When No One Listens
ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.
When No One Listens A Mad Desire to Dance By Elie Wiesel Knopf. 274 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English; director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts,...
...Motivated by a powerful sense of testimonial mission, Wiesel addressed his anguished story to those who were largely silent when European Jewry was being destroyed...
...In the concluding line, this once joyless, inhibited man even expresses “a mad desire to dance...
...As the reader quickly learns, the protagonist, Doriel Waldman, "takes refuge in madness" and seems unable or unwilling to escape it...
...Though attracted to women, he is also afraid of them, and normal erotic desires seem to elude him...
...Though his parents survived the War, they died soon after in a car crash...
...His talk—to himself, his psychotherapist, various people he meets in his travels, to the God whom he ardently wants to understand—can easily test the reader's patience, especially in the opening chapters, where it is frequently overwrought and not always intelligible...
...One is therefore moved to ask: Who is Doriel Waldman, and what ails him...
...His purpose was to compel the world to know what it first chose to ignore and then preferred to forget...
...or, failing to find a way to God, they retreat into silence...
...and the talk is propelled far more by therapeutic imperatives than testimonial ones...
...During his often contentious meetings with Dr...
...Wiesel is a master storyteller, and in past books his characters have typically known what to do with their tales...
...Their murder and the murder of millions like them, he vowed, would not be forgotten...
...One needs steady nerves to absorb such disorder, itself the product of Waldman's unsteady nerves...
...They give the novel much of its formal structure and thematic interest...
...He also sought to discharge a strongly felt debt to the dead, who included his parents and youngest sister...
...And since then, he has never uttered another word...
...As a young boy hidden in a small Polish town, Doriel was spared the massacres that overtook so many others, but the wounds he bears in the postwar years are similar to those of other survivors...
...Once disclosed the insight proves liberating...
...Although his new opus is not a Holocaust novel per se, its familiar echoes are unmistakable...
...I’m your patient and you’re my only hope...
...The novel suggests that his disturbance is rooted in repression of some version of the Freudian family romance and therefore amenable to treatment by a capable analyst...
...But buried within the book is a brief vignette that offers another explanation: “Let’s go back to the last survivor in my town...
...A spare, riveting account of the author's sufferings as a youth in Auschwitz and Buchenwald Night used words to convey what they can barely express: the unspeakable cruelties that accompanied mass death in the Nazi camps, and the death of God in the soul of a devout Jewish boy who was a witness...
...Born in 1936, Doriel survived the Holocaust by hiding with his father in a small Polish village...
...Goldschmidt for therapy sessions, he says: “Doctor, I’m confused...
...Doriel doesn't know himself, but as we discover over the course of his therapy sessions with his psychoanalyst, Thérèse Goldschmidt, he is about 60 years old single, a loner, doesn't work, can't sleep, is anxious, touchy, suspicious, nervous, frightened often angry and out of sorts, and generally unwell...
...His mother, whom he barely knew, was an active member of the resistance and rarely saw her family during this period...
...Explorations of madness appear in many of Wiesel's previous books, but not in the extended clinical way they do in this novel...
...But because Wiesel has tended to concentrate on the spiritual and moral dimensions of tormented souls, his new work is bound to send the reader in search of a subtext that might shed further light on the supertext...
...As for fathering a child: "I always believed that my past and the state it left me in don't allow me to beget life...
...The utterer of too many words, Doriel is the mirror image of this man, who is referred to as “the last Jew...
...Far from being seen as a form of illness in Wiesel’s copious oeuvre, madness is often related to muteness, an existential condition imposed from without on a witness to atrocity who tells his story but is not listened to...
...He spoke, he spoke everywhere, to the point of exhaustion...
...This formerly repressed information, he comes to understand has contributed to his emotional problems and hampered his relationships with women...
...At first, people listened to him...
...Here is a clue worth following...
...Then they turned their backs on him...
...The etiology of such pain was clearly conveyed by the Yiddish title of Wiesel’s original memoir—Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Was Silent...
...In the subsequent half century Wiesel has published some 50 fiction and nonfictionbooks, many of them rooted in the lacerating experiences recorded in Night...
...Goldschmidt, Doriel uncovers longsubmerged family secrets, including one about an illicit affair his mother may have had with a fellow resistance fighter...
...All my real-life or imaginary stories, all these burdens full of remorse and guilt—it is to you that I show them...
...When Doriel engages Dr...
...Goldschmidt...
...As such, they are probably not reducible merely to the psychological and show him to be suffering from what Primo Levi knowingly called “the survivor’s disease...
...As Wiesel has demonstrated before, that is a much more encompassing affliction—a wound to human definition itself—for which effective therapies are still to be devised...
...SINCE the novel is essentially about struggling with the psychic burdens of guilt, shame, solitude, and fear, its remedial talk is no surprise...
...Their variations—"crazy," "disturbed" "insane," "nuts," "unbalanced" etc.—recurthroughoutthe novel...
...Thus much of the talk is about "madness...
...Elaborate reports on Doriel's therapy sessions with his analyst and her detailed notes are artfully developed...
...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University Elie Wiesel's justly famous 120-page memoir Night—his 1958 distillation in French of a 25 3 -page book written in Yiddish and published in Buenos Aires two years earlier—appeared in English translation here in 1960...
...Do you know why and how he lost the power of speech...
...The focus is on the main character's quest for personal healing and consolation...
...In at least two significant respects, however,^ Mad Desire to Dance marks a notable departure from Wiesel's previous work: Night's lean, reticent style of narration gives way to nonstop, at times manically expansive talk...
...He hopes she can help him understand "the language and logic of my illness...
...When he returned from the camps, he decided to roam the world and tell people about the unspeakable...
...Doriel's brother and sister were murdered in Poland...
...or, failing to find listeners, they dedicate them to God...
...Two pages later, the same words are cited 10 times...
...he hoped to lift the world from its torpor and from an indifference that could lead to its own annihilation...
...Brought to America as a young orphan by a faithful uncle, Doriel looks to make a new start in the new land but he suffers from causes that he cannot decipher, is basically dysfunctional, and so seeks the professional guidance of Dr...
...The narrative often returns to the War years, but it does so chiefly to seek relief from the torments of traumatic memory, not primarily to advance the broader aims of historical and moral awareness...
...Doriel’s “madness” is characterized by many years of silent suffering, which is then broken by a superabundance of nervous talk...
...Tell me what I should do with them...
...Following termination of his therapy, Doriel comes more confidently into his own, courts and marries a woman, changes his name, and at book's end learns he is about to father a child...
...On the first page alone, "mad" or its noun counterparts appear 13 times...
...In our age scores of novelists, after all, have looked to the methods of psychoanalysis to illuminate human experience...
...They search out sympathetic listeners for them...
Vol. 92 • January 2009 • No. 1
