Writing these words is a performative action: it preserves the past, and simultaneously makes the author (and hopefully the reader) aware of the past; writing these words is writing the past; the past exists alongside the present.
But to return to flat, sequential time for a moment. Relating back to words of the past creates a chain, a sequence of chronological words. This present work does not function in the same way as previous works to which it connects, but it is similar. Shai Agnon and Stefan Zweig, the subjects of this thesis, both experienced and theorized Modernity. While I am theorizing on their works-- and I am even experiencing their works and performing actions similar to theirs via said theorizing-- writing from an apartment in Queens is not the same as Zweig's writing in Brazil after fleeing the Nazis, or Agnon's reconstruction of his two lost libraries. I am further away from their initial acts of preservation, and, baruch Hashem, from the events which necessitated the acts of preservation. Zweig and Agnon wrote to compensate for the tragedy of lost words and lost worlds. Twice.
The title of this blog post, which means chain in Yiddish, is a reference to the Yiddish paper started by the poet Avram Sutzkever in Israel. He was one of the few Yiddish writers to survive WWII, and luckily he got out of the USSR before Stalin liquidated even more Yiddish writers in the 1950s. When Sutzkever was in the Vilna ghetto, during its siege by the Nazis, he wrote a poem that meditates on another function of words different from Zweig and Agnon's usage, but the goal of conservation remains the same: Sutzkever witnessed the melting of a printing press in order to make bullets. Words become means of destruction while preventing their own destruction. The meta-themes shared by all three writers brings the focus onto words themselves, and how they function as words. Language, in the hands of Jews, is one of our most valuable assets. My language right now, in looking to the past, also creates the past, molding it to relevancy once again.