March/April 2006 Feature

A Conversation With Elie Wiesel

On February 1, 2006, Midstream met with Elie Wiesel in the book-lined offices of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, in midtown Manhattan. Mr. Wiesel graciously agreed to help inaugurate a new feature for the magazine, The Midstream Interview. Although he certainly deserves one, Elie Wiesel needs no elaborate introduction to this magazine’s readership. He is, after all, a member of the community to which he addresses himself here. He speaks to Midstream’s readers from what in Wiesel’s near-native French he would call his for intérieur, his innermost heart. All the while, he sprinkles his remarks with expressions from the Hebrew and the Yiddish as though we were sitting together with him at the Shabbat eve dinner table. The following is an edited version of our free-flowing conversation. –J.L.

Joseph Lowin: In mid-January, Oprah Winfrey designated Night as the next selection for Oprah’s Book Club. It is already number 1 on amazon.com and holds places 1, 3, and 8 on The New York Times bestseller list for biography [and would subsequently become number 1 on The New York Times paperback bestseller list.]. Aside from increased sales, what effect will that choice have—on Jews, on non-Jews, and especially on American youth?

Elie Wiesel: One doesn’t realize the power of Oprah Winfrey’s voice. The fact that she chose this book makes it immediately into a bestseller. This book comes forty-five years after it was [first] published in America, and you must remember that at the beginning it didn’t sell at all. The first printing was 5,000 and took over three years to sell. I used to say as a joke that two books of mine had a special destiny: Night was read but not sold; A Beggar in Jerusalem was sold but not read. What will happen now to that book is that people who have never heard about me or about my work—[suddenly] it goes to almost every household in America. Young people in general have read my books—I get 100 letters a month, at least, from young people. High school students will read one book or another, mainly Night. But it’s not a matter of sales. That’s not the issue. Simply, the message—the story—I wanted to tell is now being received in so many places.

Josesph Lowin. In your Preface to the current edition, you quote liberally from Un di velt hot geshvign [And the World Remained Silent], published in Yiddish in Argentina in 1955, which formed the basis of the French book, La Nuit. There are those who study your work seriously—myself among them—who believe that an English translation—perhaps even a dual language version—would be enormously helpful to scholars in coming to a fuller understanding of your subsequent oeuvre. It might help us to understand that if Night is neither a novel nor a memoir, what is it? Might it rather be classified as a Jewish genre, one that you have, if not invented, then perfected. Do you think that the timing is good for an English translation of Un di velt hot geshvign?

Elie Wiesel:. First of all, Night is a memoir; it’s autobiography. It’s not a novel at all. I have always thought that the witness has the right to decide whether what he writes is bearing witness or not. Nobody else has that right. At the very beginning I said, it’s an autobiography. Every word in it is true. I said it myself, because I believe in transparency, that there are very small details that need to be changed; the words, not the facts. Is it a genre? No. I follow in the footsteps of my ancestors, the way they wrote, in our tradition, Emek ha-Bakha [The Vale of Tears, (1557-58) a liturgical chronicle written for the Tisha be-Av service by Joseph ha-Kohen], Yeven Metsulah [The Abyss of Despair, a chronicle of the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648-49 by Natan of Hannover]. These are books of methodology and reflect my philosophy because the main thing is not to embellish, to tell the story the way it happened. Now, as to the translation. I’m not against it, naturally; I recognize that it would be helpful to scholars. But the rights belong to my French publisher. Night is after all a condensation. Whatever is in Night is in Un di Velt hot Geshvign. The French publisher owns all the rights to all the translations.

Joseph Lowin:. When he was eleven years old, my older son, David, took Night off the bookshelf and read it in one sitting. After finishing the book, he asked me: “Is Elie Wiesel still Jewish?” When I asked him, “Why?” he responded, “Because he no longer believes in God.” That young boy is now a man. What can you tell him about your ongoing struggle with belief?

Elie Wiesel:. First of all, Jewish? I become more and more Jewish. Whatever I do, I do for my own people. Whatever I do, I do as a Jew. I believe that I can help others, that I can speak to others, that I can teach others, and always as a Jew. For me, therefore, it is important to see the whole world through the eyes of a Jew. I say it again and again. I say it all the time; I choose to identify myself as a Jew. I acknowledge that a Catholic, a Buddhist, or an atheist has the same right of self-identification.

Joseph Lowin: So you flunked Assimilation 101?

Elie Wiesel:. I never even registered for that course. Some writers were seduced, but I was never tempted. My problem is not with Judaism but with humanity. As to my beliefs, people didn’t understand about my faith [in the camps]. I never lost my faith. If I had lost my faith, I would have had no problem. I don’t say I don’t have problems with God. I do have problems with God. As I say elsewhere, the tragedy of the believer is deeper than the tragedy of the non-believer. The non-believer has a problem with humanity, not with God. We had both. I did have problems eventually, but not immediately. I stand by every word in Night. In Night [and in my play, The Trial of God] I say we condemn God, but immediately afterward we went to prayer. Not only that. We had, in Auschwitz, somebody—a non-Jew—who smuggled in a pair of tefillin for I don’t know how many portions of bread. Every day—every day—[my father and I] we got up and laid tefillin. There was no reason to do that. It was not one of the three laws of ye-hareg ve-al ya’avor [for which one must permit oneself to be killed and not transgress]. And what is the prayer we said? Ahavah Rabbah Ahavtanu [You have loved us with abundant love]. What kind of prayer was Ahavah Rabbah? And then we continued, Hemlah Gedolah Viyteirah Hamalta Aleinu [You have pitied us with exceedingly great pity]. Where is the Ahavah? Where is the Hemlah? And when I came out of Auschwitz to France, into a children’s home, I became very, very religious. I really became almost as religious as I was as a child [in Sighet]. What saved me, what saved my sanity was study [of Jewish texts]. I never stopped learning. Later on, in the fifties, when I studied philosophy and theology [at the Sorbonne], I began to be invaded by doubts, all the questions we have now in philosophy and theology, God’s presence in history, God’s action in history, God’s relationship to his creation. Again, not that I stopped believing in God.

Joseph Lowin:. Some people compare Night to Iyyov [The Book of Job].

Elie Wiesel:. No, no. Iyyov wasn’t Jewish. Lo hayyah ve-lo nivra [He never existed], ela mashal hayyah [He was a parable]. Shaul Lieberman, my revered teacher, once told me that instead of mashal [parable] we should read le-mashal [as an example].

Joseph Lowin:. I once had a conversation with your good friend Eliyahu Amikam. During the conversation, he hinted that your early novel, Dawn, a masterpiece of Racinian concision and tautness, might be based on a real event that you had witnessed. He even thought that he himself might be the model for one of the characters in the novel.

Elie Wiesel:. In Le Monde, they called my work Racinian. No, I wrote Dawn before I met him [Eliyahu Amikam]. We were very close, and I, because of him, became very interested in LEHI. You know that the execution of two British sergeants, after the killing by the British of three Jews—Dov Gruner and two others—was at the hands of the Irgun, not LEHI. In any case, I was not there; I came to Israel for the first time in 1949 and stayed only a few months. If I had been in Palestine at the time, I would have joined LEHI, because it had a certain purity and was suffused with poetry. Things happened, but I wrote a different story. I met afterwards somebody who was the head of a squad to punish traitors. He had read Dawn. He said, “What you describe there is so impossible. You really think we spent a whole night discussing these things—philosophy, morality—are you crazy? Come on,” he said. “We got the order. I had to execute somebody. I did it.” I said to him, “I prefer my style.”

Joseph Lowin:. I have just re-read Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, dealing with a highly intellectual old man who had gone through the Holocaust. To me, Sammler’s actions and thoughts during his experience ring true, and even remind me of Elisha’s dilemma in Dawn. Do you see a filiation? Has Elisha become a literary type, a metaphysical model? The Jew who fights back also thinks?

Elie Wiesel:. First of all, I know Bellow, but I’m not even sure he read Dawn. I do know that he read Night. [In any case] I did not write to teach other people how to write. I wrote for myself, by myself. The one writer who responded to Dawn was Philip Roth, who compared Dawn with [Leon Uris’s] Exodus, praising Dawn, and downgrading Exodus.

Joseph Lowin:. I understand that you may not have patience with the television series Holocaust, or with Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s List. But what about The Pianist and Rosenstrasse? Are there any movies dealing with the Holocaust that have moved you? And Spielberg’s new movie, Munich, dealing not with the Holocaust but with the Munich Olympics massacre and its aftermath, has raised outcries that he is dealing in “moral equivalency.” Do you see it this way?

Elie Wiesel:. My world is not film; it is books. With Holocaust, I felt this was the beginning of a process of trivialization. And I was right. I have seen The Pianist and, yes, Rosenstrasse. But I’m no good on movies. I really like books. One thing I will say about The Pianist is that, however moving it might be, the trouble is that at the end he does not change. All he cares about is giving a concert. The war is there, but did he become a better Jew? As for Spielberg, he denies that in Munich he deals in moral equivalency. He said he didn’t do that. I met Spielberg. He happened to be in the south of France, and he came to see me. He told me about the movie [before it was finished]. He said: “I know that the Jews will be very angry with me.” So I said, “Come to see me in New York, before it’s finished, then I can try to help you.” But he didn’t come, and I haven’t yet seen the movie.

Joseph Lowin:. Let’s get back to your own writing, A Beggar in Jerusalem. Do you agree with Dov Yudkovsky [your editor at Yediot Aharonot] that A Beggar in Jerusalem, has made your career.

Elie Wiesel:. Well, when it won the Prix Médicis, a very prestigious award, in France, it took off. [In 1967] I came to Jerusalem as a beggar, literally as a beggar. I came because at the beginning, we were afraid, especially when Ahmed Shukeiri [Chairman of the PLO at the time] said there would be no more Jewish problem. Finished. I was alone. I wasn’t married yet. I really felt what Raymond Aron wrote in Le Figaro, “Je ne veux pas survivre à Israël” [I don’t want to survive Israel]. If he said it, I will also say it. Absolutely. Some of us, [myself included] said, has ve-halilah [God forbid], Who wants to survive? We cannot take two catastrophes—we cannot—in one generation. When I came to Jerusalem, I began running—as the whole country was running—toward the war. And then, all of a sudden, Jerusalem was ours. And at the Wall, not the huge plaza that it is today, they were already there, the tsanhanim [paratroopers] and they were crying and the whole country was crying and I began writing at that time [not with my pen but] with my lips I would write. The structure of the novel was designed to bring the past and the present entwined together—even in my evoking of Jesus and showing what Christians were doing with his teaching. The past became present. And that’s why I wrote with such fervor, to make my past become the present.

Joseph Lowin:. The critic Dan Miron writes that Agnon had problems with the novel because it was, for him, a foreign genre and that he somehow had to write around it. I have a feeling that there is a filiation between you and Agnon, that you too have problems with the genre, that at best you can only have what Alan Mintz—also writing about Agnon—called “transactions with the novel.” What you’re really trying to do, in sum, is to create or perfect a Jewish genre. I believe that, like Agnon’s writing, your writing has a very, very strong liturgical content. The “poem” in Night, the “Never” poem—the one that begins “Never shall I forget that first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed”—I believe that one day that’s going to become part of Jewish liturgy.

Elie Wiesel:. There is Rabbi Nahman’s saying. “Make my prayers out of my stories.”

Joseph Lowin:. Toward the end of your recent novel, The Time of the Uprooted, you have your main character Gamaliel Friedman say that it’s not enough merely to “go on” but rather that one must strive to “begin again.” How did you come to that conclusion?

Elie Wiesel:. We Jews are obsessed with beginnings. I felt that in our generation, it’s much more difficult to “begin again.” I have a friend, Rabbi Menashe Klein [the head of a yeshiva underwritten by Wiesel and named for his father], who quoted to me the verse in Bereshit about Ya’akov: be-makli avarti et ha-yarden [I crossed the Jordan only with my cane]. He said to me, when we came out of the camp, we had nothing, not even a cane. And yet, we must start again. Build a family. Have faith in society, the world around you, your environment. That’s what I meant.

Joseph Lowin:. Some recent photos of you show you with a broad smile and a merry gleam in your eyes. This is in contrast to earlier photos. Have you changed over the years? Is there a new/old persona you’re eager to project? Are you “beginning again?”

Elie Wiesel:. Well, it’s very simple. I have a son, and for me that changed my whole outlook on life. My son has a son—Eliyahu ben Elisha ben Eliezer. We have a tradition in our family that we go back to Rashi so, in my mind, I invited Rashi to the bris. You know the rule: he cannot refuse to come. So I said, “moreinu ve-rabbeinu, rabi shelomo yitshaki, come.” And in my mind, I’m sure he came.

Joseph Lowin:. When asked, “What have the anti-Semites learned from the Holocaust?” You once answered, “That they could get away with it.”

Elie Wiesel:. They got away with it. The president of Iran thinks he can get away with it. He gets away with it. Everybody knows that, has ve-halilah [God forbid], when he gets the atomic bomb, he will use it on Israel. But what does he think? That he will get away with it then? No.

Joseph Lowin:. Do you think the term, “Religious Humanist,” adequately describes your world-view?

Elie Wiesel:. I don’t know how to describe myself. I try to be a Jew, and I don’t need more. The Jew in me is Jewish. It is as a Jew that I am human. God is in my work and in my life, mainly because of my life. My father remained religious to his last breath. And my grandfather, his grandfather, his grandfather. I cannot give it up. I just cannot. Nevertheless, I had problems, very serious theological problems.

Joseph Lowin:. I am one of those who believe that your writing will last into posterity—not only Night (which is, and will remain, a monument) but also your more difficult works—your complete oeuvre. I believe your work is sometimes not appreciated precisely because you take artistic risks; I also believe that it will last because of these risks. What is your take on this way of looking at your work?

Elie Wiesel:. My work has to be seen as an ensemble. Every novel is part of a whole. If you take away one, the edifice will collapse, even the non-fiction. Somehow, they must all fit. Every novel creates its own structure. So, style is a way of building a novel. We all have our inner landscape. I bring back the same society. In one novel, “A” is a secondary character; in the next one, “B” is secondary and “A” becomes the focus. The difficulty is that somebody will read only the latest novel. I think, in order for somebody to comprehend A Beggar in Jerusalem, he or she must have read, before, the others. Otherwise, they can’t understand. You must read the sum. In French one says la somme. And, therefore it’s a risk—to require that from a reader.

Joseph Lowin:. One last question. I am interested in your language skills. You have written two books in Yiddish; as a young man in Paris, you took courses at the Sorbonne and now write books in a beautiful literary French; you somehow got a job as the Paris correspondent for Yediot Aharonot, and then wrote a column in literate journalistic Hebrew. How could all this develop from a Yeshiva bochur from Sighet? What exactly did you mean when you said that for you French is not merely a language?

Elie Wiesel:. I love language. When I came to France, I didn’t know a word of French (except for Rashi’s be-la’az). I wrote in Yiddish as a tribute to my father and grandfather. I wrote and write in Hebrew because my father was a maskil, and he hired a Hebrew teacher for me and my friend, Yerahmiel Mermelstein. He insisted [on Hebrew culture] and I read Tchernikhovsky and Bialik and Dovid Frishman and Shneour. On Shabbat, we never spoke Yiddish, only Hebrew. He had one copy of a Hebrew grammar book—Ha-dikduk Ha-ma’asi—and I learned it by heart. And then, in Paris, for Yediot Aharonot, I wrote a column called shavririm me’ir ha-orot [Sparks from the City of Light]. Today, I still write in Hebrew—but it’s not the same. It comes from a different zone. I acquired French as a language; I made a kinyan on it. Now, what I did is I adopted it as it had adopted me. When I write, I can only use the French of Racine or of a French philosopher [because] I don’t have the street language. The instances of French argot in La Nuit were probably from the editor at Les Éditions de Minuit, Jérôme Lindon. I once said that French was not merely a language for me but a home—because, at the time, I needed a home. French was like a building. Word after word after word, I built a home there. And because it’s fragile, I have to protect it. That’s why I read American literature in French translation. If I write an article today, I can’t write it in English (though I do prepare my lectures in English). I live French culture. As to language in general, I respect language too much [to say or write anything] to destroy it. Ah, the pleasure of finding the right word. •

About the author
Dr. Joseph Lowin, Adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at Stern College of Yeshiva University, has written reviews of a dozen books by and about Elie Wiesel. He has also published, in Midstream, “Elie Wiesel’s Liturgical Drama” and “The Making of Elie Wiesel, Novelist,” and, in the Journal of Psychology and Judaism, “A Dialectic on Life and Death: Elie Wiesel, From the Tragic to the Midrashic Mode.” He is working on a new reading of Night. elie wiesel, Nobel laureate, Holocaust witness, Boston University professor, world-famous author, is a member of Midstream’s Editorial Board.