A Commitment to Memory
ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.
A Commitment to Memory And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969By Elie Wiesel Knopf. 434 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of the Borens...
...Who knows, perhaps the museum had been a mistake after all...
...So while this is a book of often vivid autobiographical reflection, it is also something more—an anguished probing of the links between memory and traumatic event, memory and justice, memory and the quest for a common morality...
...In both cases, the insistence that memory not be compromised or betrayed is at the heart of Wiesel's complaint...
...Throughout the two books, dream sequences about his dead father continually intrude upon the linear flow of Wiesel's narrative and tell him that he has not yet left "the Kingdom of Night...
...And yet this second volume of memoirs ends, as did the first, on a note of melancholy rooted in recollections of his murdered family...
...They observe us, guide us...
...Wiesel is planning a separate volume, tentatively titled My Masters and My Friends, that may speak more directly and personally about his ascendancy...
...It is no exaggeration to see him as one of the major spiritual teachers of his generation and a prominent part of its public conscience...
...describe his numerous interventions on behalf of the beleaguered in places like the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Bosnia...
...They are judging us...
...Beyond such matters, what gives this volume its occasional rueful tone is a private grief carried from the author's boyhood that remains unassuaged to this day...
...Instead, the chapters here offer comments on the author's many previous books...
...Especially interesting are the accounts of his rocky relationship with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C...
...He denies being political ("the word 'power' fits me as a tuxedo might a kangaroo"), but as his career amply demonstrates, he has been and is on intimate terms with many who are...
...They do not tell us what has enabled him to travel the unlikely road from Sighet, his provincial hometown in the Carpathians, to the White House, the Elysée Palace, and the Royal Palace of Oslo...
...Coming from Elie Wiesel, these reservations are troubling...
...The very definition of what the Holocaust was depends on how one answers this question...
...This is a harshjudgment, particularly for someone who has given so much of himself to honor both the living and the dead...
...Wiesel's answer—"the Holocaust is a Jewish tragedy with universal implications"—seems unobjectionable to many, but not to all...
...It did not sit well, for example, with Jimmy Carter—who in 1978 appointed the author chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust —and others in the nation's capital...
...In Wiesel's telling, a conceptual question of primary importance has confronted the shapers of the museum's mandate from the start: Is it to memorialize the roughly 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, oris it to extend beyond the specificity of the Jewish devastation and embrace the sufferings of other victim populations...
...What is astonishing is that he has succeeded in projecting his quiet, commanding voice outside of major institutional frameworks...
...It is inside us...
...Wiesel's achievements have been many, but a continuing anguish about the past nags at him...
...His own early years were shaped by the catastrophe of Nazi Germany, which tore apart the traditional Jewish world he was born into, destroyed much of his family and community, and threw into crisis everything that once gave meaning to his life...
...Wiesel knows from brutal personal experience that the trauma triggered by this murderous era is hardly over, and in his many books and public speeches he has shown an uncommon, indeed some would say obsessive, devotion to chronicling, questioning, and combating the destructiveness of human behavior at its most extreme...
...And the Sea Is Never Full illustrates Wiesel's reach, but does not explain it...
...Life has little meaning for him apart from the primacy of memory and justice, but despite decades of dedicated work in their service, he feels that on some basic level he has failed...
...Yet he has been a highly influential figure, a fact attested to by his receiving such prestigious awards as the Nobel Peace Prize, the U.S...
...The Washington museum is "undeniably impressive," he says, but he writes about it with marked ambivalence: "By trying to illustrate too much, reveal too much by contrived means, it all becomes too facile...
...For understandable reasons, the fate of the Jews has been at the center of his attention, but he has also exerted himself energetically on behalf of other peoples who have been marginalized, excluded and oppressed...
...But like other institutions in our nation's capital, it is vulnerable to political pressures of various kinds...
...and show him in close engagement with the political and cultural elites in this country, France, Poland, Russia, Israel, and elsewhere...
...Readers of Wiesel's previous works will have no trouble recognizing the source of his intense commitment to the preservation and transmission of memory...
...Meanwhile, And the Sea Is Never Full sheds light on several controversies he has been involved in...
...For reasons he clearly sets forth, Wiesel ultimately gave up his role as one of the guiding spirits behind the Holocaust Museum...
...Notwithstanding the more than 40 books he has written and the hundreds of lectures he has given, he lives with a sense of not yet having done enough about the things that matter most to him...
...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of the Borens Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University In this second installment of Elie Wiesel's memoirs, following All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), memory extends beyond the personal to matters of history, politics, ethics, andreligion...
...Thus, although the imperatives of memory have compelled him to become the kind of writer he is, they have at the same time prompted him to take a determined stand against many different kinds of injustice...
...Congressional Gold Medal and the French Legion of Honor...
...A chapter on his estrangement from François Mitterrand, over issues related to the French President's concealment of a Vichy past and continuing loyalty to former officials of Marshal Petain's regime, is particularly bitter...
...Apart from being ahumanities professor at Boston University, he has stood alone, unaffiliated in any formal sense with the established political and cultural centers of power...
...and his once close but ultimately disappointing associations with François Mitterrand, Lech Walesa, Simon Wiesenthal, and others...
...As a custodian of the memory of the Holocaust, he has also clashed with individuals...
...On the whole, Wiesel has been remarkably effective...
...Officially opened in April 1993, the Holocaust Museum is already a highly effective educational institution...
...The dead are inside us...
...Or rather: it refuses to let us go...
...One of his adversaries is Simon Wiesenthal, and the rehearsal here of Wiesel's long-standing dispute with the famous Austrian Jewish Nazi hunter, which is both personal and conceptual, in uncharacteristically caustic...
...Today, he admits, he has "less and less confidence in museums as sanctuaries of memory...
...soldiers are buried...
...From the publication in 1958 of his first book, Night, Wiesel has taken upon himself the sorrowful burden of being a moral witness to the past...
...His considerable accomplishments prove otherwise...
...his disagreements with Ronald Reagan and some White House aides about the President's 1985 visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg, where S.S...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
