Elie Wiesel was first a survivor, then a witness. A role imposed by History and by the violence of a confrontation with the inhuman whose reverberations run through his work and his life.
He was one of the last custodians of the memory of a vanished world, and from book to book he made himself its inconsolable and lyrical bard, giving renewed life to its little mystical towns, its places of prayer, its houses of study, its legends, its dreams, and an imaginary intimately bound to a language-world.1
He also knew himself to be the custodian of a knowledge and a tradition to be transmitted. And it is within this dimension of transmission that a part of his novels is inscribed, as are the Célébrations (Celebrations) which, beginning in 1972, would punctuate his work: Célébrations hassidiques (Hasidic Celebrations), then Célébrations bibliques (Biblical Celebrations), Célébrations talmudiques (Talmudic Celebrations), Célébrations prophétiques (Prophetic Celebrations),2 written for generations of Jews who no longer knew how to read the Texts and no longer had access to their heritage. Works that were also addressed to a very broad public of non-Jews, as a bond between cultures, drawing luminous images of knowledge and wisdom that came to refute dark and deadly stereotypes.
Within this heritage, the memory of the Shoah irradiates past and present, but contrary to an idea too often held, it does not occupy the whole of the space. It is inscribed within a path that reconnects with words, and that, despite a persistent nostalgia for silence, places its trust once again in language. Witness these few lines in Cœur ouvert (Open Heart),3 his last book, which resonate like a testament:
I believe in man, despite men. I believe in language even though it has been bruised, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of humanity. I continue to cling to words because it falls to us to transform them into instruments of understanding rather than of contempt. It is for us to choose whether we wish to use them in order to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.4
A knowledge born of the experience of the camp, with its destructive charge; a knowledge issuing from the texts of the tradition that nourishes a demand for humanity — it is in this oscillation of memory and will that the heart of the work beats. And it is in the practice of dialogue that the Wieselian credo declines itself, his will to safeguard the unity of the people of Israel.
At the heart of a night sevenfold sealed
At the outset, from the very first text, a landscape of death and destruction. In the world of the camp, at the heart of the enterprise of extermination, nothing seems able to be preserved of what had made life-together. It is difficult to conceive what it can represent, for an adolescent raised in the religious tradition, within a united family, having no other landmarks than the sacred texts, to find himself in the demented reality of Auschwitz. Thus the young Eliezer saw all the rules he had been taught transgressed, the law of the camp presenting itself as an inverted caricature of the Decalogue. He witnessed the deposing and the degradation of adults, the systematic destruction of men and also the destruction of the bonds between men that found humanity.
The adolescent discovered the suffering of having a body subjected to hunger, to thirst, to cold, to blows, to the relentlessness and the cruelty of the executioners. But above all, he discovered man laid bare, without the fragile veneer of culture and civilization, insofar as these constitute, as Nathalie Zaltzman writes, “an ensemble of unconscious representations that intercede between man and himself, between each person and others,” and insofar as they serve “the function of a rampart of the individual against the reign of murder.5”
Eliezer saw man subjected to the violence of his instincts, including the hard and ferocious instinct of survival. Incredulous, he witnessed the process of putting a people to death and the murder of children. I saw it with my own eyes… never will I forget… It is indeed the tireless affirmation of the witness. And this corrosive knowledge forbids him any illusion, any easy consolation, any certainty, any religious belief that is not confronted with this knowledge.
The power of a text like Night6 lies in the force and the pitiless concision of the description of life in the camp, in a dereliction and a daily horror punctuated by the selections. But it lies also in the fact that the witness’s speech states an intimate truth, doubtless the most difficult to utter and to accept. Wiesel, as a witness, evokes what he underwent, what he witnessed, what happened around him, but he also evokes what happened within him in contact with the events he relates, in the face of the searing of Evil. “The stake will not be the description of the horror; the stake will be the exploration of the human soul in the horror of Evil,7” wrote Jorge Semprun, a short while after his liberation from Buchenwald.
Through his account, the surviving witness who turns back toward what Primo Levi called the perilous water takes the risk of laying bare his weaknesses, his temptations. He delivers himself to the judgment of readers, but also to his own. For the judgment of that other that the survivor has become once again outside the camp, in normal life, is often devoid of indulgence. This latter can pronounce against himself condemnations silent or unformulated, but without appeal. One need only reread some of the pages of Primo Levi that resonate like cries of denial. And there are few texts that bring into play a relation of self to self as tragic8 as the one that, in testimony, unites the man who testifies here, in the present of the writing, to the one he was there, on that other planet, which confronts him with what he did or did not do in that other universe.
In Night, the preserved humanity of Eliezer and his father is bound in part to the maintenance of the paternal and filial bond, a bond to which other pairs of fathers and sons evoked in the account do not manage to remain faithful. In a universe that organizes the war of each against each, in the absence of a father, a friend, a companion, a privileged bond, it is difficult to survive. But the father, the friend, the weaker companion can also represent a danger, can drag one toward death. “Here there is no father who counts, no brother, no friend. Each one lives and dies for himself, alone.9” That is what Eliezer must become aware of. It is the insidious temptation to separate from his father in order to be able to survive, the wish to see him disappear, which he states with such pain in his account. Through an effect of novelistic multiplication, the account stages three pairs of fathers and sons, delivered to the same temptation, with differing degrees of resistance. The son of Rabbi Eliahou ends by abandoning him during the death march and moves away from the old man, whom he leaves to stagger alone in the snow: “For three years they had held firm together, always one beside the other,” writes the narrator. A little later, in a roofless wagon where the snow covers the dead and the living, a son whose first name alone we will know, Meïr, savagely attacks his weakened father in order to wrest from him a bit of bread. I was fifteen years old, writes the narrator soberly, Eliezer, who witnessed this spectacle. He himself is content to wish, for a moment, to be freed of the burden that his father represents. A temptation he resists, but which he analyzes without indulgence, which he will not forgive himself. Just as he does not forgive himself for having obeyed the injunction of his life-instinct and not having answered the cry of his father, dying and beaten by an SS man. “I did not move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of receiving a blow in turn…. I could still see him breathing in fits and starts. I did not move.10” My body was afraid, the witness specifies, urging us to understand the force and the proper will of bodies moved by the instinct of survival. And this pair of a father and a son, bound by a deep but ambivalent love, crushed by a fundamental guilt that shifts, depending on the works, from one to the other, will return from book to book.
Like every survivor of a genocidal process, Wiesel cannot forget that, in a world where the Nazis instituted a perverse bookkeeping that wills that every life spared be spared at the expense of another, to survive is to have to think that another died in one’s place. In a collection titled Entre deux soleils (Between Two Suns), he returns to this suspicion within the framework of a dialogue conducted with Death itself, a Death that gives itself over to garrulous confidences and makes him understand the meaningless arbitrariness to which he owes his life:
Over there I had full powers. I was sovereign. I did as I saw fit. He did not interfere, never intervened… He found it amusing. As for me, I was bored.11…
And the survivor confesses to Death, a terrible confidence, that he knows that in the eyes of the weakened prisoner who preceded him or who followed him in the selection line, death had its own face:
Before, I was you. In the eyes of the man I preceded in the queue and of the old man whose chances of survival were crumbling hour by hour: my youth, my endurance condemned them.12
Carrying the dead within oneself and letting them go
After a genocide, in the absence of funeral rites and of burial, the survivor has often made of his very being the receptacle and the shelter of his dead. “All are now buried within me and continue to live within me,13” writes Ka-Tzetnik, while Mordechaï Strigler claims to hold back his laughter “so as not to wake the corpses14” he carries within him.
Likewise, each of the works of Wiesel’s trilogy closes on the image of a silent corpse that inhabits a living being. In Night, after the liberation of the camp, far from any joy and any relief, this corpse appears, reflected in a mirror: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse contemplated me. Its gaze in my eyes never leaves me again.15” In the final lines of Dawn,16 this corpse appears like a reflection in a windowpane lined with night: “The black patch, made of shreds of shadow, had a face. I looked at it and I understood my fear. That face was mine.17” Finally, in Day,18 it appears at the center of a terrifying painting, the portrait of the narrator-survivor made by a painter friend: “I was there, before myself. The sky was a thick black. The sun a dark gray. The eyes were of a throbbing red, in the manner of Soutine. They belonged to a man who would have seen his God commit the most unforgivable of crimes: to kill without reason.19”
In the books that follow the trilogy, there nonetheless seems to take place what I would call, for lack of a more adequate expression, the expulsion of his dead from out of the narrator-survivor.20 Succeeding the time when the survivor makes of his own body the sepulchre and the cenotaph21 of his dead, there comes the time when he makes of his work, and no longer of his body, a shelter, and of his writing an act of piety and of memory.
This expulsion, which unfolds in the writing, like a scriptural exorcism, is bound to the appearance of a double,22 of an alter ego who, in the following works, accompanies — but from the outside — the Wieselian narrator, and with whom he ties a dialogue.
Those who have worked on testimony know it: the very possibility of testimony is bound to the presence within oneself, during the ordeal, of that spectatorial instance that Jean-François Chiantaretto calls the internal witness.23 Nor can it be conceived without the presence and the listening, real or imaginary, of that external instance that Régine Waintrater names the testimoniary.24 But, as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere,25 in the case of a survivor of a genocide, this figure of listening and of interlocution is often multiple. It concerns the dead as well as the living, for the survivor addresses himself also to the engulfed one, that part of himself he left over there. The violence of the trauma was so great that it as if displaced, shook the boundary between death and life — whence the frequency of the dialogue with the dead in a certain number of survivors’ texts, including Wiesel’s.
The dialogue with the dead is, indeed, one of the great constants of Wieselian writing. We find it from one account to another, often preceded by a laconic heading: Dialogues.26 Sometimes it consists only in an echoing repetition of the narrator’s speech by his interlocutors of shadow. Sometimes it continues at length, painfully, with the disappeared who are closest or dearest. This dialogue gives rise to powerful pages in which the writer deploys the best of his art.
It is important to specify that, in a general way, dialogue is one of the fundamental dimensions of Wieselian writing27: dialogues between religious Jews and assimilated Jews, confrontations between executioners and their victims, between believers and a God guilty of abandonment, between revolutionary militants and charismatic rabbis. It is in this exchange that the writer makes explicit the questions and the contradictions that run through him or that run through the Jewish condition as he conceives it, for in the last resort, the dialogue is very often a dialogue with oneself or with the part of the other within oneself.
In the dialogues between the dead and the living, what strikes is that their presence is never a source of disquiet, of dread, or of terror. It is never commented upon with the incredulity characteristic of the narrator of a fantastic tale; it is charged with a kind of naturalness.28
Resiliences
One might evoke the itinerary of Elie Wiesel as an itinerary running counter to our usual trajectories, one that would have led him from death toward life, from the most arid despair toward the choice to live in spite of everything. The radical revolt of a young survivor bearing a wounded faith would be succeeded by an increasingly affirmed reconciliation with the tradition of his childhood and the recovered joy of song.
The mute witnesses, the haggard survivors, the rebellious adolescents who haunt the first works and in particular The Trilogy would thus be succeeded, in the text, by figures of beggar-poets, of messengers, of scribes, and of storytellers. “One encounters a Hasid in every one of my novels. And a child. And an old man. And a beggar. And a madman. They are part of my inner landscape,29” he writes.
Through his work, which draws upon the most recent and the most distant past, through the force of identification that his speech and his writing represent, Elie Wiesel constituted himself into a powerful figure of transmission, making himself not only the witness of the disaster — voice, speech, and memory of an annihilated world — but also the ferryman of an immense heritage of texts whose transmission he ensures.
His is a singular trajectory, in which the capacity for survival, for the individual resilience of the survivor of a genocide, is strongly buttressed upon a project of collective reconstruction and rebirth. And it is perhaps this project, this will to reweave between a before and an after despite the abyss of the Shoah, this desire to transmit the whole of a patrimony, that were able to preserve Wiesel from the tragic fate of Jean Améry,30 of Piotr Rawicz,31 of Primo Levi, and of so many other survivors who took their own lives. An exit which in Day, his third account, nonetheless seemed to tempt his narrator.32
From Dawn to The Beggar in Jerusalem
In Dawn, drawn along by Gad, a Zionist emissary, Elisha, now an orphan with no family, has emigrated to Palestine, where he takes part in the armed struggle against the English. When he is designated to execute an English hostage, John Dawson, the adolescent is torn, for he experiences the venture into which he is drawn as a radical rupture with the tradition to which he belongs, as a transgression of everything his parents and his masters taught him.
During the night that precedes the execution, in a darkly oneiric scene, he sees appear around him, in the cell of the condemned man he is guarding, all the dead he has loved and whose teachings he has respected. Elisha tries to justify himself to each of them: — Mother, I am not a murderer, — Father, do not judge me, he says in a beseeching tone. And as the dead look at him with reproach and sadness, he turns toward a little boy who accompanies them, and who resembles the child he once was. A young child who often reappears between the pages of his books,33 often mischievous, sometimes serious, “like an orphan dressed in black who would resemble him as a brother.34” No repulsion, no fantastic folklore in this presence of the dead. It is a moral problem that is discussed between the dead and the living. The child explains to him the reason for their silence, but also the indissoluble bond that binds them:
I do not judge you. We are not here to judge you. We are here because you are here. We are everywhere you go, we are what you do… Why are we silent? But because silence is our being and not only our homeland. We are the silence. Your silence, Elisha. You see, you carry us within you. Sometimes you happen to see us, most often you do not see us. When you see us, you believe that we are here to judge you. You are wrong to believe it. It is not we who judge you, it is the silence that is within you.35
At the end of this long night, at the moment when he executes the hostage, Elisha has understood the message of the dead: the act of giving death engages not only the being who accomplishes it, but all those who contributed to making him what he is. “By killing a man, I was making murderers of them,” he says to himself. He understands too that it is a part of himself that he has killed, and he murmurs: “It is done. I have killed. I have killed Elisha.”
Thus, as one can see, the message of Dawn is profoundly ambivalent. It confirms the necessity of the Zionist struggle, but at the same time it seems to attest to the certainty that it is in rupture with Jewish tradition and its commandments. As we have already seen, the account does not close on the exalting image of the resurrection of Israel, or on the promise of it that might give meaning to Elisha’s act, but, as in the rest of the trilogy, on an image of death and mourning reflected in a windowpane. As though nothing came or could come to attenuate the moral condemnation borne by the dead.
This is why The Beggar in Jerusalem36 marks an essential turning point in this dialogue between past and present, between the dead and the living, the Israelis and the Jews of the diaspora. For this work, operating in a unifying manner, describes the fusion of two dimensions experienced as conflictual in Dawn: that of the values of traditional Judaism and that of political Zionism.37 Everything happens, at the level of this work, as though the outcome of the Six-Day War represented for the State of Israel a second birth, welcomed in fervor by the living and by the dead.
It is always difficult to distinguish to what extent a writer reflects the ideas, the emotions, the consensus of his time, and to what extent he crystallizes them, gives them form and consistency. A book like The Beggar in Jerusalem illustrates this process. In 1968, the year of its publication, Wiesel had been writing and publishing for nearly ten years. He had already established himself as one of the great narrator-witnesses of the Shoah. He had already broadened this status by taking up the condition of the Russian Jews, of whom he made himself the tireless advocate.38 But it is with The Beggar in Jerusalem that he presents a cohesive construction of the postwar Jewish condition into a unifying and mythical whole.
Making himself the inspired chronicler of this war that had barely ended, he confers upon it an exalting and legendary dimension. Victor Hugo, doubtless, was doing nothing else when, singing the soldiers of the Year II, he tore them away from History and made them enter into legend.
Wiesel does not content himself with recounting or celebrating the outcome of the Six-Day War. He gives it a meaning, he makes of it the prolongation of another history, diasporic and biblical. He situates the State of Israel at the center of Jewish life, at the crossroads of all the roads of exile, but infusing it with an entire diasporic and biblical heritage and memory. He makes of Israel saved from the threat of annihilation the legitimate heir of this history and this memory. In doing so, he endows the historical sequence that has just unfolded with a mystical, messianic dimension. The State, the land, the city, the Wall, the people, the tradition, history appear thus unified and inseparable, legitimated, sanctified.
The political effects and repercussions bound to this messianic vision unfortunately make themselves felt to this very day. I will nonetheless venture this remark, suggested to me by the attentive study of the Wieselian text: even if they have been used by politicians, these pages are the pages not of an ideologue or a politician, but of a poet nourished by the biblical text.
The status of Israel
What the novel organizes, in any case, describing or anticipating a historical process, is a reconciliation/confrontation between the old and the new, the religious and the political, the material and the spiritual, instituting a difficult dialogue between the Israeli soldier and the inspired beggar. The question of the reciprocal recognition of diasporic Judaism and the young State is posed in the novel through a question endlessly repeated: Who won the war?
Onto the combat of the soldiers and the generals, recognized and celebrated, the Wieselian account superimposes another combat, waged by unarmed madmen: “The war, it is we who won it, by weeping, by singing, by telling stories,” say the madmen. “The madmen have taken matters in hand,” says the narrator. Ezra Ben Abraham, an old man originally from Morocco, will maintain that it is thanks to his tears that the enemy was driven back. His friend Velvel claims that it is thanks to his dance. Zadok will complain that his prayers have been forgotten. A jest? The speech of a madman? But we know that in the Wieselian universe, it is often the madmen who know the truth.
The violation of the ancient commandment thou shalt not kill, which the dead who surrounded Elisha in Dawn refused to countenance, now seems to find a justification: Israel struggles for its survival.
In the text, the boundaries between past and present, between the dead and the living, seem for a time abolished. In visionary pages, the man whom the narrator sees dancing before the Wall is also the preacher of his childhood, and the recovered Wall bears the face of the vanished mother, in a unity that is mystical fusion. In this universe with its uncertain temporal boundaries and its interchangeable identities, the dead and the living mingle and advance, united, toward the Wall.
And it is in this fantastic dimension that the writer can give the best of his art when, in a grandiose and hallucinated vision (one cannot but think of the images of Abel Gance’s J’accuse39 and of the oneiric and haunted visions of Leïb Rochman40), he describes the cohort of the dead of the Shoah, come to bring their aid to the living:
All the dead of the city, all the dead cities of the cemetery that Europe became. All became pilgrims, and there they are at the crepuscular, timeless hour, invading the Temple of which they are at once the foundations of fire and the guardians… These cities and these villages emptied of their Jews, these names cut off from their sap united their efforts and built an enclosure of safety — an Amud Esh — around the city that had taken them in. Sighet and Łódź, Vilna and Warsaw, Riga, Białystok, and Drancy; Jerusalem became once again the memory of the entire people.41
The reconquest of the Wall symbolizes a kind of reversal of History and of Time, and to describe this moment, Wiesel recovers once again the accents of an inspired Hugo, who himself was recovering the breadth of biblical poetry. “Then everything stopped. Breath, life, the sun. The war itself came to a standstill…” In a long procession, it is the whole history of Israel that comes to file past the Wall: the kings and the prophets, the warriors and the priests, the poets and the thinkers, the rich and the poor. Because this wall, this city, and this country are experienced as the rallying point of Jewish history.
Elie Wiesel bound the past and the present, Israel and the Diaspora, the religious tradition and the political reality, in an enterprise of unification and legitimation. The dead of the Shoah have made the journey from one world to the other; they are no longer that unappeased presence that haunts the survivor, they are henceforth a benevolent and protective army that attests the indivisible unity of the children of Israel.
The status of the storyteller. Who speaks, and to whom?
But the reader witnesses at the same time a change in the status of the storyteller. Whereas in the preceding novels the traces of the writing remained discreet, the account here delivers itself in an evident way as a legend, a tale, a mythical narrative. It assumes the flamboyant and lyrical writing of one. But above all, for the first time in Wiesel’s universe, the beggar, the dreamer, is the narrator himself:
He beckons to you. Do you see him now? It is he, it is I. They call me David, like my grandfather, David like the conquering king, except that he loved to fight and to sing, whereas I know only how to dream.
In the old reconquered city, before the citadel of David, the storyteller now inscribes himself within the lineage of the poet-king, and places himself under the sign not of prophecy, but of memory. The interlocution has once again changed, and the dialogue now installs itself between the poet-storyteller and his readers. In the preceding works, many madmen, beggars, travelers traversed the account, evoked by a narrator identified with a young survivor of the Shoah who listened to them tell stories. Here, the narrator is identified with the beggar, one of the immemorial figures who peopled the old world, transmitting and perpetuating the tradition.
The mute madmen and the dreaming beggars, the masters and their disciples, the cantors and their allies, the just and their enemies, the drunkards and the storytellers, the dead and immortal children, all the characters of all my books, ah! yes, they had followed me to make an act of presence and to testify like me, through me. Then they parted, and I had to call them in order to gather them once again.42
Wiesel’s status is thus transformed, since he speaks from the center, from the heart of this Jewish memory. He has become its voice.
A dazzling variation of tonalities and registers
One ought here to evoke one of the most savory texts of Wiesel’s work, a few pages of L’Oublié (The Forgotten)43 themselves forgotten by many readers and critics. Pages of solemn and trivial, comic and fantastic resonances, which organize, in an unprecedented manner, the dialogue of the dead and the living, in a dazzling variation of tonalities and registers.
Malkiel, the son of Elhanan Rosenbaum, a survivor of the Shoah, lives in New York with his father, who tries to transmit to him his lived experience and attempts to transfuse into him his memory, for he knows himself stricken by an illness that drives him toward oblivion. Malkiel travels to the little Carpathian town where his ancestors lived, in order to recover the past there and to gather himself at the grave of his grandfather, whose name he bears. It is there, in the cemetery, that he meets Hershel the gravedigger, one of the last Jews — perhaps the last Jew — of his community to have remained alive, and the latter tells him what he calls The Night of the Great Reunion.
During the liquidation of the ghetto, and at the time of the last Aktion, Hershel, who had remained hidden in the cemetery while all the Jews of the ghetto were going to their death, was on the point of going to join his brothers, when there rang out a voice coming from one of the graves: “Hershel, do not abandon us, we too have need of you,44” said the voice. The solemn dimension of the call of the dead is quickly contradicted by Hershel’s commentary, trivial and banalizing: “It was not the first time the dead spoke to me. It’s normal, they have nothing to do, the poor things, so they chat with me like that, to pass the time.45”
The gravedigger is a drunkard. He is cowardly, boastful, insolent, devoid of manners, and at the same time transfixed with respect before the holiness of the rabbis his cemetery shelters. The reader thus witnesses a savory dialogue between the dead and the living, and, as in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an exchange between a Yiddishizing Leporello and a Commendatore in a tallit. The voice from beyond the grave nonetheless presents itself with the requisite solemnity:
I am Rabbi Zaddok, the first rabbi to have had the honor of serving this community; for three centuries and a half I have watched over it from this grave.
With, as counterpoint, the insolent reply of the gravedigger:
Well, I felt like telling him, you have a funny way of watching over your community, my dear rabbi; go take a stroll through town…46
Hershel, despite his comic attributes, finds himself charged with a sacred mission. He must go to fetch in the deserted ghetto the cane of Rabbi Zaddok, and with this cane he must strike upon the graves of the rabbis and the rabbinical judges of the cemetery to invite them to The Great Reunion. Having accomplished his mission despite his fright, he is ordered to stay and attend the reunion. Well! he laments, that’s exactly what I was missing! And to the voice that asks him whether the guests have arrived, he replies, as offhand as ever: how should I know? I don’t see the dead, me.47
As regards black humor, inappropriate jokes, glibness, and chutzpah,48 Hershel has nothing to envy in Romain Gary’s Gengis Cohn,49 with whom he shares many resemblances — though he is in an inverted situation, for, contrary to Gary’s character, a dead man who speaks to the living through the mouth of the one he inhabits,50 here it is a living man who speaks familiarly to the dead. But beyond this humorous and even facetious dimension, Wiesel’s text, charged with a funereal poetry, haloed by the aura of memory, testifies to an intimate knowledge of the destroyed world that is evoked here.
When the dead rabbis and the deceased judges of the holy community, drawn from their long sojourn, gather at three in the morning, at the heart of the cemetery, to learn of the death of the town and of its inhabitants, they present themselves bearing names forged by piety and legend, the names attributed to them by those who believed in them and in their power: Rabbi Mordechaï, the Tzaddik with the wounded heart, Rabbi Israël, the one called the inflamed soul of his people, Rabbi Yehuda, the one whom the poor adored…
In silent procession, they make the round of the destroyed and deserted town, visiting houses with broken-down doors where they can still see a piece of moldy bread, a child’s shoe, a prayer book with torn pages, and they too, in their turn, serve as witnesses, witnesses already dead. When they go to the various synagogues of the community — that of the tailors, that of the dreamers, that of the traveling salesmen — lamenting over the profaned sanctuaries, the scrolls trailing in the dust, and the irremediable aspect of the destruction, it is the dead who express, like the living, the pain of never-again. “God of our fathers, will there be, then, no more prayer addressed to you in this town! The voice of the children studying your Torah will no longer be heard within these walls!” cries one of them, while another laments over the solitude of God, of whom he asks, weeping, who will henceforth console him, him the Creator. And it is Rabbi Zaddok, initiator of The Great Reunion, who sums up the extent of the disaster: “Woe unto us, we are the dead rabbis of an extinguished community.51”
Like the text of Piotr Rawicz,52 describing Boris’s last walk in the cemetery of his town, where he deciphers one last time the inscriptions and the ancient bas-reliefs engraved on the graves, Wiesel’s text offers us a last look, come from within a culture he knew and loved. It is of the mourning felt from the very interior of the religious world that he speaks to us, with the words, the traditional formulations, the honorific titles, the images, the erudite or naive beliefs of this world closed upon itself and to which we generally have no access. He conveys to us the echoes of the mourning of a part of the Jewish people, achieving, for a few pages, an impossible transfer, making one language speak within another, one culture within another, half-opening the doors of an imaginary to the young American visitor, Malkiel, son of Elhanan, son of Malkiel, as well as to the lay reader, making them hear the noise of time:
The dead made a noise that is not of this world. Perhaps it was not a noise, but something else. A trembling, not of the earth, but of time. A thunder so powerful that, become deaf, people confused it with silence.53
The keeper of the cemetery (a metaphorical figure of the writer?) keeps faithfully, jealously, the graves of the dead and the memory of a dead world. But with a smile one had not known him to have (or that one had not recognized in him), Wiesel, the memorious survivor, also lingers over the touching foibles of the disappeared: the cohort of rabbis has decided to go intercede with God for the last survivors, who are crammed into the last wagon and could still be saved. But here these great scholars launch into a discussion to determine whether or not they have the right to leave the cemetery before the coming of the Messiah, whether from the halakhic point of view they have the right to fly to the train, whether the law that binds the living also binds the dead, and, from arguments to citations, they arrive at morning and at the moment of returning to their graves, while the night withdraws behind the mountains.
A last mission will be entrusted to Hershel: with the cane of Rabbi Zaddok, he must strike upon the grave of Rabbi Malkiel the martyr, every night (except the Sabbath and the festivals, he is told) in order to trouble the sleep of the town’s inhabitants, who otherwise would know no remorse.
Hershel fulfilled his mission, but he confesses to having also made use of the cane in a more concrete and expeditious way, in order to knock out definitively one of the villagers who had been particularly cruel during the war.
A cane, an auditory metaphor of memory and remorse, made concrete as an avenging cudgel for a brawny righter of wrongs. One would like, thinking of Wiesel, recently departed, to linger as well over this smile.
Notes
The expression is Rachel Ertel’s.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Célébrations hassidiques, Seuil, 1972; Célébrations bibliques, Seuil, 1975; Célébrations talmudiques, Seuil, 1991; Célébrations prophétiques, Seuil, 1998.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Cœur ouvert (Open Heart), Flammarion, 2011.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, ibid.↩︎
Nathalie Zaltzman, La Résistance de l’humain (The Resistance of the Human), introduction, PUF, 1999.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, La Nuit (Night), Les éditions de Minuit, 1958.↩︎
Jorge Semprun, L’écriture ou la vie (Literature or Life), Gallimard, 1994, p. 218.↩︎
Concerning these problematics, I refer to two texts: that of Rachel Rosenblum, “Peut-on mourir de dire ?” (“Can One Die from Telling?”), in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 2000, and that of Régine Waintrater, “Ouvrir les images, les dangers du témoignage” (“Opening the Images: The Dangers of Testimony”), in Le Risque de l’étranger (The Risk of the Stranger), Dunod, 2000, p. 199.↩︎
La Nuit, op. cit., p. 172.↩︎
La Nuit, op. cit., p. 173.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Entre deux soleils (Between Two Suns), Seuil, 1970, p. 184.↩︎
Ibid., p. 185.↩︎
Yehiel Di Nur, known as Ka-Tzetnik, Visions d’un rescapé ou le syndrome d’Auschwitz (Visions of a Survivor, or the Auschwitz Syndrome), Hachette, 1990.↩︎
Cited by Rachel Ertel, Dans la langue de personne. Poésie yiddish de l’anéantissement (In No One’s Language: Yiddish Poetry of Annihilation), Seuil, 1993.↩︎
La Nuit, op. cit., final lines.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, L’Aube (Dawn), Gallimard, 1960.↩︎
Ibid., final lines.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Le Jour (Day), Gallimard, 1961.↩︎
Ibid., final page, p. 138.↩︎
I refer here to the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, to their book L’Écorce et le noyau (The Shell and the Kernel) (Aubier Flammarion, 1978), and to the notion of inclusion and of crypt within the ego that they elucidate there. As well as to the work of Claude Nachin, in particular Le Deuil d’amour (The Mourning of Love), Éditions Universitaires, Paris, 1989, an essay on the pathologies of mourning that follows in their wake.↩︎
Speaking of one of his masters, Wiesel can write: “Perhaps I am nothing other, I his disciple, than his tombstone,” Le Chant des morts (The Song of the Dead), op. cit., p. 23.↩︎
For the theme of the double in the work, I refer to the fine study by Ellen Fine: Legacy of Night. The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel, Albany, State University of New York, 1982. For my part, I situate this process of “expulsion” in Wiesel’s fourth work, Les Portes de la forêt (The Gates of the Forest), at the moment when Grégor, a Jewish adolescent hidden in a cave, meets a stranger, a strange alter ego who makes him the gift of his own name, Gabriel.↩︎
Jean-François Chiantaretto, Le Témoin interne. Trouver en soi la force de résister (The Internal Witness: Finding within Oneself the Strength to Resist), Aubier, 2005.↩︎
Régine Waintrater, Sortir du génocide. Témoigner pour réapprendre à vivre (Leaving Genocide Behind: Testifying in Order to Relearn How to Live), Payot, 2003.↩︎
I take the liberty of referring to my work on this subject: Anny Dayan Rosenman, “Les deux voix de Lazare” (“The Two Voices of Lazarus”), in Le Survivant, un écrivain du XXᵉ siècle (The Survivor, a Writer of the Twentieth Century), Textuel, no. 43, 2003 (eds. Anny Dayan Rosenman and Carine Trévisan); Anny Dayan Rosenman, Les Alphabets de la Shoah. Survivre. Témoigner. Écrire (The Alphabets of the Shoah: To Survive. To Testify. To Write) [CNRS Éditions, 2007], Poche Biblis, 2013.↩︎
In particular in Le Chant des morts (The Song of the Dead) and Entre deux soleils (Between Two Suns).↩︎
This is to be connected with his dramatic work.↩︎
“It is for the living that I write, and at the same time it is in order to reconcile them with the dead, because there has been, in our century, a terrible rupture between the living and the dead: I mean the disappeared. It may even be that a terrible anger separates them,” in Le Mal et l’Exil. Dialogue avec Michaël de Saint-Chéron (Evil and Exile: Dialogue with Michaël de Saint-Chéron), Nouvelle Cité, 1988, p. 55.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Paroles d’étranger (A Stranger’s Words), Seuil, 1982.↩︎
Jean Améry, Par-delà le crime et le châtiment - Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (At the Mind’s Limits), Actes Sud, 1995. (1966 for the publication in German.)↩︎
Piotr Rawicz, Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky), Gallimard, 1961.↩︎
In Le Jour (Day), the narrator is the victim of an accident. He is run over by a car, and the reader cannot know whether it is the result of a moment of inattention or of a will to suicide, as the English title of the book, The Accident, suggests, as well as the final pages.↩︎
In Les Portes de la forêt (The Gates of the Forest), the same child takes him by the hand to lead him toward the house of study.↩︎
Alfred de Musset, La Nuit de décembre (December Night), 1835.↩︎
L’Aube, op. cit., p. 105.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, Le Mendiant de Jérusalem (The Beggar in Jerusalem), Seuil, 1968.↩︎
One may recall that during the first Zionist congresses presided over by Herzl, as well as at the time of the creation of the State of Israel, a great many communities and religious authorities had expressed their opposition to the creation of a Jewish State. For some, it endures still.↩︎
Les Juifs du silence (The Jews of Silence), Seuil, 1966. He would later write Le Testament d’un poète juif assassiné (The Testament), Seuil, 1980.↩︎
J’accuse, a French silent film by Abel Gance released in 1919, which denounced the butchery of the trenches.↩︎
Leïb Rochman, A pas aveugles de par le monde (With Blind Steps across the World), Denoël, 2012.↩︎
Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, op. cit., p. 180. Amud Esh: pillar of fire.↩︎
Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, op. cit., p. 11.↩︎
Elie Wiesel, L’Oublié (The Forgotten), Seuil, 1989.↩︎
Ibid., p. 120.↩︎
Ibid., p. 120.↩︎
Ibid., p. 121.↩︎
Ibid., p. 124.↩︎
The word chutzpah can be translated as nerve, or cheek.↩︎
Romain Gary, La Danse de Gengis Cohn (The Dance of Genghis Cohn), Gallimard, 1967.↩︎
Gary refers in this book to the tradition of the dybbuk.↩︎
L’Oublié, op. cit., p. 126.↩︎
Piotr Rawicz, Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky), op. cit., Gallimard, 1961.↩︎
L’Oublié, op. cit., p. 126. ↩︎