THUMB inky, Zweig pauses from feverish writing about feverish
CHESS, tale of a man whose body slipped the Gestapo’s clutches, whose mind did not.
SYRUPy Fios de Ovos is brought to his table. The
HOTEL staff quietly fusses over Zweig. Perhaps the care of staff may yet ground an unquiet mind.
Note: I’m imaging Stefan Zweig in 1941 writing his Chess Story, or Royal Game, in a hotel in Petrópolis, Brazil (though I think he actually wrote in his own house there). His life was shadowed by the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of World War I. He wrote of the passing of the Austrian culture and way of life he had known in the The World of Yesterday. Zweig, like Dr. B in the Schachnovelle (the German title of Chess Story) was able to escape Nazism. As a Jew, he wisely fled Austria in 1934, when Hitler came to full power in Germany. Yet, his sense of loss was too great. Within a year of writing the Schachnovelle, Zweig committed suicide.