SACHS's EMPHASIS ON “ISRAEL” as more than land hinges on her conception of and uncertainty about memory, in particular memory of the immediate postwar era, and grows out of her problematizations of memory and memorialization in earlier texts. When an object, for example a blue flower or a parcel of land, is made the representation of an event (for example Merlin's and Gotelind's death) or of something more abstract, for example “Israel,” the event or abstraction can seem contained. “Nicht nur Land ist Israel” suggests that a projection of whatever else Israel can be as land does away with any need to be mindful of the history of wandering, to question, or to discuss. The same apprehension can apply to Holocaust memorials. A projection, for example a nation-state, or an object, for example a memorial or monument, runs the risk of obscuring or even replacing the meaning or significance of the thing being represented. With a concrete object, there is a sense of closure. Closure implies that the questions have been answered; that any lack has been fulfilled. If the blue flower stands for Merlin's and Gotelind's death, then we need not worry about telling the story. Unsatisfied with Arthur's relic, Blasius goes home to write a story, one that the reader knows conflicts with other accounts of Merlin's story. Where there is uncertainty, there is no closure, which means that questions remain: there is an absence of answers, and a presence of discussion. “Nicht nur Land ist Israel” warns that the closure implied in the State of Israel blinds us to the unanswered questions and lack of certainty that, as Jonathan Boyarin asserts, are the very powers of diaspora; those same powers of diaspora play a role in Sachs's poetic confrontations of Nazi genocide.

As so many of her postwar poetry cycles deal in some way with a discussion or depiction of a time ripped open like a wound, it is possible to see her work as a critical voice on remembering and memorializing the Holocaust. Several of her postwar cycles examine the meaning and significance of different kinds of memory, often reinterpreting or reinscribing poetic forms associated with reminding in ways that resist the closure of a standard memorial and insist, as we see also in her correspondence, on “suffering through” in the moment rather than remembering something past.