A World Gone Mad
Greenberg, Joanne
A World Gone Mad Twilight by Elie Wiesel (translated from the French by Marion Wiesel) Summit Books, 1988 217 pp, $1795 Reviewed by Joanne Greenberg In Twilight, Raphael Lipkin, Wiesel's...
...Myth, an amalgam of Jewish history and mysticism, is the link...
...How do we pick up the awful baggage and go on our way...
...Before Creation there was a vision of the future, and I tell you, that vision could originate only in great madness.' I don't know if a novel can bear the freight Wiesel wants to put on it, to become the myth of the Holocaust for the Jewish people...
...Mysticism treats all phenomena as metaphors...
...I also believe that myth is the way it must happen...
...Wiesel equates God with that kind of randomness...
...I do know that incorporating our recent 50 years with our past 3,000 is a psychic and spiritual necessity for us as Jews...
...Wiesel once said, ' 'God gave the Jews a mission...
...Joanne Greenberg is the author of many novels including / Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and more recently Simple Gifts and Age of Consent Greenberg also teaches Hebrew and Bar Mitzvah classes...
...Not the word?' wonders Raphael...
...A World Gone Mad Twilight by Elie Wiesel (translated from the French by Marion Wiesel) Summit Books, 1988 217 pp, $1795 Reviewed by Joanne Greenberg In Twilight, Raphael Lipkin, Wiesel's protagonist, is attempting to reconcile the inexplicable reality of the Holocaust with the ordinary pursuit of post-Holocaust life, and with the mythos of privilege, i.e., the covenanted history of the Jewish people...
...Wiesel starts with the world gone mad, and madmen are God's messengers...
...In the beginning, there was madness,' says Dr...
...Wiesel would turn the Holocaust into a myth, a story of enormous proportions for which there is no explanation but that it happened and the event has become part of our heritage...
...Twilight weaves together recollections of Raphael's childhood, before and during the Holocaust, with his adult quest to make sense of the past...
...Madness is seen as innocence, openness, lack of control, lack of order...
...Benedictus, ponderously...
...Wiesel's mad world is the opposite of the Third Reich's New Order, the reverse of a regime of planning and deciding...
...The plot is not linear, but jumps between the future—Raphael as an adult visiting a mental clinic to study the patients in an attempt to link their madness with mystical possession—and the earlier events in Raphael's life...
...These madmen are method to Wiesel, symbols of various biblical and mystical identities...
...As in %alman and The Trial of God: A Play In Three Acts (Schocken, 1986), the madmen themselves mean less to Wiesel than what they represent...
...In Twilight, madness and history flow into each other, each feeding the other's delirium...
...No, madness...
...In Twilight, he picks up the tools of mysticism in order, as Reb Yomtob of Joigny said before his own martyrdom, "to build an altar of the broken fragments on my heart...
...I don't think Wiesel is interested in fiction or in madness apart from its symbolism...
...During the Holocaust madmen helped Raphael survive, especially Pedro, a madman spirit who remains with Raphael throughout the Holocaust experience...
...Wiesel has already seen what the Nazi world has done with its control, with its order, with its decision making—who lives and who dies...
...This book is an attempt to integrate the nightmare of the long slaughter into our souls, our lives and our history...
...The metaphor Wiesel uses is madness...
...Madmen often say they have mystical powers, and Wiesel may think so too...
...Pedro locates Raphael's brother, imprisoned in an insane asylum, and tries to rescue the brother for the sake of young Raphael, who needs someone to care for him...
...He has done this before in ?alman, Or The Madness of God (Random House, 1975...
...But the madmen in Twilight are not like any mad people I have ever known— they are ideal mad people, mystically mad people who are used as metaphors...
...Wiesel's non-fiction works such as Souls On Fire (Summit Books, 1982) and Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle Against Melancholy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1978) present the mystical tradition in which he was raised...
...He never told us it was a suicide mission...
Vol. 13 • October 1988 • No. 7
