The Dog's Passion: Tmol Shilshom's Scripture of Violence

ABSTRACT:In this article, I offer a reading of Agnon's work, and especially his classic Zionist novel Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday), from the perspective of cultural and historical analysis. It is my contention that cultural reading will significantly enhance the scholarship of racism and antisemitism that his works address. Reading Tmol shilshom in this fashion affords theoretical and cultural insight into the genealogy and assimilation experiences of the beast (the dog) and the Jew—two figures that challenge the idea of the modern nation by contesting the very possibility of abstraction and symbolism that the national and humanistic imagination enables. I offer a tentative look at the way in which discourse performs identity through violence, that is, differentiation and exclusion. I seek to show that the novel Tmol shilshom, written during the Holocaust, combines the colonial experience with the Jewish one, employing a signifier that never renders a coherent symbol and therefore always highlights difference, reluctant to be submerged by any worldview.