Back in 1998, I had the pleasure and the honor of interviewing Elie Wiesel for a book that I contemplated writing on his works of fiction. During the course of our conversation, he confirmed what I had surmised from reading his Memoirs, namely, that without the traumatic experience of the Holocaust, he probably would have never become a novelist. As he assured me, after traversing the interminable night of flames and horror, he needed to create imaginary destinies in order to see more clearly within himself
His first great text, La Nuit, or "Night" (1958), is not a novel per se. It is rather a heartbreakingly terse account of the 11 months he spent with his father in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Yet it explains why he absolutely had to write works of fiction afterward in order to free himself from that emotional and spiritual hell. "Night" resembles the book of Exodus unfolding backward. Whereas the brutally oppressed Hebrew slaves, once liberated by Moses, could look forward to a future as free men and women, the Jewish community in the town of Sighet, at that time part of Hungary, was enjoying a peaceful, reassuring existence until the Nazis dragged it into an unspeakable nightmare. When young Elie emerged from captivity, he was a living corpse and his soul had been stripped of all of its religious fervor. In fact, his soul had also become a living cadaver.
He eventually became a world-famous author and novelist. But very often the aspiring writer needs the help of an already well-known figure in order for his career to take off. That person was the renowned French Catholic novelist, François Mauriac. Mauriac won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. He excelled in depicting the dark underside of human nature. His characters are torn between their spiritual yearnings and carnal lusts. Perhaps his most famous novel, Thérèse Desqueyroux, published in 1927, relates the story of an intellectually brilliant and fiercely non-conformist young woman trapped in an asphyxiatingly conformist society that does not condone the slightest deviation from its rigid norms. She resembles a person lost in a tunnel without the slightest glimmer of light to guide her, without any way of escaping. Impelled by obscure forces beyond her conscious will, she desperately attempts to free herself by poisoning her narrow-minded, obtuse husband and does this by progressively increasing his dose of medication. Given François Mauriac's vision of our human condition, it is not surprising that he would feel an immediate empathy for the torments Elie Wiesel had endured in the Nazi death camps.
The young Elie Wiesel had come as a journalist, representing an Israeli magazine, to interview François Mauriac in the latter's apartment. Wiesel had an ulterior motive. He hoped that Mauriac would introduce him to the then Prime Minister of France, Pierre Mendès-France, who normally shunned interviews with journalists. That would have been a spectacular scoop! But something far more extraordinary occurred. Elie Wiesel left several hours later convinced by the venerable Catholic writer that he had a mission to fulfill as a witness to the Shoah. In his memoirs as well as in his collection of essays titled Un juif aujourd'hui (A Jew Today), Wiesel makes no bones either about his admiration for François Mauriac or the immense debt he contracted towards the latter.
It was Mauriac who exhorted Wiesel to break the vow of silence that the young man had imposed on himself for a ten-year period and to describe his experience as a former prisoner of the Nazi hell. It was Mauriac who served as his literary godfather and watched over the Jewish writer's career with a very moving solicitude. Meeting Elie Wiesel was also a kind of discovery for Mauriac himself, because the Catholic writer had not, up till then, ever met directly a survivor of the German death camps. Not content with encouraging the publishing house, les Éditions de Minuit, to print the French version of the book, La Nuit (Night) that Wiesel had originally drawn up in Yiddish, Mauriac also requested the honour of writing a preface for it. The elderly French novelist committed himself to the career of his new colleague as though the book had been his own, even though he knew that Night contained passages likely to wound the ardent Catholic that he was. It was as though by urging Elie Wiesel to become a writer, Mauriac displayed an act of faith in writing itself in order to prove that individuals who may have nothing in common, not even their suffering, are capable of understanding one another.
Indeed their divergences as concerns their experiences of life and their respective faiths could have provoked a disaster. During the course of the interview, Mauriac launched into his favourite subject, the grandeur, and divinity of the Jew Jesus. Once he got going, it was impossible for him to stop. Wiesel wrongly saw in this love for Christ a lack of pity for the martyred children of the Holocaust who, in his eyes, had suffered infinitely more than the Son of God. Wiesel, the young survivor of the concentration camp hell, exploded in indignation. Seething with barely controlled anger, he cried out: "Sir, you speak of Christ. Christians love to speak of him. The passion of Christ, the agony of Christ, the death of Christ. In your religion, that is all you speak of. Well, I want you to know that ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ on the cross. And we don't speak about them. Can you understand that, Sir? We don't speak about them." Then he rushed furiously out of Mauriac's apartment.
At the very moment he called for the elevator, Elie Wiesel heard the door opening behind him. It was the illustrious French novelist himself who, with an infinitely humble gesture, asked Wiesel to come back into the apartment with him. Once the young Jewish man sat down in front of the French novelist, he noticed that François Mauriac was weeping silently. Faced with the sorrow of the elderly gentleman, the future author of Night was overcome with self-loathing for having hurt a person whose conduct during the Nazi Occupation of France had been irreproachable, indeed, exemplary. Sensing the distress of the young man and his desire to ask for forgiveness, the Catholic novelist prevented him from so doing. He skilfully and compassionately directed their conversation to Wiesel's past. The young man ended up describing to his elderly interlocutor how he and his whole family had plunged into the realm of infernal night. When they said goodbye to one another, Mauriac looked very grave, almost solemn, and to overcome the reticence of the future author to put his experience into writing, said, after embracing him: "I believe that you are wrong. You are wrong not to talk about it...listen to the old man that I am: You must talk about it."
A year later, Elie Wiesel handed over to his venerable mentor and friend the manuscript of his account of his 11 months in the concentration camp hell. I would like to emphasize right away that this text, which will appear over the years in different versions both in English and French, is an adaptation of an original manuscript written in Yiddish, as I mentioned, and published in Argentina. The French publishing house, les Éditions de Minuit, strongly advised the author to tone down the virulence of his anti-German diatribes--some passages were particularly vindictive--for the first version in French printed in 1958. It is much shorter than the original Yiddish version and already represents a literary text as well as an eye-witness account.
But La Nuit, however powerful and eloquent, is not a novel. It simply brought to the foreground of his consciousness all kinds of anguishing moral and spiritual dilemmas that Wiesel would spend a whole lifetime trying to resolve. Writing novels eventually became the only way for him to thrash through this incomprehensible tragedy and seek out solutions that would restore his faith in mankind and replenish his spiritual oxygen. At the beginning of this journey, the first two solutions his heroes hit upon are illusory ones. In the novel L'Aube, or "Dawn" (1960), the young man Elisha embarks on terrorism to help create the state of Israel, even though he knows full well that by committing murder he is violating one of Judaism's founding principles, the sacredness of human life. In the next work, Le Jour or "Day" (1961), the hero imprisons himself in an asphyxiating worship of Holocaust martyrs.
Beginning with the next two novels, despair gives way to hope. The heroes of La Ville de la chance, "The Town behind the Wall" (1962), and Les Portes de la forêt, "The Gates of the Forest" (1964), succeed in moving beyond the Holocaust without ever forgetting it. Michael in "The Town Behind the Wall" breaks free from his isolation thanks to friendship and is drawn towards his fellow man in a surge of fraternal love. Grégor in "The Gates of the Forest" opens his heart more and more to compassion, embodies the messianic ideal, and reconnects through it to the faith of his childhood. These tendencies become even more marked in the novel that follows, Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, "A Beggar in Jerusalem" (1968), one of Elie Wiesel's finest works on which I will now dwell. During the course of this narrative, the hero becomes acutely conscious of participating in a spatio-temporal continuum that transcends normal time and commits himself to a splendid mission: safeguarding the centuries-old memory of his people.
Elie Wiesel didn't intend to write A Beggar in Jerusalem immediately after The Gates of The Forest. He was thinking, rather, of devoting a novel to the dilemma of the Jews in the Soviet Union. But then there occurred very stressful historical events over which he, as a writer, had no control. In 1967 the Six-Day War broke out. Like many Jews, during the weeks that preceded the conflict, the author's heart was weighted down with anguish. He feared another Holocaust. The Arab armies enjoyed a crushing numerical superiority. The Western nations remained passive. But for once, the worst didn't happen. The Israelis' incredible intrepidness, unconditionally supported by Jewish communities around the world, ensured the survival of Israel. Inspired by this completely unexpected reversal of a situation the consequences of which had appeared as tragic as they seemed unavoidable, Elie Wiesel composed A Beggar in Jerusalem at a dizzying speed.
As the author readily admits, this novel of his is the most difficult to decipher. It is neither a novel nor an anti-novel, neither a work of fiction nor an autobiography, neither poem nor prose, but here Wiesel navigates between all these forms without restricting himself to any one of them. Narratives, lyrical outbursts, aphorisms, conversations, newspaper reports, and parables follow one another at a breathless rhythm. Behind this chaotic surface, however, the novel has a strong organic unity based on two main themes. The first encompasses the text itself. It is the mystic solidarity that links Jews both as individuals and communities across time, space, and legends. Hence, the author's need to expand the framework of the conventional novel in order to suggest this centuries-old continuum which takes root in the imagination as well as in history. The second theme is orchestrated within the first. It evokes the death in the figurative sense and self-regeneration of a Holocaust survivor who was trapped in a tragic past.
If these two themes undergird the novel, they in turn derive their raison d'être from the city of Jerusalem itself. A spiritual centre of gravity for religious Jews from time immemorial, a fabulous realm where history and legend become inseparable, Jerusalem is surrounded by an extra-temporal aura. As an adolescent, the hero, David, dreamt of the city long before he could contemplate it. He wanted very much to emigrate there as soon as the Jewish communities in Central Europe were threatened by the Nazi scourge. Supported by his mother, he had entreated his father to take the whole family to the Holy Land before they would become the victims of Hitler's final solution. But as an unconquerably optimistic humanist, his father refused to believe that even Nazis could act so barbarously. David was the only one to remain alive after the Second World War and to make that trip.
According to the hero, all Jews come to Jerusalem as beggars. They are embarked on a quest for spiritual plenitude necessary to fill the void in their existences. Some of them don't even have to search very long to find it. Since they inhabit the holy city, they are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are connected to the fourth dimension, that of legend which encompasses all centuries. From the point of view of common sense, these beggars resemble the mentally sick. They gorge themselves on illusions the way a dope addict gets high on drugs. They float around in a state of mythomania with hair-raising ease. Yet on the poetic level, the conduct of these crazies is not devoid of meaning, and David empathizes with them. By believing literally that they are on intimate terms with the great personages of the Bible, and by proudly proclaiming that they have lived in every era of the Jewish people's history, they show their unconditional solidarity with their coreligionists.
Thus Zalman the beggar astounds a young Israeli aviator by maintaining that he discussed military strategy with two legendary biblical heroes, Yehuda, leader of the Maccabees, and Bar Kochba, the fearless warrior who revolted against Rome. One of his comrades, Schlomo, just as insane, relates a conversation he had with Jesus, warning him against the monstrous perversion that future Christians would make of his message of love, and predicting, to Christ's horror, that his crucifixion would eventually bring about untold tragedy for his fellow-Jews.
The connection of these beggars and of the Jews of the Diaspora to the city of Jerusalem is reinforced on the eve of the Six-Day War. Their anxiety for the survival of Israel is all the more intense because they have long memories. They remember that thirty years earlier, Hitler's irresistible rise to power was accompanied by the cowardly and hypocritical silence of the Western powers. They remember God's immobility during that period, and His inability to defend His people when they faced systematic extermination.
David, just like his creator, Elie Wiesel, is troubled by a sinister premonition concerning the security of the Jewish state. By means of short journalistic reports incorporated into the narrative, Wiesel demonstrates that the many appeals to Israel for caution and patience launched by the major world powers dissimulated their hypocritical cynicism and their intention of allowing the Jews to perish yet again. They would shed tears over the fate of the Israelis only when the tragedy of the latter was consummated.
Fortunately, 1967 did not completely resemble 1940. The author does not fail to emphasize that something essential has changed in the Jewish mentality in twenty-seven years. The Israelis of the new generation would not allow themselves to be led to the slaughter. Moreover, the Jews of the Diaspora were galvanized in favour of their brothers and sisters in danger. The narrative describes the tidal wave of sympathy and solidarity that flowed over Israel on the eve of the conflict, as though the Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world had suddenly become one, were speaking with one voice, and were sharing a unique identity: "Writers and artists, impoverished students and easy-going merchants, believers and atheists, all found themselves in the same camp, carried along by the same wave. As a result, each one realized he was responsible for the collective survival of all, each one felt threatened, targeted."
At the very moment that the Diaspora is galvanized, the hero senses within himself a resurgence of moral energy. Running parallel to the narrative of the victory that the state of Israel achieves over enemies determined to destroy it, is another story: that of David's liberation from a past that was suffocating him and preventing his self-reconstruction. He becomes a new being capable of welcoming the future and experiencing joy. Before the outbreak of the Six Day War, this survivor of the death camps felt he was a prisoner, just like other characters that Wiesel created, of a traumatic past. At various points in the novel, he evokes episodes from that period which left an indelible imprint on his consciousness. He remembers the day when his father, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in a central European city, came home looking haggard, after a meeting with the Nazi authorities, and announced the dreadful news that the convoys taking his coreligionists to the concentration camps would be leaving the next morning. He also recalls Iléana, his non-Jewish lover who sacrificed her own life to save him during the occupation. Finally, after Jerusalem has been liberated by the Israeli army, David, as though hallucinated, sees his mother and little sister walking past the Wailing Wall, tortured by thirst, just as they had been the day of their deportation thirty years earlier. This sorrowful past he drags behind him explains his irreducible pessimism. If he has come back to Israel on the eve of the conflict with the Arab states, it is to die while fighting alongside his people, so persuaded is he that the world will allow another catastrophe to happen again, that the Jewish nation is condemned to disappear.
This epic struggle for Israel's survival to which David commits himself will transform his existence. He meets a soldier named Katriel. The latter relates to him a strange parable that keeps reverberating in his consciousness. At first, the story arouses David's anger. Later on, it will help him understand himself better. According to the story, a man leaves his home to seek out adventures and a magical city. At night he sleeps in a forest, and in order not to take the wrong path, turns his shoes in the direction he is to follow the next day. During the night a prankster points his shoes in the opposite direction. Thus, when the traveler reaches the city of his dreams the following day, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the one from which he had just departed. He enters a home that looks exactly like the one he used to live in, and finds there a woman and children who seem the very embodiments of the family he thought he had left behind. When they entreat him to stay, he is so moved that he agrees.
This story plagues David. Even though it sounds familiar to him, he can't recall where he had heard it. He begins to understand the distress the parable has touched off within him when he remembers what a beggar had said to him at one moment in his childhood: "Remember, little one, that the day someone tells you your story, you will not have much longer to live." This warning will be repeated twice more in an elliptical form by two other beggars, the last repetition occurring just before the end of the novel. The story Katriel had told him forces David to take cognizance of the fact that he is perhaps that traveler. Even though he survived the concentration camp hell, he is still its prisoner. His tragic past remains an integral part of his present life and is devouring it. The David in 1967 has still not acquired existential density. He has never left the dead, and the dead have never left him either: "The living person that I was, that I thought I was, had perhaps lived a lie; I was only the echo of voices silenced long ago. As a shadow, far from the other shadows, I was still bumping into them day after day, these were the ones I was deceiving, the ones I was betraying by moving forward. I thought I was living my life, I was only inventing it. I thought I could escape from the phantoms, I was simply extending their power. And now, it was too late to change directions." When he hears the third warning, on the verge of getting married, David fully understands the meaning of the parable. The death that was prophesized for him was not physical in nature but figurative. The David who was still a prisoner of the death camps long after being liberated physically from them, finally leaves his past behind him without, however, forgetting it, and the new man he has become can now recommit himself to life and love.
Discarding his pessimism, David now plugs into the centuries-old history of his people as though it were some kind of spiritual hydroelectric power station capable of revitalizing his existence and composed of fabulous legends as well as real events. Hence the indescribable emotion he experiences once he reaches the Wailing Wall. These remnants of the Temple symbolize for him the whole body of Judaism's spiritual and ethical values. As a result, the ancient stones of this legendary piece of architecture represent an urgent invitation, indeed an exhortation, to every man and woman to realize his or her potential for nobility and beauty, of which the extrapolation to the infinite coincides with the presence of God Himself.
Because of the legends and the exalting aspirations invested in it, the Wall transcends the present to encompass all epochs. On contemplating it, David feels he is suspended between reality and a conscious dream. He finds it perfectly natural at that particular moment that all those for whom Judaism signified the ceaseless struggle to make humanity constantly more human, should be standing in front of these venerable stones. As he tells us, "The kings and the prophets, the warriors and priests, the poets and thinkers, the rich and poor who, throughout the ages, everywhere, had begged for a little more tolerance, a little more brotherhood: here is where they came to speak about it." And adding to his sense of astonishment, he suddenly sees--or imagines that he sees-- the unburied dead from the extermination camps joining all the others in front of the Wall. Far from crushing the living under the weight of their reproaches and terrorizing them as they had done in the novels "Dawn" and "Day," these martyrs had also come to help defend Israel. Just then David is startled by a stunning vision: a biblical prophet explains to him that Israel won the war because the ranks of its army and people were suddenly increased by six million more names.
Consequently, the breakthrough glimpsed in the novel "The Gates of the Forest" has now become an immense, open perspective. The Holocaust survivors can henceforth move definitively out of the moral tunnel where they risked being suffocated. The dead have become their allies. Remembering them no longer means being imprisoned in a tragic past. Safeguarding the memory of the dead can give the living the courage to make a renewed commitment to life and love.
Now this surge of optimism on which "A Beggar in Jerusalem" ends does not prevail in the subsequent novelistic production of our author. Elie Wiesel was agonizingly aware of the extreme fragility of our destinies. He had seen on so many occasions how the ugly paleolithic brute that seemed soundly asleep in the abyssal depths of the human subconscious, can, suddenly when the circumstances are right, awaken and unleash its destructiveness. Our human condition seems prone to tragedy. Consequently, although our novelist persists in exalting life, he realizes that all too often sorrow will triumph, at least temporarily, over joy. I would say that in many of his later novels, one perceives a pessimism that, nevertheless, never quite ends in despair, because his protagonists persist tenaciously in giving life a vote of confidence.
This complex attitude is obvious in a novel he wrote in 1987, Le Crépuscule, au loin (Dusk, far off). The hero, Raphael Lipkin, a university professor who is spending his summer doing research in a private psychiatric hospital, is beset by the same torturing doubts about the nature of God that plagued his creator, Elie Wiesel. When he was liberated from Buchenwald by the American army in 1945, the 16-year-old Elie no longer possessed his unconditional belief in an all-loving, merciful God of Israel. He had not lost his faith, but it would henceforth be criss-crossed by torturing doubts and anxieties. The hero of "Dusk, far off" dares go even further. He questions the wisdom of the Creator and, like another illustrious Jewish writer, the Italian Primo Levi, seems willing to take his doubts to their logical conclusions. Levi once told Wiesel that, as concerns the God of Israel, one of two things are possible: either God is all-powerful, and thus His refusal to intervene during the course of the Holocaust is unforgivable; or He is not all-powerful, in which case there is no point in believing in Him. Raphael Lipkin enters into a dialogue with a mental patient who is convinced he is God Himself. Raphael realizes that accusing a demented man who thinks he is God of breaking His covenant with His people, is absolutely preposterous. There is, however, so much anger stored up in him that he can't refrain from lacing into the sick man. He even entertains, for a fleeting moment, the dreadful thought that the God of Israel Himself, just like the psychiatric patient, is perhaps mad as well and that His whole creation is sullied as a result.
What ultimately saves Raphael from utter despair is his belief that despite our very flawed natures, we can embody the Messiah towards our fellow man and woman through the surge of compassion we feel when we see another human being suffering and endeavour to alleviate his/her pain. Elie Wiesel would agree. If we yearn for a better world, we must do our utmost to enter into a partnership with God to repair and restore a very damaged humanity. As the hero of yet another novel by Wiesel, Le Cinquième fils (The Fifth Son), published in 1983, declares, that there is no point waiting for the legendary Messiah to appear one day and establish the reign of everlasting peace and justice. We must embody the legend in our daily lives by acting as though our actions have cosmic repercussions. In that way, the human spirit will continue triumphing over the forces of degradation and death, regardless of the tragedies it will confront.
After the Second World War, Elie Wiesel fervently hoped against hope that the murderous insanity unleashed at that time would never be repeated and that our human race had finally learned a lesson. Yet the killing frenzy flared up again and again. There were the killing fields of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, where at least a million people were slaughtered. Then came the massacres in Rwanda in 1994, and between half a million to a million innocent victims lost their lives in the most barbaric conditions. In Syria over the past five years, at least a half-million citizens have perished and 4 million displaced. Our author was aghast by the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, but I doubt whether he was inordinately surprised. He knew that if man is capable of the best, he is also, when the circumstances are ripe, capable of the worst. Yet His morale never collapsed because his faith exhorted him as well as his fellow Jews to always exalt life and create joy. Although Elie Wiesel was agonizingly aware of the tragic dimension of our human condition, he steadfastly refused to ever call into question our potential for nobility.
In the long run, then, the spiritual values of Judaism are instrumental in saving not only Elie Wiesel's heroes like David, Raphael, and the Fifth Son, from sinking into utter agony, but the author himself. Writing novels was, thus, Elie Wiesel's way of emphasizing Judaism's regenerative spiritual power with stunning clarity. But one can sense yet another reason that is present in filigree within the author's many novels. It is never expressed explicitly. It is, however, everywhere: an elemental will to live. By evoking it so eloquently in his works of fiction, he could ultimately convince himself that despair and its frequent corollary, suicide, were not options. And so in conclusion, I would like to quote the words of another outstanding Franco-Jewish writer, Liliane Atlan, for whom Elie Wiesel had immense admiration. She also happened to be a dear friend of mine and my wife. What Liliane Atlan says could serve as an epigraph not only for "A Beggar in Jerusalem" but many other of his works: "There are times when the burden of one's pain seems so overwhelming that one feels life simply cannot go on any longer. Yet it does go on. And that, perhaps, is the greatest miracle of all."
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