Only Yesterday

Isaac Kumer leaves Galicia for Ottoman Palestine with the full conviction of the Zionist pioneers around him, expecting to work the land, but he cannot find farm labor in Jaffa and settles instead for house painting, caught the whole novel between the secular idealism of the new Jewish settlements and the older religious Jerusalem his own family came from. Almost as an afterthought, one day for no real reason, he paints the words mad dog across the flank of a stray he has befriended, a small cruel joke he barely thinks about again. The town believes the label, and the dog, whom Agnon names Balak, is driven from neighborhood to neighborhood, stoned and hunted for a madness he does not yet have.

Isaac eventually marries Shifra, a devout young woman from Jerusalem, and drifts, through her, back toward the religious life his own parents raised him inside, while Balak, persecuted long enough by Isaac's careless joke, actually goes rabid at last, exactly as the paint on his side always claimed he was. During the week of celebration that follows Isaac's wedding, Balak bites him, and Isaac dies of the disease not long after, killed in the end by a lie he told a dog for no reason at all. The novel does not close there; it follows Balak a while longer, still attacking whoever crosses his path, before closing on the rains that finally break over the land.

Agnon writes in a Hebrew built from layers of biblical and rabbinic language, and he gives Balak his own extended sections of the narrative, an animal's confused, wounded point of view running alongside the human plot rather than serving as mere symbol for it. It suits a reader drawn to early Zionist history read without triumphalism, since Agnon treats Isaac's idealism with real sympathy and real irony at once, and the dog's persecution, once a reader has finished the book, reads less like a subplot than like the moral center Isaac himself never manages to see.