Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the “chronotope” provides a theoretical tool that captures the unique characteristics of the use of time and temporality in the Jewish train genre. The essay traces the transformations of the train as a symbol of modernity and shows how Agnon uses a different mechanism to reconstruct the symbolic role of the train against the collective post-World War II memory that had come to associate it with the Holocaust. This distance both in time and in language suggests that Agnon's story should be read as a retrospective look at the experience with which the earlier works deal. However, Agnon, who published his story decades later, assumed that his audience would be unfamiliar with this experience and even with the language of his protagonists. All three writers use the train to represent a common experience in pre-World War I Eastern Europe. Abramovitsh's “Shem ve-Yefet ba-agala”, Sholem Aleichem's Di ayznbangeshikhtes, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon's “Bi-kronin shel rakevet”. Not surprisingly, this central role is reflected in the literature of the period, in what I would like to call “the train genre.” This essay examines the role of the train in three works by prominent Jewish writers: S.Y. The train had a remarkable and meaningful role in the process of modernization and secularization within European Jewish society during the nineteenth century.

The railway journey schivelbusch essay