Echoes of the Silenced

...Kossover is one of the relatively minor victims of the mad and dying Stalin, who in a single day in 1952 destroyed nearly all of the Soviet Union's great Yiddishwriters...

...Thanks to artists like Elie Wiesel, "the dead are not mute...

...This makes things a little difficult for the few novelists still dedicated enough or tactless enough to resolutely address such intractable subjects as the Holocaust, the Gulag, or any of the less conspicuous acts of terror, torture, degradation and genocide that governments and individuals are at this moment visiting upon their fellows...

...He seeks to use his talent and indeed his life to fill in for all those of our century who have been prematurely silenced...

...His religious upbringing is derailed by a revolutionary fervor that dwindles into compromise and opportunism as the Revolution creates its own Tsars, and worse...

...Today, I know I cannot...

...In the process we also learn why he himself will not let go of our buttonhole...

...And it does so from the vantage point of Jewish mysticism as homely and unstudied as brushing one's teeth...

...They constitute our sanctifying window on a world racked by a diminishing sense of consequences...

...But Wiesel's artless art, the sheer authority of his own personality in a modest role early on, compel one to believe the story absolutely...

...Like nearly all of Wiesel's stories and novels of the past two decades, except on a more ambitious scale, The Testament chronicles a European Jew who tries, as a Jew, to survive in the toxic environments of the 20th century...

...And yet...

...He sums it up on the first page, in an anecdote he quotes from his earlier One Generation After...

...An impossible task, of course, an act of hubris, an invitation to mockery...

...One feels all the more grateful, therefore, to a Solzhenitsyn or, in this case, to Elie Wiesel...

...In the end, though, Kossover comes to the devastating realization that even if the suffering shared by Jews and Russians in their common victory over the Nazis has not erased the age-old disease of the Russian spirit...

...Yet somehow the poem's stark imagery and moral earnestness have been engraved on our collective imagination...

...One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment...

...Where readers of an earlier age seemed quite prepared to offer up their outrage, their anxieties, their very tears to the teller of a good story, however, our own generation, whether from moral exhaustion or a sheer surfeit of sensory input, hesitates to allow the mere novelist more than token access to its emotions...

...The Ancient Mariner's example shows that brute ability to seize our unwilling attention matters less than irresistible sincerity combined with a story-teller's skill in making us, for the duration of the tale, virtual partners in his obsession...

...Reviewed by Shimon Wincelberg Playwright, "Resort 76," "The Windows of Heaven" Having had some experience with button holers, I never did believe that the Ancient Mariner could have held the weddings guests he ambushed a moment longer than it would have taken to walk around him...

...Irony is what he reserves for almost casual asides: "In war, all people become Jews without realizing it...

...Similarly, Wiesel's courage in being at times overtly sentimental reminds us that there is much in life to be sentimental about, that occasionally we need to let ourselves simply feel, without irony, without cynicism, without objectivity...

...That seems to me to capture Elie Wiesel's own propulsive force...

...I have written this novel to restore their deaths to them and to imagine what their lives might have been," Wiesel tells us...

...The predigested summaries purveyed by the media are sufficient unto the day in giving us our thumbnail survey of current horrors...

...If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me...

...The supernatural becomes comprehensible and necessary to us-if only we too could learn to view it through the eyes of the poet, the eccentric or the child...

...There follow some decades of trying, desperately or cynically, to keep alive merely as a human being and a poet, no longer as a Jew...

...He responds, "In the beginning, I thought I could change man...

...There is a prologue about Kossover's mute son, whose first night in Jerusalem impels him only to sit down and write...

...Kossover's career is presumably typical for Russian-Jewish intellectuals of his generation...

...But "the killers went on killing, the wise kept silent," and a compassionate child finally asks the Just Man, "You shout, you scream, don't you see that it is hopeless...

...At the same time, by some literary Gresham's Law, these very subjects in less serious hands have already been reduced to a sub-genre of the international thriller...

...Racial arrogance and rigid conformism persist, vying with Soviet Man's paradoxically undiminished sense of inferiority and paranoia about the power of the written word...

...Is he too a poet...

...even if nobody reads it, its content is transmitted...

...That statement may betoken an absurd faith in the possibility of a purely mystical transaction between writer and reader on Kossover's (or Wiesel's) part...

...The dead," he says, "are not mute...

...The characters live in a world where those in literal search of the Messiah are ordinary fellow-travelers one may encounter on a train to Paris, not patronized figments of pop legend on a trendy excursion through a Disneyland of the Other World...

...The Testament, sensitively translated by Marion Wiesel, is the history of early 20th-century Europe recollected in the moral freedom of a death cell by a broken and disillusioned Communist who, with all else stripped from him, stumbles back into being an honest writer and a defiant Jew...

...In place of his father...

...Or consider the rueful line with which Paltiel Kossover, the book's belatedly heroic hero, is characterized by his Russian wife to their son: "He thought everything could be accomplished through words...

...We read such men, I suspect, not because they tell us things we don't already know in a general way, but because at their best they make us truly care about their people, piercing us with details that reawaken some of the nerve-endings of our own long-numbed humanity...

...And yet, more often than not he successfully restores a faint echo of millions of lost voices without ever exploiting either them or us...

...As he informs his son in the coerced autobiography that constitutes the bulk of this novel, "Like all the writings of prisoners, it will rot in the secret archives...

...No, not like his father...

...The trigger-happy old sailor has in fact set the pattern for the committed writer of our own disheveled century...

...While some of his previous tales may at times have lacked narrative momentum, the wonder of his company, whether as a minor protagonist or a witness or a detached narrator, has always been to make us see and feel the preciousness of life with a child's matter-of-fact anticipation of something miraculous that could happen at any moment...

...The escaped Nazi war criminal and the superhuman terrorist fill in where once mad scientist and master spy reigned supreme...