Voice from the Graveyard
WIESEL, ELIE
Voice from the Graveyard BLOOD FROM THE SKY By Piotr Rawicz Harcourt, Brace & World 315 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by ELIE WIESEL Author, "Night" It is only with tears or blasphemy that one...
...Piotr Rawicz is neither Camus nor Kafka nor SchwartzBart—he is Piotr Rawicz...
...Standing before the grave filled with corpses, he does not recite the Kaddish...
...Blood from the Sky has been acclaimed in Europe, and its author has been compared to Kafka and Camus...
...And he sheds no tears...
...If you have courage and stamina (for you will need them), read the book from beginning to end—although, properly speaking, it has neither...
...The blood in this book is his, and so is the sky...
...Cohen, lovely young Naomi, the scholar Hillel: Boris is not content merely to evoke their images, and thus inflict wounds...
...His vision of the holocaust sets him apart from other writers...
...The book's protagonist is walking across a Europe in flames...
...From time to time, the narrator breaks off suddenly and begins to sing, for no apparent reason and about anything at all—a song of angry hurt, of pent-up grief, of rebellion against God's madness and against man's...
...There is nothing new under the sky...
...It is his own story that he tells, his own song that he lets us hear, his own life that he presents to us—pushed to the farthest limit of intensity...
...He imitates no one, and he reminds us of no one...
...His novel, written in French, was awarded the Prix Rivarol in 1961...
...Children smiling as they calmly await death...
...It is Rawicz who stands before us...
...In doing so he has conveyed to us, without distortion, the meaning and magnitude of the suffering undergone by those who did not survive the holocaust...
...Strictly speaking, the story could be described as autobiographical, and that would account at least partly for its inner resonance...
...It is the testimony of a man who humorously mocks death and is himself mocked by it...
...In a voice that is harsh and almost unfeeling, the narrator paints terrifying scenes...
...The atmosphere is profoundly Jewish, at once nostalgic and restless...
...Somewhere in time, Sodom is already in flames, and nothing of it will survive...
...Boris watches and listens...
...Then he becomes aware of his guilt and also of his futility...
...Around him, people are dying silently or with a question on their Ups, turning toward exaltation or oblivion...
...And at each step we confront the mystery of the people which has shed its blood for 2.000 years and finds history's thirst still unslaked...
...Nothing is yet stirring, or perhaps it should be said that nothing is stirring any longer, for death is already at work...
...The witness remains the same, and the prophet as well...
...The narrator's voice might be that of a prophet, foresaken and alone, who no longer knows day from night...
...The tears of the dying and the killer's grin...
...he refuses to take his place among them...
...Piotr Rawicz has made his choice...
...He lives in the 20th century...
...They bear his mark, his flame, his secret—and the fate of that secret...
...The Germans were unaware of his origin—it is to that small detail that he owes his life...
...Together they stroll about the graveyard, which stretches endlessly into the distance...
...Reviewed by ELIE WIESEL Author, "Night" It is only with tears or blasphemy that one can speak of the death of a Jewish community which was betrayed by both heaven and earth...
...Some passages in the book read like Hasidic legends...
...The poet, however, has been able to transmute his personal suffering into a larger experience, his sense of defeat into a vision...
...Whether the enemy is Nebuchadnezzar or Titus, Torquemada or Hitler, he remains the same, as does his victim...
...Nothing of what had hitherto been used had meaning any longer...
...Read it, and you will understand that Boris' tragedy did not begin with him...
...It is more than that, and something else as well...
...but his voice seems to come to us from a remote past...
...It is almost as though they were accomplices, as though the massacre occurs only because Boris is there looking on...
...The impact is not in what Rawicz tells but in how he tells it...
...It is the chaos of the day which preceded or followed the creation of the world...
...What takes place in the book...
...Life—or what the living call life —outside the ghetto...
...His name is Boris...
...But who is Rawicz...
...After the liberation, he went to France, where he studied Oriental languages at the Sorbonne...
...It is a challenge, not an act of submission...
...He is, without a doubt, virtually alone among Jewish writers in being able to read both Yiddish and Sanskrit...
...You will understand, too, that after Auschwitz there is no longer anything to understand, for reason itself was drowned in the blood from the sky...
...That in itself would be enough to earn him our admiration and gratitude...
...His book is a shout, not an echo...
...he brings them back to life and flings open the portals of the hallucinatory world he is creating...
...the blood always gushes from the same source...
...And also so that he may laugh...
...He tells a story — and basically it is an old story...
...a song against song itself...
...He does so in order to remember rather than in order to understand...
...Life—or what passes for life—in the ghetto...
...Boris tells what he sees around him...
...Round about, his friends are departing, but he makes them return...
...Born in the Ukraine—like his hero—and now 45 years old, the author experienced Auschwitz and Birkenau...
...Boris is Rawicz...
...It is the atmosphere that lends the tale its power and authenticity...
...Rawicz lived in the time of the mass murders, and he realized that to describe that time he would have to invent a new language...
...Is it a novel he has written...
...Jews buried alive, with only their heads visible—perhaps so that the sun may be reflected in their eyes one last time before it fades...
...In fact, however, he eludes comparison...
...Rawicz's book is like a mythical tale in which man and God vie to see which of the two can spill more Jewish blood...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 10
