The Perfect Metaphor
STERN, DANIEL
The Perfect Metaphor The Forgotten By Elie Wiesel Translated from the French by Stephen Becker Summit. 237pp. $21.00. Reviewed by Daniel Stern Author, "Twice Told Tales" The great master of...
...Malkiel's ascent into knowledge and forgiveness...
...He recalls not only days and years but instants and their total texture...
...At the end of her life, Isak Dinesen wrote, in Biblical parody and tribute: "I will not let you go, my life, unless you bless me...
...He is startled to see his own name on the tilted tombstone: Malkiel ben Elhanan Rosenbaum...
...Elhanan Rosenbaum, a survivor of the War who is a psychotherapist and teacher, is being gradually invaded by the horror of forgetting...
...They range from gentle moments of his father's childhood long ago, to fierce reconstructions of Elhanan's days as a prisoner in the Hungarian forced labor battalion on the Russian front, to his fighting in the Palestine underground...
...The illness carries with it the threat of completely annihilating the past...
...So you insist on keeping all your wounds open?' Those wounds exist...
...Since Elhanan's memory is being erased, where is God in this matter...
...it is therefore forbidden and unhealthy to pretend that they don't...
...Indeed, if one were to sum up Wiesel's thrust, one would say it is to give both suffering and memory meaning...
...And I who speak to you cannot say more, for" There the sentence and the novel break off...
...To Elhanan, a man much given to dwelling in the past, the prospect is devastating...
...By the time we get to his third book, The Accident, the hero is stepping in front of a speeding cab in order to still the flow of painful images from the past...
...In Elie Wiesel our time has a Funes with a difference...
...As he is about to take a sip, he remembers that his father is fasting until sundown...
...It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiba...
...But then, I will let you go...
...They were right...
...Or Old Haskel, the ruler of the ritual baths, preacher and messenger of the unbelievable catastrophe...
...Even as I speak to you I tell myself that you will discover in your own way what my lips cannot say...
...As the disease advances, the father sends the son to Romania to search out memory at its site...
...an act of courage both in thought and esthetics...
...Elhanan's descent through the shards of memory into his illness and the madness of despair...
...The first comes early in the book, when Malkiel encounters a young German woman he knows near Times Square...
...The paradox is complete...
...Thus what has become a Wiesel hallmark, the tender father-son relationship, here takes on possibly its ultimate dimension as Elhanan starts to sketch a portrait of his little native town in the Carpathian mountains of Romania...
...even when that involves a profound charge of pain and loss...
...Repeatedly it is made clear that only by sustaining memory of the past in its most intense form may one aspire to the possibilities of ongoing life...
...She suggests a cup of coffee...
...For a Jew nothing is more important than memory...
...Simultaneously there is often a struggle with a God who remained silent during the killing...
...From then on, the son's discoveries vary...
...It is a secret that should only be encountered at the moment it is revealed in the novel, not in a review...
...The double journey...
...Your temple was destroyed 2,000 years ago and you're grieving today!' Yes, as if it happened only yesterday...
...He does not rest with the presentation of Elhanan as a stricken survivor...
...But in the end Wiesel's quarrel is not between nations, it is between man and God...
...That doesn't matter, my son...
...No,' she cried...
...Hope wins, but not without cost...
...I have chosen two brief samples...
...All she had to do was toss her thick head of hair, and her gloomy friends perked up...
...Reviewed by Daniel Stern Author, "Twice Told Tales" The great master of tales and their memories, Jorge Luis Borges, tells in "Funes the Memorious" of a man who remembers everything he has ever experienced...
...Is that why I still cannot recall the essential thing that I want so much to pass on to you, Malkiel...
...She rejected their gloom: 'I refuse to see you like that...
...Malkiel's travels have their own reverberations, too...
...And there is a continuous oscillation between despair and hope...
...Cheer up or I go.'" She is a won-derful counterpoint to the melancholy Elhanan...
...As Wiesel's enterprise continues, though, memory becomes more blessing than curse...
...In The Gates of the Forest the protagonist battles with a wonder Rabbi in an effort to evade the need for remembering...
...One of the many things the son learns about is the first meeting of his father and his dead mother after the War in a DP camp: "Her name was Talia and she trailed happiness in her wake...
...least of all, perhaps, God...
...It's human nature to forget what hurts you, isn't it?' Yes, but the Jews live by other rules...
...Funes' destiny is tragic...
...God cannot be so cruel as to erase everything forever...
...Wiesel has rarely exhibited greater skill as a fiction writer than in The Forgotten, which has been eloquently translated from the French by Stephen Becker...
...In The Forgotten he has found the perfect metaphor: Alzheimer's disease...
...They say that before dying a man sees his whole past...
...is an extraordinary achievement...
...Its framework of pain and tension would be unbearable were it not for the appearance of people like Tamar, Malkiel's girlfriend, a feisty, impassioned Times reporter who defends the rights of the Palestinians and drives him wild...
...A repeated refrain in Wiesel's first book about Auschwitz, that haunting masterpiece Night, is the phrase "never will I forget...
...He refuses and explains why...
...Wiesel's early novels often present a struggle of the walking wounded of the Holocaust to throw off the bonds of memory, in order to resume living in the present...
...The son's quest results in the uncovering of a secret source of the guilt that is suffered by so many who managed to outlive the Holocaust, and that accounts for Elhanan's lifelong sadness...
...A revelatory conversation between a young German and a young Jew...
...He has developed nothing less than a new definition of the human being: The "humanity" of humankind may be located in the passionate clinging to memory...
...Yet because it is all encased in a moving story of discovery, it makes sense in these pages...
...In this, one of his finest novels, Elie Wiesel has wrestled with the angel of loss and memory, and even though it has blessed him, he has not let go...
...If He were, He would not be our father, and nothing would make sense...
...Not I. All I see is bursts and fragments...
...particularly his encounter with a charming, subtle woman named Lidia who acts as his guide in Romania...
...If he denies memory he will have denied his own honor...
...In fact, the novel opens stunningly with Malkiel's discovering his grandfather's grave in the old Jewish cemetery of the tiny village the family had called home...
...It is Tisha b'Av, the day of fasting in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem...
...no mortal frame can bear the burden of such recall: He dies young, ancient with memory...
...It is impossible to convey the sense of so ambitious a book without quotation...
...I doubt he ever will...
...You can't be serious...
...Panicked, he turns to his son, Mal-kiel, a journalist working at the New York Times, and begins to make him the repository of his memories...
...a writer for whom memory is the connective tissue that holds together sou] and body, father and son, generation and generation, perhaps even man and God...
...A lot of people have told me the Jews were crazy,' she said...
...To deprive suffering of its memory is to deprive it of its significance...
...But perhaps that is because I am not yet going to die, not physically at any rate...
...The novel concludes with a passage of superb honesty, sparing no one...
...In more than 30 books of fiction and philosophical speculation, Wiesel has expanded the notion of the sacredness of memory into an almost metaphysical mode...
...It is a fine touch of irony that Malkiel's primary job at the newspaper is that of rewrite man for the obituary page...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
