[In the following review, Elman praises The Town beyond the Wall, calling it “an existential parable of faith.”]

Evil is human; weakness is human; indifference is not.

—Elie Wiesel

Even in his literary expression the Jew remains cosmopolitan. Despite the creation of a Jewish state, the reinvigoration of the Hebrew language, writers continue to express themselves as Jews in the various tongues of the Diaspora; and their imaginations seem forever fixed on a Europe that is in ashes. In a recent Commentary, Isaac Bashevis Singer explained: “Demons symbolize the world for me, and by that I mean human beings and human behavior.” Surely it is not accidental that this surviving Yiddish master should now be achieving world-wide recognition (including a West German nomination for the Prix Formentor) at a time when the conscience of the western world is again trying to confront the premeditated murder of six million Jews. Nor is it merely coincidence that Elie Wiesel who survived the death camps—a Yiddish speaking Jew from Hungary—should address us during this period with the French idiom of Camus. If some Christians are still testing the relevance of their faith against the proven apathies of their spiritual leaders, the Jew remains faithless and skeptical. These, indeed, are his only faiths. They are what liberate him finally from being parochial. Through his symbolic eminence as victim, the Jew has become the object of Christian atonement.

Thus, to François Mauriac, a French Catholic liberal, the work of Elie Wiesel is an act of conscience. Mauriac may try to locate the Christian myth of sacrifice in the actualities of what he chooses to believe was a Jewish martyrdom, but that effort is finally tentative, acknowledged to be inadequate precisely because the Jews did not set themselves up as martyrs but were absurdly victimized. Just as the theme of guilt—corporate, collective, or personal guilt—still scars the literary imaginations of writers in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia as well as England and France, the United States and Russia, as well as Israel, so, too, is the Final Solution still able to mock Jewish and Christian pretensions, encouraging agnosticism, reducing genuine concerns to mere crocodile tears, but managing, nevertheless, to overshadow all other human experience of the past three decades. One Jewish writer has even argued: “We live with one Auschwitz—the Auschwitz of the Jews—behind us, and another, the universal nuclear Auschwitz ahead of us. This is a time when the Jew has something to say.”

But, if some writers think they can reenact the prophetic vision for the rest of humankind, others may be only seeking a personal expiation with the insight that God has also perished. To such writers the ancient injunction that “out of Jerusalem will go forth the Law” may seem like naïve, provincial sloganeering. Often, their effort is just to dispel madness, to find a community among men. Still vulnerable and ambivalent, men like Wiesel (and his friend and contemporary André Schwarz Bart) continue to search for a meaning to their ordeal even as they manage to confront mere ash heaps. Their works are flawed; they may fail more often than they succeed in communicating their visions. Yet these are heroic failures, affirmations of some meaning to their search and of context. These men, who have stood in the shadows of the crematoria, cannot deliberately obliterate memory.

In Transylvania, where Elie Wiesel was born and lived until he was 15, there was no war before 1944. Some Jews endured in an ancient sacramental style of life. Others were very much the creatures of the Enlightenment. It was so even in Wiesel's family: His father was a rationalistic humanist; his mother a follower of the Hassidic wonder rabbis. Both these groups were slaughtered without distinction beginning in 1944. Night was Wiesel's earliest published account of the deportation experience; it was a direct statement about that historic event. Night was a memoire, factual, argumentative charged with a nausea for the realities it depicted; it was a document as well as a work of literature—journalism which emerged, coincidentally, as a work of art. In a later unsuccessful work, The Accident, set in New York and Western Europe, such candor was shown to be a lingering misery for the protagonist—surreal and self-destructive. Now, in The Town beyond The Wall, Wiesel finds both emblem and aesthetic in the Dostoevskyan vision of insanity. He writes of a survivor, Michael, returning to Szerencsévaros, his former home in Eastern Europe, only to be imprisoned by a new set of authorities, as well as by his fantasies, visions, old loyalties. Michael finally chooses the martyrdom which was denied to the six million.

As an existential parable of faith, The Town beyond The Wall is purposely set outside the conventions of realistic fiction. It is a narrative of the mind, moving backwards and forwards in time, a continuous passage through memory and delirium in which some of the characters are hardly more than convenient mouthpieces for Wiesel's ideals and passions while others—occasioned by remorse, nostalgia, or both—are dramatic figures even when they are also representations of the inhumanity to which the Michael figure was exposed. As in all dreams, the motivations are somewhat mechanistic. Michael has been haunted by a face in a window which glanced out at his deportation and did nothing. Made to withstand a maddening torture so as to protect his friend (and only protector), Michael recalls this “bland face, banal, bored: No passion ruffled it. … It was gazing out, reflecting no pity, no pleasure, no shock, not even anger or interest.” It is like the face of his inquisitors—neutral and indifferent—yet it has lured him back to Szerencsévaros, and will eventually betray him. Their confrontation is mutually hallucinatory. “You won't humiliate me … You won't do it. … I will not let myself be humiliated,” the man announces, invoking his former neutrality, accusing Michael of cowardice, and finally recalling how it was like a game—“a game which I didn't understand: a game you had all begun playing, you on one side, the Germans and the police on the other. I had nothing to do with it.” Because Michael is still contemptuous, the man must finally humiliate himself by turning Michael over to the police.

What do we learn from such an encounter? Why does Wiesel constantly lay bare this one painful experience? In this and in other scenes, his theme would seem to be that human loyalties are the ultimate form of religious commitment. With a visionary lucidity, often in the language of prayer, he manages to make this concern historic. Taken into custody, Michael (who has no last name) recalls Szerencsévaros “like a mantle of purple silk” when the sabbath “came to drape the city at sundown.” Michael's onrushing madness is a kind of deliverance from his tormentors. It is even depicted as beatitude: He “had come to the end of his strength. Before him the night was receding, as on a mountain before dawn.” To protect his friend, Michael must sacrifice his own sanity. But this, after all, is an extreme situation; Szerencsévaros—the city of luck—is now a graveyard. If The Town beyond The Wall manages to seem God-obsessed, that is clearly not Wiesel's intention. He shows us religious experience in order to dramatize a personal code of honor and behavior. In his captivity, Michael instructs his fellow prisoner not to oppose humanity. “A man is only a man when he is among men,” Michael explains. “It's harder to remain human than to leap beyond humanity. Accept that difficulty. Tell yourself that even God admits His weakness before the image He has created.”

Coming from one who rode the stifling box cars of Europe to the barracks at Auschwitz, the poignancy of such a plea should be obvious. If, elsewhere in his works, Wiesel has vowed: “Never shall I forget,” he now seems to recognize the personal peril of such a position, and that one cannot keep faith with the dead except by acts. When Wiesel through Michael urges “sighs heavy with existence” his speech has an unearthly persuasiveness, a sense of consequence, and a humanism that is not to be fobbed off with programs for human perfectibility, although it may continue to struggle and yearn for just that.