In Search of Redemption
WIESEL, ELIE
In Search of Redemption Master of the Return By Tova Reich Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 240 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Elie Wiesel Winner, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize; author, "Souls on Fire, "...
...Or his apparent lack of affection for the wife and children he left, almost destitute, because he insisted on going to the Holy Land...
...His tales are among the most beautiful, the most overwhelming, in Hasidic literature...
...To understand the impact Rabbi Nachman had on his circle, one must read the stories about him and those he told himself...
...Not all have the past they had...
...Ivriya's accident...
...Not all are asocial, maladjusted, fanatics...
...Everything is strange in this novel and everything is mixed up: erotic memories and messianic prayers, false passports and real arrests, biblical citations and mystical references...
...Sora Katz, born Pam Buck of Macon, for whom the Bratslaver community was worth all the psychoanalysts in the world...
...Ivriya, his voluptuous friend, formerly his spouse, his widow...
...His followers are called "dead Hasidim...
...Or his distrust of doctors...
...Certainly, Hasidism is something different, and that of Bratslav even more so...
...It's normal...
...A heavenly chastisement...
...The scatterbrained, bizarre characters, disgusted by earthly life, search for a way to make it pure...
...He still is...
...Of course, the reader should be careful...
...We turn the pages, we leave one narration and discover the next one, we are taken by the rhythm of the language and by the imagination of the storyteller...
...The reason...
...A retired thief, Shyke Pfeffer...
...And to Uve in Uman House in Israel these former adventurers have abandoned sexuality, drugs, wealth and security...
...No one succeeded him upon his death...
...Why has Tova Reich chosen Bratslav as the place to meet these characters...
...Rami Marom's bigamy...
...But her people are connected by their adventures to our century, to our generation...
...one leaves enchanted...
...One admires his outlook on the world, his passion for the mystery of redemption...
...Translated from the French by Martha Liptzin Hauptman...
...A beautiful story is a beautiful story, and Tova Reich has given us a gift smiling: How can we not thank her for it...
...Their behavior is not the same, neither is their lifestyle...
...it is there that he was buried...
...Shmuel, an ex-hippy...
...It is in Uman in the Ukraine that Rabbi Nachman died at the age of 38...
...One must remember all this to fully savor Tova Reich's very engaging novel...
...it is because their Master was an exceptional spiritual leader...
...To visit his grave, his followers are ready to risk their freedom and life itself...
...Why did they choose Bratslaver Hasidism...
...This complex personality, afraid of neither paradox nor danger, this greatgrandson of the Movement's founder (the Baal Shem-Tov), lived an unbalanced, turbulent life full of "breathtaking falls and ascents"—as he himself put it—while confronted by a solitude that he feared and at the same time desired...
...Clearly the author wanted to write a tale à la Rabbi Nachman, and most of her heroes could claim a relationship with him...
...Then there is Abba Nissim, former friend of terrorists in prison...
...One enters them as in a dream...
...But who cares...
...An understandable phenomenon: Having reached the limits of pleasure, they sought something else—elsewhere...
...She has found here a subject worthy of her talent...
...By no means shocking in context...
...Not all the Hasidim of Bratslav are like the penitents in this novel...
...There is nothing astonishing about his followers feeling a loyalty for him that makes them beings set apart...
...Stories contain stories...
...Oscillating between despair and ecstasy, he has inspired his disciples to share his taste for adventure and his need to invent for himself a universe inhabited by princes and madmen: Rabbi Nachman is the celebration of the Hasidic imagination, the apotheosis of the word become song...
...The language is rich and poetic, and often penetrated with humor...
...These penitents live and dream and breathe Bratslav, or to be more precise, Uman...
...How to explain his disputes with his peers...
...How could a Jewish writer not love Rabbi Nachman...
...Because for them Rabbi Nachman is still alive...
...And Reb Lev Lurie, who was haloed by a strange light...
...one loves his gift for storytelling, and is attracted by his anguish as much as by his way of fighting anguish...
...Even today, to his disciples, he remains the Master...
...We understand...
...They looked for meaning in life, for eternal truth, for the link uniting beings to what transcends them...
...In fact, they would have been just as able to adhere to one of the pseudoreligious cults which, some years ago, wreaked havoc across the Western world...
...The most incredible events unfold completely naturally: Shmuel's disappearance, the discovery of his corpse, his nocturnal burial in Safed by his faithful friends whom he had known and who knew him before their decision to abandon immediate pleasures, to break with the illusions of society, and to live the life and the destiny of penitents...
...Nothing surprises us...
...author, "Souls on Fire, " "Four Hasidic Masters," "Twilight" Exalted and exalting, troubled and troubling, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav remains one of the great Masters of the Hasidic movement...
...Perhaps the answer is quite simply that their creator, Tova Reich, loves Rabbi Nachman...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 9
