Seeing Elie Wiesel Whole
STERN, DANIEL
Seeing Elie Wiesel Whole Twilight By Elie Wiesel Summit. 217pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Daniel Stern Novelist; short-story writer; Director of Humanities, 92nd Street Y, New York One of the...
...Stop this senseless project...
...And, throughout, there is the presence/absence of Pedro...
...After a brief period of silence, this figure begins to speak of the "mortal combat" in which day and night are perpetually engaged...
...I am trying to see if I can live with what I know and with what I believe," Wiesel might say...
...In his conversations with them one can trace the outlines of Wiesel's own Job-like questioning of a God who stands by while some among his children murder others—and their children...
...Merciful God, God of Love, where were you and where was your love when under the seal of blood and fire the killers obliterated thousands of Jewish communities...
...Raphael notices the pain his words have caused themadman/God:"Ithink I see tears rolling down the side of his face...
...It is not irrelevant, either, to point out that Wiesel's first play, done in 1975, is called Zalmen, or the Madness of God...
...Tinged with the despair and sense of guilt that haunts the Holocaust generation, the patients' words bring the age-old dialogue between the Jew and his God to its ultimate pitch...
...Now that he has spoken I know who he is...
...It is in their name that I speak to you...
...His Roads to Freedom novels are not uniformly excellent, nor does The Condemned of A Itona make for really compelling drama...
...I am trying to see if I can live only with what I know," said Camus...
...Face it...
...Close the book before you turn the first page...
...Noteworthy as well is a resident of the sanatorium named Zelig, whose thoughts turn endlessly to the sky...
...To read Elie Wiesel's work is to somehow join him in it...
...Yet he has been equally clear that man must continue to emulate Job by challenging God on the deepest levels—a point that is eloquently reiterated at the close of Twilight in perhaps its most moving scene...
...I am alone because he is alone...
...The patient who believes himself to be Cain is a particularly striking and original creation...
...Considering the evil he has known first hand, this would seem to be an astonishingly difficult task...
...Wiesel has long insisted that man must not shirk his duty to confront the forces of social and political evil so long as they poison earthly life...
...Wiesel magically weaves his obsession into both a parable of the Holocaust and a pastiche of a tale by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav...
...At the very last moment...
...How can you justify their suffering...
...His second was Dawn...
...Moreover, in the midst of his literary endeavors Sartre was also articulating a series of philosophical positions as well as pursuing a life of political action...
...Rather, it was seen as part of an ongoing enterprise, as the latest episode in a larger adventure...
...In his presence I feel alone...
...Raphael has recognized the sanatorium resident as the one who believes himself to be God...
...Elie Wiesel, like Sartre and Camus, stands in the European tradition of the man of letters...
...Why not before...
...in fact, we haven't made much progress in this respect since the time of Henry James...
...Sartre, to be sure, had his lapses...
...In Night—probably one of the dozen most influential volumes of the 20th century—the young protagonist, in the midst of a concentration-camp universe apparently deserted by God, implicitly relinquishes thousands of years of Jewish history to face a world without meaning...
...Wiesel's first novel, written in the mid-1950s, was of course entitled Night...
...But the French literary community, while politically partisan and unforgiving, never treated the appearance of a new work by Sartre or Camus—whether a novel, a play or a book of essays—as a discrete event...
...Here is a madman who believes he is God, and here I am, addressing him as if he were...' Ultimately, you come away from Twilight appreciating that, in a world where some indict God for evil and some man, Wiesel is almost alone in maintaining a charged tension in which both parties are held accountable...
...You thought man would be your glory, the jewel of your crown...
...It is proof of our limitations in assessing the output of a serious writer that we rarely, if ever, link Wiesel's fiction to hisstudies of the Hasidic masters, to his series of essays on the great Biblical figures, or to his reflections in treatises like The Jews of Silence or One Generation After...
...The context in which the work was appraised thus took in the author's thought as a whole, and indeed his life...
...Lipkin's quest takes him to the Mountain Clinic, a sanatorium in upstate New York that specializes in the treatment of mythomaniacal madmen—that is, people whose fantasies are organized around characters from the Bible or antiquity...
...Those looking for neatly packaged themes would be well advised to remember that each novel, play or essay by Wiesel is part of a larger whole that is still unfolding...
...Unplacated, Raphael bursts out, all toohumanly: "Why didn't you save my parents, my brothers, my sisters, my friends...
...He also made a courageous but abortive attempt to free Yoel from a Soviet prison—or did he...
...There Pedro helped the hero retain his sanity, too, and the novel's motto, "I have a plan...
...All of the author's major themes come together in this portrait of a middle-aged professor of mystical traditions, Raphael Lipkin, who is searching for his legendary "friend," Pedro...
...Raphael, about to leave the Mountain Clinic, goes out into the garden at dusk...
...One need only add that Wiesel's " message" is not a simple one...
...Benedictus, the director, that he wishes to do research on "the relationship between madness and prophecy, between the madmen of the Bible and today's madmen, their diverse responses to their common despair...
...Yet it is not guilt that possesses him, but a dignified sense of absolute justice...
...Contributing to the hallucinatory quality of Raphael's stay at the Mountain Clinic are his encounters with the madmen there...
...Director of Humanities, 92nd Street Y, New York One of the deep mysteries of American intellectual life is its continuing insularity...
...The only son of a Cleveland industrialist, he is fixated on the idea that he once had a brother whom he murdered...
...To this the madman/God replies: "Can you tell me at what precise moment I should have intervened to keep the children from being thrown into the flames...
...It was the anonymous caller's hint that evidence for this could somehow be found at the Mountain Clinic that led Raphael there in the first place...
...so is Tiara, Raphael's untamable ex-wife...
...Man is your failure...
...Vivid memories are evoked of the Jewish ghetto in the tiny Galician town of Rovidok where he was born...
...In 1986 Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize...
...A member of Briha, the unit dispatched from Palestine after World War II to rescue survivors of theHolocaust, Pedro brought Raphael from Rovidok to the safety of Paris and helped heal his psychic wounds...
...It is embodied in the complex, contradictory and poetic forms of many works that reveal a tapestry of concerns...
...Compared to the great literary cultures—of England or France or preStalin Russia—we have not come very far along the road to understanding the man of letters...
...In France, Voltaire and Rousseau were models of the man of letters in the 18th century, Sartre and Camus in modern times...
...Despite feelings of sympathy, Raphael questions the madman severely, as if actually speaking to God: "I have seen men suffer, I have seen children die...
...of his brother Yoel, who followed his beloved to the Soviet Union and pretended madness to escape —perhaps actually going mad in the process...
...He is not "merely" a writer on the Holocaust...
...But when is 'before...
...What he adumbrated in The Stranger was refined in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus and in plays such as The Visitor and Caligula, then painfully undermined in his last novel, The Fall...
...One assumes that the Pedro who hovers in the background of Twilight is the same character who appeared as an inmate of a Soviet prison in Wiesel's novel The Town Beyond the Wall, written more than two decades ago...
...of his other brother Ezra, who loved birds as much as people...
...But the roots of Twilight go back even further...
...He will not allow the quarrel man has with God, and God with man, let either off the hook...
...Ezra, with his gently mad affinity for birds, and Yoel, who takes on the persona of Jeremiah in "confessing" to a Soviet court, are unforgettable...
...I tell myself, this suffering is human, not divine...
...Give up your illusions...
...Besides making plain as never before the thematic unity of Wiesel's work, Twilight contains some of the author's richest characterization in years...
...It is agreed that he will stay three months and work in the library...
...Now, some 30 books later, he has continued the progression...
...The protagonist of Dawn, set in British-occupied Palestine, is given the task of carrying out a reprisal killing against a British soldier—making the Jew the actor in history rather than the acted-upon...
...But Nausea is a major achievement, both as a novel and as an expression of existentialist ideas, and No Exit is, in my opinion, a first-rate play...
...I am alone as he is alone...
...Fortunately for us, Wiesel has done the job himself in his new novel, Twilight...
...He does not introduce himself," relates Raphael...
...and of the mysterious Pedro, whose fate Raphael is seeking to discover...
...I'm speaking of the kind of man who embodies in his career a special address to spiritual, social and/or moral values, and who develops his themes by employing many, if not all, of the forms available: the novel, the essay, poetry, drama...
...The judges' statement is worth quoting: "Wiesel is a messenger to mankind...
...To go mad," from Dostoyevsky, foreshadowed the present work...
...His message is one of peace and atonement and human dignity...
...Raphael's visit to the sanatorium proves to be a journey through his past...
...And in Twilight, Raphael examines the horrors of what God and man did in the Holocaust...
...The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author...
...He does not have to...
...Camus, too, used a variety of approaches to elaborate his moral and philosophical outlook as he passionately navigated a course through difficult waters...
...Here, for example, is Adam—or rather the patient who is convinced he is Adam: "Listen God, what I am about to tell you is for your own good...
...Moreover, Wiesel's literary oeuvre must be seen in the context of his life as a teacher and a human rights activist...
...still another imagines he is the Messiah...
...Only Raphael is uncertain of his identity...
...You make me laugh...
...One patient believes he is Abraham...
...According to a shadowy figure who repeatedly telephones Raphael, Pedro was in reality a Soviet collaborator and informer...
...Finding a bench, he sits down, aware that there is a man seated at the other end...
...Yet Americans have by and large received his novels as individual efforts falling into the genus of Holocaust literature (although most of them do not, except inferentially...
...another, Cain...
...he is a man of letters addressing the theological and human tragedies of modern times in a variety of literary voices...
...He comes to the Mountain Clinic under false pretenses, telling Dr...
Vol. 71 • September 1988 • No. 15
