as in biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. Only Yesterday quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, but not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. This monumental 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?