ELIE WIESEL AND THE HOLOCAUST

...What is the aim, God, death, freedom...

...But they, for some reason, want to give answers, maybe because we need answers...

...His body was so emaciated that it did not weigh enough to help him to die...

...in all my language I pledge that what I say is what I think...

...Each of us can, very naturally, assemble a personal roster of such doubts and while a list like this can be an amusement, it has its roots in very serious philosophic ground...

...He receives it from the word, which carries its suffering and its hope within it...

...I'm afraid of anyone who comes with a theory, a system, based on that experience...

...What matters is to choose at the risk of being defeated...

...In Night Wiesel tells of seeing a young boy hanged...

...The writer witnesses a son murder his own father in order to steal bread from the old man's mouth...

...Wiesel's works, then, like those of other important Holocaust writers, be they diarists, chroniclers, playwrights, novelists, or poets, are not so much lamentations as they are deeds...

...harry james CAROAs, a professor of English at Webster College in St...

...The questions that Adam asked when he was alive we are still repeating...

...If I use these ideas so often, it's because I relate them to our generation and to our experience...

...What divides people is not the question, it is the answer...

...Those who write a type of literature of frustration raise their questions from that frustration...

...Language then belongs to the very marrow of the body of faith...

...We may go to Japan, too, and read Yukio Mi-shima whose final and major work, the tetralogy titled The Sea of Fertility, ends with Honda, the person through whom the action is filtered to us, being staggered concerning the il-lusoriness of life...

...Was there a Howard Hughes...

...The answers are all temporary, while those who give the answers see them as eternal...

...This philosophy must inevitably affect the author's style...

...What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God...

...Clearly," the young man said to our class, "the kinds of things described as happening in Boss can't be historically true they must spring from the author's imagination...

...but he nevertheless must not be destructive in a silent way...

...Again the reaction: "I was fifteen years old...

...In an interview which forms the basis for my book Conversations with Elie Wiesel, I asked Wiesel about his idea that questions are more important than answers...

...In a novel like Jealousy, Alain Robbe-Grillet can give us detail after descriptive detail and when we close the book we cannot be certain that any of the events related ever happened...

...Because answers divide, are incomplete, are lies, one response to the mysteries of existence is silence...

...In a novel, one character insists that "The essence of man is to be a question, and the essence of the question is to be without answer...

...I believe the experience was above and beyond theories and systems and philosophies...

...But are the characters any less real than the novelist himself, who is simply a construction of Queneau's...

...We are asked to risk with Wiesel and the others rather than despair alone...

...So Wiesel says that "the act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who before I could tell them I loved them, went away...

...They live out the teaching of the Rabbi in Wiesel's drama Zalmen, or the Madness of God: "God requires of man not that he live, but that he choose to live...

...Eugene Heimler said it remarkably: there were "messages I had to deliver to the living from the dead...

...This is not something negative but rather a kind of prayer, a listening to God...

...Of their dead, burnt bodies I would be the voice...

...The basic questions are always the same: What am I doing here...

...He accompanies the words which accompany him...

...Edmond Jabes, a Jew born in Egypt, now writing in Paris, has said so succinctly, "God is a questioning God...

...Wiesel ends one of his non-fiction volumes by saying that silence, ". . . demands to be recognized and transmitted...

...He questions the words which question him...

...The answers change and are being revised...

...His has been called a literature of silence...

...They can be distinguished from the writings of Robbe-Grillet, Ionesco, Beckett, and others because they are acts of faith even as questions because those questions are addressed to God rather than being images of absurdity...

...Beyond this, Wiesel would agree with Jabes on the seriousness of the writer's work...

...Or there is the Borges of "The Circular Ruins" whose main character is horrified to learn "that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another...

...The transmission is, of course, of ultimate importance for many survivors of the Holocaust...

...When it is suggested that the man whose history Honda was observing, through several incarnations, probably never existed, he utters, in despair: "If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao...

...Question, I think, comes from the word 'quest.' If people were to share their quest and make it a common quest, there could be a better time, a better fate, a better society...

...In a way their attitude of faith has been summed up by Elie Wiesel in his cantata Ani Ma'amin: ". . . the silence of God is God...

...Can the events of the Watergate affair have actually occurred...

...Here is his response...

...Raymond Queneau goes further in, for example, The Flight of Icarus, when he has a novelist search for characters he has created who have jumped off his page, incarnated themselves, and begin to interact with his real friends...

...Again Wiesel provides some clues...

...the list is at once unfortunately and fortunately very long...

...So should Carlos Fuentes of Mexico whose novella, Aura, finds a young historian coming to the realization that the young woman he thinks he is making love to in bed is actually his employer, in her nineties, who has projected an image onto him in order to keep him in her employ...

...An example or two may be in order...

...Yes, they are because the questions remain...

...In that same book we read of a cattle car experience...

...What's the truth about Mylai...

...How then do they understand this minimal breaking of silence...

...Wiesel presents this view in a number of his works...

...I am suspicious...

...And again, in one of his novels: "In taking a single word by assault it is possible to discover the secret of creation, the center where all threads come together...

...He fears having said too much, perhaps thus cheapening what he wishes to commemorate...

...As Wiesel has noted in a work composed of spiritual biographies of Hasidic teachers, ". . . some words are as important as deeds some words are deeds...

...according to the code and game and life of language I make a pledge and expect belief not belief in what I say, for we expect to find out that we are fools or stupid or mistaken, but belief that what I say is what I think...

...This will remind us of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s intrusion into his own novel, Breakfast of Champions, in order to give one of the characters, Kilgore Trout, his freedom...

...In the autobiographical book Night, we read the words of Moche\ the mystically mad seer: "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks . . ." This same person says a moment later, "I pray to God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions...

...Contemporary literature certainly reflects this...

...Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writing in a kind of heightened magical realism, particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude (perhaps Spanish America's greatest novel), must be mentioned...

...About his own reaction the author has but seven words: 'That night the soup tasted of corpses...

...What is the purpose of my life...

...What remains is the question: How, What and Why...

...These writers intuited what Jesuit critic William F. Lynch has articulated regarding the sanctity of language language as gift laid at the divine altar...

...There is one genre, however, which, while also positing doubt, if we may say it that way, by questioning God rather than persons, heaven rather than the world, actually concludes with a kind of hope which may be opposed to the despair of a Mishima, a Vonnegut, or a Robbe-Grillet...

...Louis, is the author of several books, most recently...

...The purpose of my meeting people...

...My generation has been robbed of everything, even of our cemeteries...

...This genre has been labeled Holocaust Literature...

...We are grimly reminded of what is probably the best known work by Nobel poet Nelly Sachs, "O, the Chimneys...

...Where is Jimmy Hoffa...

...The killer is, in turn, beaten to death by others...

...In Conversation with Elie Wiesel (Paulist Press...

...Silence, for Wiesel, is beyond language, beyond lies...

...all language is public and a public act...

...I don't want theories...

...Not to write, for Wiesel, as for so many other survivors of Hitler's camps, would be a betrayal...

...There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I." The questions proliferate in modern literature concerning the meaning of life, the meaning of humanity...

...In writing, the contributor to Holocaust Literature is acting out a destiny...

...If it hadn't t een for answers, there would have been no wars...

...He told me, "I don't have the right not to communicate...

...Those experiences of which I try to speak have no answers, should have no answers...

...And of course there are so many other writers who can be cited here: There is Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges who, in a parable, "Borges and I" can observe at its conclusion, "I do not know which one of us has written this page...

...Hence divisions, dissensions, wars, death...

...Some are more strident, recalling the "atheist" Bendrix in Graham Greene's Catholic novel The End of the Affair who, after the woman he loves is lost in death, metaphorically shakes his fist at a God he has been denying and says these words which close the book: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever...

...It may be less than a giant step from doubt in man to faith in God...

...All the real questions stay basically the same...

...Much else in contemporary affairs has been likewise suspect by at least some in our society: Did we really place men on the moon...

...Wiesel too is obsessed with being such a bearer...

...In his critical work Language and Silence, George Steiner parallels Wiesel profoundly: "It is just because we can go no further, because speech so precisely fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours...

...Wiesel and others, on the contrary, see in their queries the very basis of life...

...He feels his responsibility to the dead...

...I believe in the writer's mission...

...He knows what every Jew knows, that for 6,000,000 victims it will be impossible to say the memorial Kaddish at their graves because either the sites are unknown or there are no graves...

...In another of Wiesel's novels we read, "Only the questions matter...

...They go and come back and go and come back, to infinity...

...Perhaps the best illustration of this is found in the work of a man who progressed from the night of Auschwitz to at least the ap-proachables of faith (for, after all, who can say that one truly has belief) Elie Wiesel...

...We must not conclude, however, that the questions asked of God by Wiesel, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Jakov Lind, Andre Schwarz-Bart, Emmanuel Ringelblum, Lena Donat, Joset Bor and so many others are necessarily far removed from the doubts of Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sar-raute, Michael Butor, Jean Cayrol, Robert Antelme, Fuentes, Severo Sar-duy, and still others...

...For over half an hour he continued swaying, struggling between life and death...

...The authors of this literature, particularly those who are survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, sometimes demand answers from God, sometimes scold, defy, rebel against God, but most seem to voice their doubts within a context that admits of God's existence...

...the answers change...

...In his book The Jews of Silence Wiesel distinguishes between constructive silence illustrated by the praying Jews of Russia and the destructive silence of Jews throughout the world who refuse to act on behalf of their suffering brothers and sisters...

...Wiesel has chosen, Sachs has chosen, Levi has chosen, Donat has chosen, Bor has chosen...

...Practitioners of le nouveau roman in France are obsessed by the question of how reality is perceived...