I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to see a picture of Elie Wiesel staring back at me from the essay page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
United States of America (Press Release) February 26, 2008 --
Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust
By Andrew Grabois - Feb 25 , 2008
I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to see a picture of Elie Wiesel staring back at me from the essay page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
The picture was an old one, but he had the same pained, prophetic look that he did thirty years ago when he lectured in the basement of North Campus at the City College of New York. In the Times picture, his face is partially obscured by cigarette smoke, recalling the look of the fashionably existential French intellectual that he once was. That, of course, was before he won the Nobel Peace Prize and became the world’s conscience.
The picture accompanied an essay written by Rachel Donadio on Night, Wiesel’s recollection of his and his family’s deportation to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The book has sold an estimated ten million copies since it was originally published some fifty years ago, and it continues to sell about 400,000 copies a year because it is staple of American high school curriculums. As Donadio reports, however, it did not come easy.
After the war, the teenage Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage, where he learned the language. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and later became a journalist. After a decade-long silence, Wiesel was finally persuaded by his friend Francois Mauriac (also a Nobel Prize winner) to put pen to paper. His first draft, written in Yiddish, was an angry 900-page doorstop called And the World Remained Silent. Again, Mauriac stepped in and convinced Wiesel to take the book in another direction. He rewrote it in French as the slimmed down, 100-page masterpiece we know as La Nuit, or Night. Mauriac wrote the preface.
Mauriac, as Donadio astutely observed, was not only France’s greatest living writer, and a Nobel Prize winner, but also a Catholic, giving Wiesel and his book instant credibility. Unfortunately, it was not enough. The book did not do well. It was the mid-1950’s, and the world was not quite ready to confront the horrors that Wiesel tried to gave a name and face to. The story was much the same in New York, where the French-language manuscript was rejected by fifteen publishers before the small publishing house of Hill & Wang decided to take a chance on Wiesel’s book in 1959.
Night received very good reviews, including one from Alfred Kazin, one of America’s foremost literary critics. This led to more good reviews, but did not translate into sales. It wasn’t until the dramatic trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, some fifteen years after the last of the death camps were liberated by Allied armies, that America and the rest of the world listened. The harrowing testimony at the Eichmann trial seemed to open the door to a cathartic release of memories and memoirs that had been hidden in deep, dark places. Wiesel’s book not only rose with the rest of the sea, but managed to ride the crest of the wave.
By the early 1970’s, Wiesel was no longer just a writer. He had become a mystical figure, telling his tale with all the dramatic, prophetic intensity of one of the divine madmen he was so fond of. I attended his Holocaust studies class at City College, one of the first of it’s kind in the nation. It was a very disorienting experience for me., not only because of the subject matter, but because I was the lone third-generation American in a sea of first-generation children of Holocaust survivors. I respectfully observed, but dared not participate. I felt I had nothing to contribute to such a discussion.
Weisel would usually sit on his desk and speak ever so softly, eyes closed, head tilted in ecstasy. One did not get close to him or bother him with questions about assignments or grades. How could you talk to someone like that about anything so mundane after he had smelled burning flesh and survived Dante’s Inferno? Weisel had a teaching assistant who handled such earthly concerns and did a good job of it. I remember feeling moved, disturbed, overwhelmed, enlightened, and occasionally out of my depth. What does it say about Wiesel’s classes that I remember only feelings but not the content of the lectures or discussions? I attended Wiesel’s class for two consecutive semesters, and all I clearly remember was a spirited debate on the fate of the Egyptian Third Army, which Israel had cut off and surrounded in the Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
It’s been more than sixty years since the end of WWII, and the Holocaust, though it is taught in all our schools, is receding into the mists of time. It is, as kids would say, ancient history. Survivors are dying off, and soon there will be no one left to keep the memory alive as only living witnesses can. Elie Wiesel is no longer the prophetic mystic and sage he was in the 1970’s. He has been criticized by some for helping to create the “Holocaust Industry,” while others claim he has been slow to acknowledge non-Jewish genocides, or to criticize Israel.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Wiesel would become an ombudsman of genocides. In a sense, he is trapped in a prison of his own design. But that Romanian teenager who was so angry because the world remained silent while his parents and millions of other innocents were murdered, remains, after all these years, the Holocaust’s most famous and effective witness — and that alone should be his legacy. Just how important a legacy that is, can be understood if we recall something Hitler himself said before he launched his war against the Jews in 1939. Speaking of atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks during World War I, he said, “Who today remembers the Armenians?”
By Andrew Grabois - Feb 25 , 2008
I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to see a picture of Elie Wiesel staring back at me from the essay page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
The picture was an old one, but he had the same pained, prophetic look that he did thirty years ago when he lectured in the basement of North Campus at the City College of New York. In the Times picture, his face is partially obscured by cigarette smoke, recalling the look of the fashionably existential French intellectual that he once was. That, of course, was before he won the Nobel Peace Prize and became the world’s conscience.
The picture accompanied an essay written by Rachel Donadio on Night, Wiesel’s recollection of his and his family’s deportation to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The book has sold an estimated ten million copies since it was originally published some fifty years ago, and it continues to sell about 400,000 copies a year because it is staple of American high school curriculums. As Donadio reports, however, it did not come easy.
After the war, the teenage Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage, where he learned the language. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and later became a journalist. After a decade-long silence, Wiesel was finally persuaded by his friend Francois Mauriac (also a Nobel Prize winner) to put pen to paper. His first draft, written in Yiddish, was an angry 900-page doorstop called And the World Remained Silent. Again, Mauriac stepped in and convinced Wiesel to take the book in another direction. He rewrote it in French as the slimmed down, 100-page masterpiece we know as La Nuit, or Night. Mauriac wrote the preface.
Mauriac, as Donadio astutely observed, was not only France’s greatest living writer, and a Nobel Prize winner, but also a Catholic, giving Wiesel and his book instant credibility. Unfortunately, it was not enough. The book did not do well. It was the mid-1950’s, and the world was not quite ready to confront the horrors that Wiesel tried to gave a name and face to. The story was much the same in New York, where the French-language manuscript was rejected by fifteen publishers before the small publishing house of Hill & Wang decided to take a chance on Wiesel’s book in 1959.
Night received very good reviews, including one from Alfred Kazin, one of America’s foremost literary critics. This led to more good reviews, but did not translate into sales. It wasn’t until the dramatic trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, some fifteen years after the last of the death camps were liberated by Allied armies, that America and the rest of the world listened. The harrowing testimony at the Eichmann trial seemed to open the door to a cathartic release of memories and memoirs that had been hidden in deep, dark places. Wiesel’s book not only rose with the rest of the sea, but managed to ride the crest of the wave.
By the early 1970’s, Wiesel was no longer just a writer. He had become a mystical figure, telling his tale with all the dramatic, prophetic intensity of one of the divine madmen he was so fond of. I attended his Holocaust studies class at City College, one of the first of it’s kind in the nation. It was a very disorienting experience for me., not only because of the subject matter, but because I was the lone third-generation American in a sea of first-generation children of Holocaust survivors. I respectfully observed, but dared not participate. I felt I had nothing to contribute to such a discussion.
Weisel would usually sit on his desk and speak ever so softly, eyes closed, head tilted in ecstasy. One did not get close to him or bother him with questions about assignments or grades. How could you talk to someone like that about anything so mundane after he had smelled burning flesh and survived Dante’s Inferno? Weisel had a teaching assistant who handled such earthly concerns and did a good job of it. I remember feeling moved, disturbed, overwhelmed, enlightened, and occasionally out of my depth. What does it say about Wiesel’s classes that I remember only feelings but not the content of the lectures or discussions? I attended Wiesel’s class for two consecutive semesters, and all I clearly remember was a spirited debate on the fate of the Egyptian Third Army, which Israel had cut off and surrounded in the Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
It’s been more than sixty years since the end of WWII, and the Holocaust, though it is taught in all our schools, is receding into the mists of time. It is, as kids would say, ancient history. Survivors are dying off, and soon there will be no one left to keep the memory alive as only living witnesses can. Elie Wiesel is no longer the prophetic mystic and sage he was in the 1970’s. He has been criticized by some for helping to create the “Holocaust Industry,” while others claim he has been slow to acknowledge non-Jewish genocides, or to criticize Israel.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Wiesel would become an ombudsman of genocides. In a sense, he is trapped in a prison of his own design. But that Romanian teenager who was so angry because the world remained silent while his parents and millions of other innocents were murdered, remains, after all these years, the Holocaust’s most famous and effective witness — and that alone should be his legacy. Just how important a legacy that is, can be understood if we recall something Hitler himself said before he launched his war against the Jews in 1939. Speaking of atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks during World War I, he said, “Who today remembers the Armenians?”
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