Writer of Silence

Elie Wiesel brought the Holocaust and its survival to the American public.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

"So, learn to be silent." The burden of Elie Wiesel's speaking, teaching, and writing has been to guide the world at large, not just Jews, toward silence in the face of an unspeakable event: the Nazi genocide, the European Jewish catastrophe.

 

"But how to do this?" he asks in Why I Write (1978). "All words seemed inadequate…. Where was I to discover a fresh vocabulary, a primeval language? The language of night was not human." Not actually silence, then, but the process of learning what to be silent about and why has taken Wiesel through over 25 novels, plays, biblical and Hasidic portraits and legends, essay collections, memoirs--plus his regular teaching and ceaseless speaking engagements, from New York public schools to the Nobel prize ceremony. A paradox may reside here, not necessarily due to Wiesel, but to history and society: "Learn to be silent."

Early Years

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, a few days before Simchat Torah (the festival known as "Joy of the Torah"), when the year's cycle of Bible readings commences anew. His birthplace, Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains, was a largely Jewish town that passed from Romania to Hungary in 1940; thus his ambient languages were Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, Hungarian, and also German. Wiesel's father, Shlomo, was a shopkeeper, his adored mother, Sarah, the daughter of Dodye Feig. From Reb Dodye--"cultured and erudite… a festival for the heart and mind… a marvelous singer"--Elie imbibed a fervent Hasidism, and he steeped himself in Talmud.

 

It was not until Passover 1944, when he was 15, that Hungarians Nazis set up a ghetto in Sighet and deported the town's Jews. Elie's mother and the youngest of his three sisters perished in Auschwitz; he himself stayed with his father, who died after the death march to Buchenwald in January 1945. Upon liberation, Wiesel went to France. In 1949, he became a foreign correspondent for the Tel Aviv daily Yediot Aharonot; in 1958, he settled in New York, covered the United Nations, and worked for the Yiddish daily Forward.

Writing of the Horrors

Years after the nightmare of 1944-45, Wiesel wrote a Yiddish memoir of his experience. Cutting it from 862 to 245 pages, he published Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Stayed Silent, 1956). Cut even further, the French version was entitled La Nuit (Night, 1958), symbolizing the horror rather than shaking a prophetic fist. Now Wiesel's style, recalling Albert Camus's The Stranger and The Plague as well as Samuel Beckett's stripped tableaux, was spare, mostly understated, and refrained from moral or psychological comment. For instance, at the book's end, after his image of a corpse gazing in the mirror, Wiesel's Yiddish version had turned angry and skeptical: "Ilse Koch, the sadist of Buchenwald, is a happy wife and mother. War criminals stroll in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past has been erased, buried."

 

As for an American edition, dozens of publishers "sent their regrets," says Wiesel. "Some thought the book too slender (American readers seemed to prefer fatter volumes), others too depressing (American readers seemed to prefer optimistic books). Some felt its subject was too little known, others that it was too well known." Scribner's had "certain misgivings" because it was merely "a document." Finally, Hill and Wang bought the book, giving Wiesel an advance of $100.

 

Night came out in 1960, around the time of Adolf Eichmann's arrest in Argentina. For several years, it sold little, but it has become, after Anne Frank's diary, the most frequently read story to emerge from the Holocaust.

Night

What kind of book is Night, what genre--memoir or novel? And what makes it part of Jewish American literature? The two questions bear on each other because most Americans, at our distant remove of time and space, cannot organically absorb what happened in Nazi-ridden Europe from 1939 to 1945. Elie Wiesel, trying (as he says) to "unite the language of man with the silence of the dead," gave shape to his account. The rhythm of Jewish holidays, the allusions to liturgy, the image of night, the figure of sons and fathers: Such things make Night seem a Bildungsroman, a novel depicting one young person's growth and "education," however grim. Yet Wiesel meant this book to be stark, like the ghetto chronicles.

 

Of course, memory and the act of writing inevitably recompose the past, re-envision the fact of things, so that Night is a strange amalgam. American readers did not immediately respond, but before long this book became almost an article of faith, a spiritual and moral touchstone. No American writer--not Malamud or Roth, not even Bellow or Singer--could possess the gravitas to say, Le silence de Dieu est Dieu, "The silence of God is God." Nor could they, for that matter, have spoken as simply to Ronald Reagan when, in 1985, the president accompanied Germany's chancellor to lay a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery, where SS men are buried: "That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."

Public Activities

Wiesel has divided his professional life between public activities and writing. In 1965, during the cold war, he went to Russia to witness the plight of Soviet Jewry, long before the emigration movement; from this came The Jews of Silence (1966). In 1979, while leading the effort to establish a Holocaust museum in Washington, he went as a witness to Cambodia. He received the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, 1969, he married Marion Wiesel, who translates his work from French, and they had a son in 1972.

 

Between 1961 and 1970, Wiesel published the novels Dawn, The Accident, The Gates of the Forest, The Town Beyond the Wall, and A Beggar in Jerusalem. His lectures at the 92nd Street Y in New York City produced Souls on Fire (1972), portraits and legends of Hasidism, the popular movement of devotion and ecstatic prayer and song founded in the 18th century by Israel ben Eliezer Ba'al Shem Tov.

 

Then came Messengers of God (1976), personal meditations on Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Job--figures who gripped Wiesel as a child. "Of all the Biblical tales, the one about Isaac is perhaps the most timeless and most relevant to our generation," he writes, since the word holocaust origina1ly designates a sacrifice, burnt offering.

 

Besides Hasidism and Bible, Elie Wiesel's antecedents are Camus, Beckett, Malraux, Dostoyevsky, Racine--not Henry James, whom Cynthia Ozick adored, or Allen Ginsberg's Walt Whitman. Yet the Romanian Jew, French novelist, and American citizen first spoke for survivors to an American public unaware of them in its midst insisted on keeping memory alive.