Only Yesterday

"Shmuel Agnon is the only Israeli writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is still regarded as the best writer in modern Hebrew literature. This book takes place in Jaffa between the end of the 19th century and the start of the First World War. My latest book, The House of Rajani, takes place at the same time and in the same place so I was very much inspired by his book. I read it three times in order to get the atmosphere and spirit of the place at that time. Nevertheless, when I read Agnon’s book I do have some criticisms of it. This is because I think that when he described the immigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine he disregarded the Palestinian existence. In the entire book, which is about 600 pages, he doesn’t even mention one Arab person by name. Yes, I think it was a political choice. The way he describes, for example, the first meeting of his protagonists in Palestine. He totally ignores the Palestinian existence in Jaffa back then. The majority of people living there were Palestinian and he only describes the Jewish population. And I think that this was a political choice, which I have tried to remedy in my own book by talking about the Palestinians living there at the time. I think I am part of a new trend in Israel to be critical of the way we tell our history. For example there is a group of historians who are called the new historians and Benny Morris is one of them. And what they try to do is to correct the political bias in the writing by talking about Palestinians, and Israelis helping Palestinians."