Only Yesterday (novel)

Only Yesterday, published in Hebrew in 1945 as Tmol Shilshom, is a novel by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Written in Hebrew and drawing on Agnon's own experience as an immigrant, it follows a young man who arrives in Ottoman Palestine during the Second Aliyah of the early twentieth century, weaving symbolism, literary allusion and tragicomedy through its portrait of the ideological and cultural tensions within the Jewish settler community of the time. An English translation did not appear until 2000. It is often called an authoritative fictional record of the Second Aliyah and one of the major works of modern Hebrew fiction.