Parables of a Survivor

...He has spoken out forcefully against nuclear madness (in the event of nuclear war, "we are all Jews," he famously declared), and passionately on behalf of children in Biafra...

...Mixed into my sadness there was undeniable excitement, for we were living a historic event, a historic adventure...

...Then he tried the offices of the Right-wing Irgun, and was given a job by the Revisionist Zionist newspaper lion in Kamf...

...As if by congenital reflex, he converted everything immediate or unfolding into a story...

...He seems to have witnessed in the miracle of Israel's birth the simultaneous sowing of the seeds of self-destruction...

...Far away...

...Yet this too makes sense: Wiesel's memoir is not about what happened during those 11 months, but about how they shaped his life afterward, how they have been remembered, how he has lived in their shadow...

...The dropping of names, on the other hand, does not bother me in the least...

...But the paradox of his being a commercially successful moral conscience of the world is not lost on him...

...In June 1945, on arriving at the chateau in Ecouis operated by the children's rescue society of France, the 17-year old Elie borrowed a pen and began a private journal: "After the War, by the grace of God, blessed be His name, here I am in France...

...it is a remarkably self-reflexive if not always self-revealing memoir...

...Indeed, given his Bible-, history- and story-saturated early education, it is not surprising that he often "felt as though [he] were reliving a page of medieval Jewish history...

...If so, I have no memory of it...

...Later on, his descriptions of the media elite in New York betray a more skeptical, world-weary tone and content...

...In Wiesel's approach to history and to the fate of the Altalena lie the seeds of his complicated and ambivalent relationship to Israel...

...Just as the author's early, searing portrait of survival in Night depicts the de-education of a pious Jewish child in the maw of Auschwitz, this new, more worldly work accounts for the child's return to life and his postwarre-education...

...Wiesel's initial meditations on his father, in particular, present a picture that perhaps only a young and adoring son can have, uncomplicated by the more human characteristics that would have become apparent had Reb Shloime lived into Elie's own adulthood...

...Reviewed by James E. Young Professor of English and Judaic Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...A political novice, he approached the Haganah offices in Paris, where he was turned away...

...In such instances the memoirist is all too human, but less protective of his own dignity than he has been of others...

...When he came to New York to make his career as an eyewitness to history, it was also his job as a reporter to know the movers and shakers, the powerful and rich...

...To this day, for example, he remains bitter at what he regards as the passivity of Jews in America and Palestine who knew during the War of places like Auschwitz, yet never broadcast the news to the unsuspecting Jews in towns like Sighet...

...While the bitterness is understandable, Wiesel himself seems to suggest it is a bit misplaced...

...This traditional veneration may explain as well why none of Wiesel's Holocaust works contain any representations of the killers...

...For he knows better than anyone that even as a youngster he saw himself refracted through Biblical tales and rabbinic legends, made meaningful and memorable by their telling...

...There, in the days just after the United Nations granted Israel statehood, Wiesel published his first article, what he now calls a "fictional commentary...

...Alone...

...It records, too, his coming of political age during the throes of Israel's birth, his accidental but eventually flourishing career as a journalist, and his move to make it in New York...

...In the light of his raconteur's instincts, and his self-perception as someone caught between memory of the terrible past and the actual unfolding of contemporary events, his pursuit of the form is perfectly logical...

...After all, had every witness obeyed our society's squeamish laws of decorum and taste, the Holocaust might have remained an untold story altogether...

...That is, in keeping with the martyrological tradition of Kiddush Hashem (sanctifica-tion of God's name through death), they remain holy, their memory inviolable...

...Wiesel does not describe the transformation of his angry 800 page Yiddish manuscript into a 149-page French-language parable of torment, but it seems clear that Mauriac's vision of him as an archetype of the abandoned and the sacrificed helped shape what became the century's classic martyrological testament, Night...

...To this end, he repopulates Sighet, his native village in the Carpathian Mountains, with blatantly idealized memories of his family and neighbors, offering an innocent's eye view of shtetl life: all rabbis, prophets and sages...

...How deliberate was his ascension, how accidental...

...All Rivers Run to the Sea, the first of two planned volumes of his memoirs, may not explicitly answer these impossible questions, but it does allow subtle and elliptical answers to come gradually into view...

...He took Wiesel's reworked memoir of the Holocaust, Un di Veil hot geschwign ("And the World Was Silent") and gave it to his publisher...

...The death camp experience itself is a near-absent center of this book, a void around which the rest of Wiesel's life was molded...

...It traces his journey from a fondly remembered shtetl into the abyss of genocide and out again, from his schooling among Kab-balists and literati in Paris to his immersion in French culture and literature...

...the other was made during the dedication of the U.S...

...only the victims...

...I mean not to recount the story of my life," he informs us, "but my stories...

...His 30-odd books share this same penchant for parable, this need to retell the recent past and thereby assimilate it with sacred history...

...One is further struck by the fact that the world's most renowned Holocaust survivor devotes a scant 20 pages out of 400 to his time in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald...

...It should not be surprising to discover this icon of equanimity settling a few scores, yet I still wish he had left out the petty grievances that mar his memoir—just as early in the narrative he prudently forswears recounting episodes "that might embarrass friends...

...But even now, what did he study...

...This morning I put on my own tef illin for the first time in a long while...

...Eagerto return to Paris, Wiesel landed a job as correspondent for YediotAchro-not, at that point "the smallest and poorest of Israel's daily papers...

...That in time Presidents would turn to Wiesel for his stamp of moral authority is one of the incongruities of our mass media age...

...When Wiesel traveled to Israel in the summer of 1949, he was devastated by the treatment of Holocaust survivors...

...The devout Catholic novelist and essayist Francois Mauriac saw in Wiesel another Jew on the cross, a martyr-spokesman for humankind...

...Why would people who could not believe one of their own have believed propagandistic sounding radio reports from abroad...

...Of all his memoir's self-insights, most revealing for me are those concerning his coming of age as a journalist...

...Its focus was the sinking of the ship Altalena?carrying arms and volunteers gathered in France by the Irgun for Israel's War of Independence—on Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's orders...

...It concludes with reflections on "Writing," which are more about his various relationships—both sweet and sour—with other writers than the literature of the Holocaust...

...He steadfastly refuses to depict even the landscape of a destroyed Germany on his way to France following the liberation...

...As we find in these pages, though, Wiesel's skin is about as thin as anyone else's...

...Part spiritual Bildungsro-man and part parable, this book is also a loosely woven blend of Wiesel's considerable talents as a canny journalist and storyteller...

...President...

...In one especially noteworthy case, however, an interview with a great man paid off...

...Wiesel's keen sense of loss is triple-stranded: He mourns the concentration camp deaths of his mother and father, the murder of his little sister, Tziporah, as well as the murder of his childhood and its benevolent God...

...The reply: "I call him to show you the door, young man...

...In many cases the voice actually seems to reflect its chronological place in Wiesel's life: When the subject is boyhood, the tone and insights are simple and naive...

...He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as a voice for the world's victims, and has carried this mantle with dignity...

...Heartbroken once by the Holocaust, and again by the spectacle of Jewish fratricide, he turned hungrily to Mal-raux and Mauriac, Valery and Bernanos, Camus and Sartre...

...In his words, "the murderers did not interest me...

...For days on end, Wiesel and his mad master, Shushani, "talked of the ascetic and his self, enriched or mutilated by suffering, the relation between suffering and truth, suffering and redemption, suffering and spiritual purity, suffering as a gateway to the sacred...

...Or that on the train to Auschwitz, he "dreamed of the Jewish exiles of antiquity and the Middle Ages...

...In 1948, aged 20 and with no means of support in Paris, he only wanted to do his part for the birth of Israel...

...If he addressed his meteoric climb without embarrassment or avoided questioning the appropriateness and terrible irony of feeding on the very memory he holds so sacred, then I might have taken offense...

...What has it meant for Wiesel to commit his life to memory of the Holocaust, only to reap a seemingly endless bounty of celebrity, adulation, and material rewards...

...The lone escapee out of over 1,000 local Jews expelled in 1941 for lacking proper papers, he returned to describe their mass-murder and was declared mad...

...Having named this chapter "Schooling," Wiesel recounts the ways Paris became his open university, and the motley assortment of memory-magicians, Kab-balists and counselors who became his mentors...

...One was to Ronald Reagan, begging him to stay away from Bitburg ("This place is not your place, Mr...

...Monsieur Jouvet," he asked the famous actor during an unintentionally brief dressing-room interview, "what do you do when you're not being Louis Jouvet...

...Asceticism?the lure of and quest for suffering," the effort to infuse "one's own suffering and that of others with meaning...

...I want to believe that they loved each other, and that nothing ever clouded that love...

...Stripped of their property, crushed and mutilated [the Jews of Sighet] still embody the nobility of Israel and the eternity of God," he writes...

...But Wiesel's indignation is also partly a result of his open glorification of the victims as victims...

...Although he clung fiercely as ever to his love of Israel and the Jewish people, he would become a man apart in the world...

...Given his experiences, his subsequent teachers and his obsessions, it is not surprising that the holiness of victimization would finally constitute the central pillar of Wiesel's worldview...

...author, "The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning," "Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust" HOW DID Elie Wiesel, of all the thousands of Holocaust survivors, become a living icon of that catastrophe, and why...

...In these words we find his amazement at survival ("here I am"), at being in France (of all places), and at having his faith restored (if never to its pre-Holo-caust luster...

...That may be too idealized a memory, but I cling to it nevertheless...

...Thus, from the very outset of his writing career Wiesel was a parabolist of history, a converter of history into meaningful story...

...Indeed, two of his greatest moments came in public appeals to American Presidents...

...Schoolchildren, for instance, repeating what they heard at home, called their immigrant classmates "little 'soap cakes.'" His massive identification with the still suffering victims appears to have made him con-stitutively incapable of identifying with the new nation as victorious...

...Yael Dayan's ungenerous treatment of him over the years notwithstanding, it was unnecessary to dismiss her as someone who "fortunately...

...Nonetheless, unlike the New York magazine reviewer who concluded that Wiesel's chronicle presents the "disturbing spectacle" of "a genuinely righteous man who is as zealous in marketing his righteousness as in living up to it," I am not disturbed...

...Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., when he turned to President Clinton and demanded that something be done to stop the genocide of Bosnian Muslims...

...As he tells it, an act of desperation drove him literally to stumble into the vocation that eventually became the source of his incredible contacts and international network of friends in powerful places...

...After all, the Jews of Sighet had been warned personally and graphically by Moshe the beadle...

...He paints a humorous portrait of himself as a neophyte journalist who is a bumbling nudnik around women and always just misses the big scoop...

...Throughout his memoir, Wiesel is thus able to step in and out of the past to reflect on how it might have been...

...It is clear, in fact, that what Wiesel wants to capture here is remembered childhood and its necessarily blinkered image of reality: "I am trying to remember if my parents ever quarreled or bickered, if there was ever any tension between them...

...Nor did I need to hear Wiesel describe Alfred Kazin's writing as "vile," and the writer as a "bitter man who has aged so badly...

...In his role as emblematic survivor, Wiesel has always appeared to float benevolently above the fray of politics and personal animosities...

...Rather than taking Wiesel to task for his part in nourishing our culture's voracious appetite for celebrity victims, we need to ask whether it is possible today to speak out effectively on behalf of the world's oppressed without having a gift for public relations...

...In his opening section on "Childhood," Wiesel sets out not to examine his first years but to bear witness to all that was lost—to give voices, faces and humanity to the murdered victims...

...abandoned literature for politics, where she made many enemies and was not taken seriously...