Master teller of tales, witness testifying to the human condition as seen through the Jewish condition, Elie Wiesel writes with an urgency that summons his readers to respond. For Wiesel, the world has still learned nothing from Auschwitz; barbaric cruelty and oppression of humanity are evident everywhere. Using one of his favorite metaphors, Wiesel describes humanity as riding a train that is about to reach a precipice. “And we, the survivors (of the Holocaust) are trying to pull the alarm. They won't listen. Even today, those who listen don't really listen.”¹

To transmit his view of a world radically transformed by Auschwitz, Wiesel turns to unique narrative strategies in his fiction. Beginning with his memoir, Night,² and continuing through over a dozen novels, Wiesel has altered the concept of time as an underlying structural principle of fiction.³ This essay will focus on some of the most striking ways in which Wiesel changes the dimension of time in his novel, The Gates of the Forest,⁴ to reflect his vision of “l'univers concentrationnaire.”

Structurally, the narrative of The Gates of the Forest follows a chronological sequence described by the titles of the four sections, “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and “Winter,” but these time indicators belie the complexity of the novel's temporal pattern. Indicators of time and date in The Gates of the Forest are often ambiguous, and there is a leap over an indefinite span of years between “Autumn” and “Winter.”⁵ Within the chronological time frame of World War II and its aftermath, Wiesel weaves an intricate fabric of references to past, present and future.

The short prologue to the novel provides a first indication of Wiesel's conception of time. Four rabbis avert catastrophe in their respective communities by their deeds and prayers, but as each successive disciple repeats his ancestor's actions and prayers, his memory is more blurred and each recreation of the ritual is therefore different from that of the previous rabbi. The fourth rabbi is able to avert catastrophe merely by telling the story of his ancestor's deeds, having forgotten all else. Wiesel implies by this prologue that a story told acquires a new temporal life of its own in each retelling, and that in its multiple reincarnations, through successive readers, it can still alter the course of history. If The Gates of the Forest awakens readers to avert the tragedy of another Holocaust, then it will play a role similar to that of the rabbi's tale, and will participate simultaneously in the past, present and future.

Wiesel denies temporality the character it usually assumes by establishing a dreamlike world in The Gates of the Forest which blurs characters' normal perceptions of time. By restricting the setting to a very narrow space (a cave, a forest, or a room in a synagogue), and by limiting the characters to one or two in these scenes, the author creates an illusion that time has been suspended, and that the usual time indicators—watches, changing positions of the sun—are no longer valid:

He (Gregor) glanced at the luminous dial of his watch: ten past two. He knew the time even though he didn't know what day it was. It could have been Friday or Saturday; what did it matter? He was living in a time of war, outside time.

(4)

Sometimes I watch the sun rise and set, but it no longer marks the passage of time. If the sun were to stop, it wouldn't surprise me. It has become a stranger to the earth—it warms out of habit or out of boredom. People don't interest it any longer.

(9)

For Gregor, hiding from the Nazis in the forest, or delirious from his exhausting voyage to Roumania, it is the abnormality, the brutality of war that have assaulted time, creating an oppressive present.⁶ The recurring elements of nature that mark time and confirm the harmony of the universe are deformed and perverted in The Gates of the Forest, becoming objective correlatives for the physical and moral havoc wracked by the Holocaust. The sun is a stranger that is no longer dependable, clouds that hang low over villages are the souls of murdered Jewish inhabitants (3); stars are the eyes of murdered Jewish children (54).

The concerns of Wiesel in The Gates of the Forest extend, however, beyond those of Night: Gregor, whose family has most likely perished, is not physically victimized by the Nazis, but struggles to find a meaningful life and to redefine his Jewish identity, haunted by memories of the Holocaust. Characters in The Gates of the Forest are defined not by their personalities or deeds, but by their relations with others in the past, present, and future, and by the influence they exert on one another, an influence extending over generations.⁷ By jumping with seeming illogic from Gregor's present, to his past and anticipated encounters with others, Wiesel suggests that the essence of a human being is not limited to his chronological existence, and that characters' lives extend far beyond their temporal existence.

Before Gregor has met his friend Gavriel in the novel, he anticipates the latter's influence on him: “the laugh of the man who had saved his life” (3). Gregor states that what he has learned about his world—about clouds hovering over the village, for example—he would understand later from Gavriel, who has not yet appeared in the novel: “Who opened your eyes, Gregor? He did. Did it hurt? Yes and no” (4). Yet at the time of his first meeting with Gavriel in the novel, Gregor feels that he has already met him before: “It was as if he had heard this voice before, and what it was saying. In another life, perhaps” (13). With this apparent fusion of past and future, as in an Escher print of staircases that run into one another in an endless cycle, the reader sees events in The Gates of the Forest, not from a linear perspective, but from a perspective outside of ordinary time.

Gregor's grandfather is dead; yet he continues to give Gregor advice about present-day situations (12). The reader never learns with certainty the fate of other family members, or of his friend Leib, but dead or alive, they remain present for Gregor in the novel through their influence on him. Gavriel advises Gregor to continue talking about his father: “Go on,” he said. “As long as you go on (talking about him), he is still alive” (24). But more than mere memories survive; the names of the dead, bequeathed to the living, or waiting to be adopted and thus resurrected, take on a life of their own, haunting the living:

Day follows night and night follows day, men are born and die, but the most fragile thing—for what is frailer than a name?—endures. As I walk through this world I find empty cities—empty of Jews, of Jewish tears and hopes and prayers—inhabited by names, by names only. And every orphaned name begs me to adopt it.

(16)

Distinctions between past and future are blurred when Gregor speaks of his friend Leib and of the war they fought: “We waged a war that will last as long as I live, and as long as it lasts, Leib will be a part of it” (164). The Holocaust is an event that forever implicates the future as well as the past and present, and all those associated with it are inextricably part of one's life, whether or not they physically survive.

By denying temporality its usual character, Wiesel emphasizes the theme of continuity—of relationships and values from generation to generation, and from one living being to another—in spite of the destruction wrought by Auschwitz.⁸ Without this anchor of continuous commitment, among the living and between living and dead, there would be no meaning to existence. Gregor's friend Yehuda expresses this conviction:

You say, “I'm alone.” Someone answers. “I'm alone too.” There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.

(177)

Throughout The Gates of the Forest, there is the weight of “l'univers concentrationnaire,” defying understanding and altering characters' notions of reality, mankind, and God. To convey the irrationality and omnipresence of the Event, Wiesel juxtaposes actions of his main characters with those of people involved directly or indirectly with the persecution of Jews. Seemingly unrelated events become connected when presented simultaneously, and the reader follows a temporal sequence that is both within and outside the main story.

While Gregor was experiencing sudden calm after the capture of Gavriel, who sacrificed himself for his friend, Hungarian soldiers in dazzling uniforms were shouting “‘Fire, fire, fire.’ … hundreds of hearts ceased beating … the Messiah himself, a thousand times, a thousand, thousand times multiplied, fell into the ditch” (60). Tranquillity and silence in the era of Auschwitz, suggests Wiesel, are obtained only at the expense of the suffering or death of others.

While these disparate actions were occurring, “Spring continued; the war too: they complemented each other perfectly, the one accentuating the other, each prolonging the other's life. Cold weather isn't suitable to murder; it slows it down” (60). Wiesel implies that the soldiers were not alone in their participation in the Holocaust; even nature and God are implicated and held responsible for the Event.

Other temporal leaps outside the main story suggest the guilt and responsibility of those who at first glance appear to have no connection with the persecution. A woman in a café lets herself be seduced by a smartly uniformed German officer reciting a poem about death, while at the same time elsewhere a German officer is crying, “‘Fire!’ and a line of men, women and children, silent and barely astonished, tumble into the ditch” (148). By acquiescing to the company of a German soldier, Wiesel implies, the woman is tacitly acquiescing to all German atrocities.

The seemingly innocent remark of a Christian mother to her daughter who has just finished her vegetables, “So they weren't so bad, were they?” (in the original French version, the literal meaning of her words is, “you don't die of it”) is juxtaposed with Gregor's anxiety about his friend Leib, and an ominous description of a town that is Judenrein, [purged of its Jews (149)], suggesting that the silence and indifference of Christians regarding the plight of Jews implicate them directly in their murder. Christian children don't die, victims of genocide, but Jewish children do.

To convey the tension of “l'univers concentrationnaire”—a world assaulted by the incomprehensible event of Auschwitz—Wiesel replaces traditional linear narrative sequence with multiple narratives of characters who change or exchange their identities in the course of the novel. Temporal leaps occur not only when events take place simultaneously, but also when narratives become interchanged. When Gregor gives his Jewish name to Gavriel, a stranger he meets, he seems to fuse his identity with the other, and the story of these two characters becomes thereafter both a narrative of two friends and of one person, Gregor, who incorporates attributes of another into his own personality. Wiesel maintains the ambiguity of Gavriel's identity throughout the novel, creating the dreamlike effect of a character, Gregor, who may have two separate identities.

Wiesel also portrays characters in The Gates of the Forest who live out inner and outer lives that contradict one another. The inhabitants of a Roumanian village all have secret lives through their relationship with Ileana. Gregor himself has two identities in the village: he is a Jew in hiding, and he is a muet, Christian simpleton (the role he plays to disguise his true identity). In another instance of multiple narratives that are interchangeable, Wiesel gives the same name to two different characters in The Gates of the Forest: Leib the Lion is a dead ancestor of Gregor who returns to the world to confront the Holocaust with disbelief (120), and Leib is the leader of the partisans and Gregor's boyhood friend. Because of their shared name, with its mystical power of perpetuating an individual's temporal existence, their otherwise unrelated stories become joined in the novel.

Time is expanded in The Gates of the Forest to portray the interconnection of different lives; and time can also be condensed for particularly intense moments that transform a character's life. In an interview, Wiesel speaks of trying to portray the essence of a lifetime in a few meaningful moments.⁹ By choosing a closed location removed from everyday existence—a cave in a forest for Gregor's first meeting with Gavriel, a room in a synagogue for their second meeting—Wiesel accentuates the atemporal nature of these encounters. He also creates the illusion of suspended time by shrouding the character of Gavriel in mystery:

“Where do you come from?” Gregor asked.

“Over there.”

“Where exactly is ‘over there’?”

“Over there, I tell you. Everywhere. On the other side.”

(9)

Gavriel appears to live outside of ordinary mortal existence, feeling no thirst or hunger, and claiming that death has no hold on him (35). His name, now lost, was pronounced and written differently (as in the ineffable Hebrew name of God, which is transcribed as YHVH, but is pronounced as “Ha-Shem,” the Name).¹⁰ What Gavriel says to Gregor is not transcribed word for word, but only suggested, as if transpiring over an indefinable period of time:

Gavriel talked on. What he said came from another time, another world. His voice was never the same. Its accent did not change, but its essence was constantly changing. Just as Gavriel had a thousand names; he had a thousand voices. One contained the plenitude of transparent dawn, another the insensate hope of a man condemned to die, another the fearful silences of a child abandoned in the middle of a crowded street.

(17)

The second meeting of Gregor and Gavriel is also shrouded in mystery: Gavriel neither denies nor admits that he is Gavriel, yet he knows all of Gregor's weaknesses, as if he has always known him (208, 210). Gavriel appears and disappears unexpectedly; Gregor seems so transformed by this meeting that he changes the direction of his life; yet the decision-making process is instantaneous, as if hours or days have been condensed into one moment:

And just as he did not know why he had decided the previous evening to go away, so now he did not know why he was reversing his decision. Gavriel could explain, but he was silent and would not even laugh. Where was he?

(220)

Through his use of allegory, Wiesel creates an additional temporal dimension in The Gates of the Forest. The narrative of Gregor and Gavriel is a modern recreation of the Biblical story of Jacob, in Genesis 28:10-32:33. Just as the Jacob story moves along two dramatic lines: a horizontal line of human-profane action (in his everyday world), and a vertical line of divine-human action (in Jacob's dreams at Bethel and Peniel),¹¹ so does Wiesel's narrative of Gregor have both its horizontal line (Gregor's efforts to survive the war and later to resolve marital problems) and its vertical line (his night encounters with Gavriel, whose name, as Gavriel explains, means “Man of God” (13)). In Jacob's first dream, at Bethel, God appears to him as a benefactor and consoler, giving him a reason to live and the courage to journey to a foreign land. Gavriel, similarly, plays a role of comforter and protector, prodding Gregor, who has all but lost the will to live, to journey to Roumania.

The parallelism of the two tales continues through the second divine-human encounter of Gregor/Jacob and Gavriel/God. Gregor/Jacob struggles all night with an enigmatic adversary who defies human understanding. Gregor/Jacob emerges from the struggle with a new sense of purpose and a new name: Jacob becomes Israel, the father of a new nation, and Gregor assumes his true Jewish name which he had previously denied: Gavriel. The Gates of the Forest can thus be interpreted as an allegory of the contemporary Jew who struggles in his relationship with God, in the era of Auschwitz. God appears in both Genesis and in The Gates of the Forest as ambiguously both present and absent, refusing to identify Himself and enigmatically escaping man's grasp.

Other narrative elements in The Gates of the Forest also acquire an allegorical dimension, as they echo biblical and Hasidic tales, and events in European history. Gavriel's tale of a Messiah who has come to earth as man and who submits to death without understanding God's will is an echo of the New Testament account of the life and death of Jesus Christ, but Wiesel gives the story a new twist: the Messiah is assassinated by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and has thereby arrived too late to save mankind (44-48, 58). The play directed by Constantine Stefan in a Roumanian village, reenacting the story of Judas' betrayal of Jesus, is an echo of the passion plays performed in Europe as early as the Middle Ages. In The Gates of the Forest, as in traditional passion plays, negative stereotypes of Jews and a climate of antisemitism are perpetuated from generation to generation.

The allegorical aspects of The Gates of the Forest enrich the narrative with intertextual associations. As Wiesel emphasized in an interview, without the reverberations in his novels of the Bible, Hasidic masters and tales of the Holocaust, there would be no continuity. “If we stop, we betray. When we die, we silence all the generations that would come after us.”¹² The multitemporal dimension of his novel is not a literary device achieved for its own sake, but a necessary means to pass on an historical legacy which Wiesel feels may soon become silenced as remaining Holocaust survivors die.

The Kaddish prayer recited by Gregor at the conclusion of The Gates of the Forest illustrates another way in which Wiesel shapes the temporal dimension in his novel. The Kaddish is simultaneously a glorification of God in the present and a link of solidarity between the living and all past ancestors and events. It operates paradoxically on many temporal levels at once, and in his recital of it, Gregor attempts a reconciliation both with the ghosts of his past who have prevented him from fully living, and with God, whom Gregor has previously rejected. Like Jacob, Gregor engages in a spiritual combat with God which has no resolution. The Kaddish illustrates this ambiguous position of contemporary man who is pulled simultaneously by his past and present, and who in spite of himself is drawn to a God he cannot fathom.

In denying temporality its traditional character in his fiction, Elie Wiesel portrays a world threatened by the inescapable presence of the Holocaust—that of World War II, and potentially that of the future. The past in The Gates of the Forest is not a separate temporal entity to be easily dismissed. It is inexorably encroaching on the present moment: Holocaust victims are hovering in clouds over their deserted homes, haunting the living; Gregor's dead ancestors are ever-present, and his dead comrade, Leib, prevents other characters from living out their lives.

Wiesel calls on man to commit himself to accept responsibility for others' well-being, and not to be silent to the voices of the past, of history. “He who is not among the victims is with the executioners” (166) is a theme that echoes throughout The Gates of the Forest. Silence is acquiescence to evil. Yet for Wiesel it is the present moment that man must assume existentially, not letting himself be seduced by the promises of ghosts of different names, not letting grief diminish life, and not waiting for a future Messiah. “The Messiah isn't one man, Clara, he's all men” (225). The Messiah, for Wiesel, is within each of us already, in each present moment.

Notes

1. Ellen S. Fine, “Dialogue with Elie Wiesel,” Centerpoint: a Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 4 (Fall 1980): 21.

2. Elie Wiesel, la Nuit (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1958); English language version, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).

3. Laurence L. Langer, in The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), notes that “The Holocaust assaulted the very notion of temporal sequence, and led to some vital experiments with the manipulation of time (as concept and principle of structure) in fiction” (251).

4. Elie Wiesel, Les Portes de la Forêt (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964); English language version, The Gates of the Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). All further references will be to this English edition.

5. Allusions to chronological time in The Gates of the Forest are extremely vague. The reader learns from page 4 that “He (Gregor) was living in a time of war,” but does not know which war it is. On page 41, the reader learns that the Hungarian army is involved in the war, and that there are deportations of Jews; he can therefore surmise that it is 1944. In “Winter,” Gregor attends a Hasidic celebration in Brooklyn; the reader surmises that this occurs after World War II, since the main character has somehow survived the war, but this is not confirmed until page 211, in an allusion to “the first post-war spring.” By avoiding references to chronological time, Wiesel implies that the Holocaust was an event which did not occur just once; rather it destroyed our whole understanding of time. The references to seasons assume multiple meanings: they are states of mind and of physical development (youth, manhood, and maturity) and milestones in a lifetime as well as indicators of a passing year.

6. Mildred L. Culp notes, similarly, in “Wiesel's Memoir and God outside Auschwitz,” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 4 (Jan. 1981): 65, the dominance of descriptions evoking the present moment in Night: “For the Jews, though, the present alone has meaning, because it is the abnormality, the brutality of that present with which they must contend in order to survive. From this standpoint, the future and past lose their meaning.”

7. David Patterson, in “Subjectivity and Responsibility: Wiesel per Levinas,” Cahiers Roumains d'Etudes littéraires 4 (1987): 130, describes Wiesel's characters similarly: “The characters are defined not by their personalities or idiosyncrasies, but in terms of their relations to others, by the words and the silences between themselves and others.”

8. Elie Wiesel comments to Ellen S. Fine, “If there is a single motivation (in my novels) besides the obsession to bear witness, it is continuity. Continuity not only with respect to the recent past but to the past in its totality.” Ellen S. Fine, “Dialogue with Elie Wiesel”: 23.

9. “We live seventy years or fifty years or forty years, yet we really live only a few hours or a few days. We collect a few meaningful hours and these form our lives. In the book I only take the substance. This is the real time. So what I do always happens within a ratio of time: twenty-four hours, usually one night.” Elie Wiesel, quoted in Harry James Cargas, In Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), 108.

10. Simon P. Sibelman, in “The Dialogue of Peniel: Elie Wiesel's Les Portes de la forêt and Genesis 32:23-33,” The French Review 61 (AATF, April 1988): 752, notes the similarity between Gavriel's name and the Hebrew name of God.

11. Bernard Och, in “Jacob at Bethel and Penuel: the Polarity of Divine Encounter,” Judaism 42. 2 (Spring 1993): 164, describes the two dramatic lines of the story of Jacob in Genesis 28:11-32:32 as “a horizontal one of human-profane activity and a vertical one of Divine-human encounter.”

12. Elie Wiesel, quoted in Ellen S. Fine, “Dialogue with Elie Wiesel”: 23.