Against Silence epitomizes Elie Wiesel's obsession: to sensitize people to the injustices that afflict their contemporaries. Having suffered from the silence of others' indifference, he spends his life speaking out against inhumanity everywhere. Now his Nobel Peace Prize signals that people are listening. It gives him reason for hope. “It is not for prizes that one works,” he replied, when asked if the award would change him. To Wiesel, who was notified of the award at the close of Yom Kippur, the prize means “a new beginning. … It is a possibility to speak louder.”¹

Although Wiesel is best known for his untiring efforts to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in order to prevent its recurrence, he has earned further renown and admiration for turning that experience towards positive action:

… because we have known hunger, it is up to us to battle against hunger. Because we have sustained humiliation, it is incumbent upon us to oppose humiliation. Because we have glimpsed the ugliest side of humanity, we must appeal to its most noble aspect.²

Hence, Wiesel has cried out against suffering in Biafra, Bangladesh, and Uganda, and against persecution of the Bahai in Iran, the Miskito Indians in Central America, and the Aché tribe in Paraguay. He has called for help for the boat people of Indochina, for the Lebanese, the Palestinians, and the Haitians. He has decried oppression in Poland, Afghanistan and El Salvador, and the torture of children wherever it takes place. He has personally gone to Argentina to secure freedom for political prisoners, to Cambodia to deliver food and try to stop the massacre, to Ethiopia to arrange help for the starving populace, to Israel to intervene personally on behalf of Arab prisoners, and to the Soviet Union to pressure for release of prisoners of conscience. “And so I shout. I alert my journalist comrades. I call up senators and high-level functionaries: We do not have the right to keep silent! … It is in combating the suffering of others that we find meaning in our own” (A [Against Silence] 1:192).³

Wiesel is driven by the same zeal to save mankind as he was when, as an adolescent, he fasted two days each week and maintained silence on the Sabbath. The youth turned inward with unquestioning faith, hoping to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Today he believes in the Messiah, even “more than before.” However, he believes that the Messiah is not one man, but all humanity, and so how and when the Messiah will come depends on us. That is why Wiesel has turned his efforts outward, writing and speaking and teaching to encourage the development of collective responsibility. He is trying to save the species by changing individuals.

What has brought about this shift in Wiesel's emphasis? The clues are in his own works. Not only do Wiesel's books trace the metamorphosis in his view of the individual's relationship to God and to others, but conversely, his change in outlook produces a metamorphosis in his writing style. From silence Wiesel moves against silence, as he confronts the implications of the Holocaust, first for himself and then gradually, for its universal implications—from contending with his destroyed world to doing what he can to change the outside world.

The child he had been, “drunk with Talmud and prayer … lived by and for the Shabat and its singular serenity, …” (A 1:245). It is that child who “died” in the Holocaust. It is that child who looks back at him from the mirror, asking him what he has done with his life, driving him to justify every day of his existence. But in his first works, Wiesel, striving to give voice to the unspeakable, to re-create a world out of chaos, could barely utter the tale.

That is why silence is the language of Wiesel's first book, Night, as it documents the camp experience that killed his faith “forever.” Its neutral tone is the language of the witness. By suppressing all emotion, analysis, and embellishment, it speaks of despair and cynicism. But it also forces the reader to fill in the feelings and judgment that Wiesel has silenced. It thus communicates Wiesel's perception, the perception of the witness. The absence of causal connectives is symptomatic of the broken Covenant between God and His people. Stripped to the essence, Wiesel's concise expression adheres closest to the truth. Reticence and understatement overrule sentimentality and repellant literalness, allowing the author to endure and the reader to believe. Both meet across the silence between words, the reader seeking the secret messages and becoming a participant in Wiesel's experience and quest.

Silence as a mood, silence as a mysterious presence, remains in Wiesel's books, even while he moves from despair to affirmation of literature and life and as he continues to probe the unanswered questions of human cruelty and God's silence. As he shifts responsibility from God to men and women, Wiesel's voice against silence begins to emerge. In The Accident, the protagonist tells of his dream in which God is no longer present.⁴ Then, in The Town beyond the Wall, Kalman, the mystic, tells Michael, “God is in prison. It is up to man to free him.” Implied is the idea that God becomes known through our deeds. Later, Gavriel, in The Gates of the Forest, tells Clara, “The Messiah, Clara, is not a single man, but all men,” thereby indicating each individual's responsibility for ushering in the messianic time. In Souls on Fire, Wiesel reinforces this concept by emphasizing a partnership between the divine and the human: “… man and God make one.” God's creation requires completion by the created. Furthermore, God may be disappointed in what we have made of his work. Indeed, in Ani Maamin: a song lost and found again—Ani Maamin means, “I believe”—God sheds tears when he sees what has been done with His creation, and God is touched by His people's continued faith in Him.

Then, in Messengers of God, Wiesel visualizes Cain accusingly questioning God, “You are the guardian of the world. If you did not want me to kill my brother, why did you not intervene?” Questioning God is within Jewish tradition, and it shows Wiesel believes He is still there. The dialogue with God continues in The Trial of God. God's defender says: “… it is a very simple situation: some men have been killed by other men. Why implicate the Lord?” With responsibility now placed on men and women for their crimes, Wiesel can direct his efforts to changing them. But to say that God is not involved is too easy an answer. Wiesel will keep asking questions, for he feels the magnitude of the Holocaust was such that it must implicate God.

I am not excusing God. I still question Him and shall question Him to the end of my life. But to say that God alone is on trial is hypocritical. … In Argentina thousands of people have disappeared. … Who is to blame for what is happening there? …

Who is to blame for Cambodia? …
Who is to blame for Iran? …

(A 1:177)

Although Wiesel is still contending with God's failure to speak, he can follow the faith of the Hasids who say, “If man had listened to the voice of God, there would not have been the great slaughter in Europe.”⁵ It is true that if everyone had obeyed God's commandment against murder, there could not have been a Holocaust.

Wiesel continues to probe the implications of that event, but now speaks with two voices: silence in his books, and against silence in his lectures and addresses. Wiesel himself explains the difference:

… between speaking and writing, there is an essential difference. You can disguise yourself in a book; you reveal yourself when you speak. …

… In a book what you do not say is important—or rather, it is as important as what you do say. Not in class: silence does not contribute in the slightest to knowledge

(A 2:94)

The words “Against Silence” not only encapsulate Wiesel's message in Abrahamson's collection; they are also the clue to its style. The message is against indifference, and it is clearly and explicitly stated. In the more than three hundred lectures, addresses, newspaper and periodical articles, book reviews, forewords and afterwords, radio and television transcripts, interviews, and dialogues, we hear Wiesel as Wiesel, not as a character in his books. We hear his humor, his anger, his tenderness, his enthusiasm, his relaxed, friendly side. These three volumes, invaluable as a resource for scholarly investigation as well as for the general reader, are not to be read all at once. They are rather to be savored little by little, then again and again, for each reading reveals more wisdom, more poetry than the previous one, as Wiesel shares insights into his books, guidelines for writers, teachers, and students, the impact of the Holocaust, Soviet Jewry, and Israel, and lessons from the past as well as hopes for the future.

Always, he speaks from within the history, faith, and culture of his people. “I am first a Jew and only then a writer” (A 1:10), Wiesel has said, and as he speaks from his Jewish experience, he addresses people of all faiths. John Roth, Harry James Cargas and Robert McAfee Brown affirm that he speaks to them.⁶ “… the better a Jew I am, the better a person I am …” (A 1:357), Wiesel states, and he asks of the rest of the world not that they become Jewish, but only that they be good Christians or good Moslems or good Buddhists—and that they respect the right of Jews to be good Jews.

Wiesel follows his own advice to writers to create an oeuvre by telling about the universe they know. He draws on the Hasidic milieu of his childhood as inspiration for his characters and stories, reveals the influence of his lifelong study of Talmud on his method of literary explication, finds contemporary relevance in the Bible legends and personages, and invokes the central events of Jewish history to insure the future of humanity. These sources not only provide the content of his work; they determine its form.

Wiesel says “The soul of every writer is his childhood and mine was a Hasidic one” (A 2:255). As he so frequently does, he drew on a Hasidic tale to make his point during a commencement address, warning his audience that they might forget his words, but would remember a story:

… a student … came to his master, the celebrated Hasidic teacher, Rebbe Mendel of Kotzk. “Rebbe,” said the student, “there is something I do not understand. It took God six long, endless days to create the world. Look at it! It's terrible. It's corrupt. It's cruel. It's inhuman.” The master looked at his disciple and said, angrily, “Can you do better?” At that point the student felt forlorn; he knew what he wanted to say and so he said it: “I think—yes!” “Yes?” the master shouted, “then what are you waiting for? Get busy. Go to work—immediately!”

Then, Wiesel addressed the students directly. “Well, it did not take you six days. It took you four years. And now the time has come for you to start work. Immediately!” (A 2:166).

By returning to Hasidic tales in his lectures and books, Wiesel retrieves his happy, secure childhood. He feels whole again. Hasidism was a haven when Wiesel chose to leave the subject of the Holocaust. It professes that the only way to love God is through man. Hasidim were profoundly human and demanded “nothing from the world, everything from God, and even more from themselves” (A 2:259). “Hasidism is compassion. Hasidism is love. Hasidism is fervor” (A 2:256). And one can even hear Wiesel's fervor as he speaks about it.

One of the characteristics that made the Hasidim so accessible, and the one which Wiesel subtly displays, is a sense of humor. The following excerpt shows that Wiesel has his feet on the ground:

Torah in Midrash is compared to water and fire, and it is a remedy against pain. The Talmud says: “If you have a headache, study Torah.” In my yeshivah the joke among the yeshivah students was that if you had a headache and you studied Torah, you would see that you had no head—and no headache

(A 1:307)

When Wiesel consciously left the topic of the Holocaust and turned to his Hasidic past, he introduced the Hasidic melody, the “niggun,” into his writing and thereby made his style more lyrical. His grandfather had taught him to make words “sing.” “With novels it's the first line that's important The first line determines the form of the whole novel. The first line sets the tone, the melody. If I hear the tone, the melody, then I have the book” (A 2:118) Wiesel expresses the rhythm of the Hasidic chant through repetition. His purpose is emphasis, but “it can become a vehicle of art” (A 2.112). Indeed, much of Wiesel's prose is poetry. His speech at Uri Zvi Greenberg's award ceremony, entitled “The Pure Fire,” conjures rising and falling flames as it builds to a crescendo with the same word pattern repeated two or three times, then drops to a quiet level as a concluding statement wraps up the first three. Then, silence. Crescendo again with the next pattern of repeated phrases—it is as if Wiesel is painting “the very pure fire of truth” that he credits Uri Zvi Greenberg with showing:

When no one knew what would happen, you knew. When no one believed what was happening, you believed. When no one dared to tell, you spoke. How were you able to live with this knowledge?

I read your words, your poems, your verses, I read the silence in them, I read the fire in them—and I do not understand how you were able to live. …

We see in you an exceptional teacher and a brother. We see in you a man who lives before us, dies before us, and comes to life again before us. I have always thought it possible to live thousands of miles from the temple and yet live through its destruction. I have always thought it possible to live from one destruction through the next destruction. I have always thought it possible to pass through the death camps after they were closed. If I have these thoughts it is because of you. …”

(A 2:74)

Wiesel follows the Talmudic method of starting with a question. Because questions disturb, and therefore lead to a search, raising questions is the duty of the writer.

How do you describe to a child in the ghetto who had no bread what it is to have a cake? Or fruit? Or sugar? “What does an apple look like?”, a child asks a father. Another wants to know, “What does happiness mean? Are there happy Jews in the world? Have there ever been?” And a third child inquires, “You told us that people are good at heart. Are they?” And a five-year-old asks, “Am I going to die? Have I lived enough?”

(A 1:151)

Do the questions disturb? Indeed they do, and there are no simple answers.

Furthermore, Talmudic “explication de texte” serves Wiesel as a guide when he uses a word definition as a take-off point. He often translates a word's derivation and its literal meaning into a moral lesson.

In Hebrew the word for “suffering” is sevel; to suffer is lisbol. From lisbol we go to savlanut or patience. And from savlanut we go to sovlanut, which means tolerance.

As a Jew and as a man totally committed to my people and its tradition, I have learned that suffering, sevel, must generate sovlanut; compassion or tolerance, and not bigotry or hate. The fact that the Jewish people, in spite of twenty centuries of persecution, have not become obsessed with or dominated by bitterness and vengeance, violence and resentment, is to me a source of astonishment and pride

(A 1:371)

“And in the Talmud one is always asked: What if the situation were the opposite? Whatever we read we are forced to read either way …” (A 3:298). Mirror images similar to the Biblical verse, “I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine, …” (Song of Songs 6:3) dot Wiesel's literary landscape:

Incapable of living simply, or simply of living, these heroes and anti-heroes, …”

(A 2:72)

We are all members of the human race if we make the race human.

(A 1:378)

… for most writers, their work is a commentary on their life; for Jewish writers it is the opposite; their lives are commentaries on their work.

(A 2:255)

Talmudic study has still other applications. For instance, just as Wiesel gently and respectfully, but insistently, implored President Reagan to “find another way” instead of visiting Bitburg as a symbol of reconciliation with Germany, Wiesel used Talmudic argumentation to convince Roman Rudenko, the attorney general of Russia in 1979, to meet with him privately and to take from him a letter containing the names of four dissidents. Here are two excerpts from their conversation:

“… And now, Mr. Rudenko, I have a favor to ask you. I would like to see you alone.” He did not understand. He said, “Why?” I said, “Mr. Rudenko, to explain to you why, I must be alone with you.” You see, learning Talmud has its advantages. Realizing that he had no choice, Rudenko took me into his study. …

“You have no right to give me this letter!” … He gave it back.

I said, “Mr. Rudenko, I am not taking it back. Either I or the letter stays here. I am not taking it out.”

(A 2:244-245)

Within a few months, the first man on the list was freed. It took longer for the release of the second man, Anatoly Shcharansky.

The Biblical injunction to “choose the good” (Deut. 30:15 and 30:19) serves as a silent reference point for Wiesel whose critiques reveal his ability to see both sides: the positive and the negative, the good and the evil, in what is said or left unsaid, in what is done or left undone, and to subtly emphasize which choice he sees as the good and moral one. Thus, Wiesel singles out the compassion of Malamud in this laudatory review:

The pulsing excitement in Bernard Malamud's work is the immense compassion which he feels for all would-be creative men who experience defeat after defeat, loneliness after loneliness; in his work they are given the right of refuge.

(A 2:273)

Then, Wiesel juxtaposes what Malamud might have done against what he chose to do:

Far from mocking them and exploiting their misery, far from condemning and scorning their mistakes and their ugliness as do so many of his contemporaries, he offers these phantoms a guiding light.

(A 2:273)

In this way, Wiesel demonstrates, too, how “… the writer becomes responsible … not only for the language but for the silence” (A 2:65).

Wiesel honors the sanctity of human life that is proclaimed in the Talmud when he writes his poetically tender and beautiful pieces in paying homage to his friends and teachers. Whether the tribute is presented on the occasion of an award ceremony or as a eulogy, each honors the humane qualities in the honoree. And each reflects honor upon Wiesel for the respect and compassion his caring words convey.

But Wiesel proclaims the sanctity of life, as well, when he declares his outrage at the wanton destruction of the Aché, in his “Epilog” to Genocide in Paraguay, edited by Richard Erens.

Deculturization, ghettos, collective murders, manhunts, tortures, and agonies: that in a country so near to ours humans can still be locked with impunity inside stifling camps, can still be tracked down legally like wild beasts before being reduced to slavery, …

But our society prefers not to know anything of all that. Silence everywhere. … But now, after having read these testimonies, we know. Henceforth we shall be responsible—and accomplices.

(A 2:372)

Again, in this insight into Wiesel's book, The Testament, he upholds the sacredness of human life:

Among other things I wanted to show the meaning of communism. The problem with communism was that it became an experiment of sacrificing living people for the sake of an abstraction. That is something one does not do … The end does not justify the means. When it comes to human life, every person is an end, not a means.

(A 3:267-268)

Wiesel is always conscious of his link to all of Jewish history. He believes “profoundly that the past is present” (A 1:279), and he illustrates this conviction by relating Biblical personages to his contemporaries. “They were forefathers, not myths, and their singular destiny affects ours. We identify with them. They were neither saints nor idols. They were human beings with weaknesses and shortcomings, but thrust into a drama of cosmic magnitude” … (A 3:100). And so, on the subject of Cain and Abel, Wiesel asks why Adam and Eve do not intervene between their quarreling children. Where are they? Even if Adam is too busy, where is Eve?

How is one to explain and justify this pedagogical failure, the first, and probably the most fatal, in history. Must we attribute it to the “gap” which divides all generations, in times past as today, and makes parents incapable of understanding their children, incapable of raising them intelligently?⁷

Wiesel's conviction that “past is present” is also manifested in the movement of his characters or of their thoughts, back and forth in time, as he alternates chapters of present-time with past-time in The Town beyond the Wall, The Testament, and The Fifth Son; or alludes to contemporary events in telling tales of the past, as in The Trial of God and The Oath; or blends past and present, as in A Beggar in Jerusalem and The Gates of the Forest.

Irving Abrahamson and most other critics of Wiesel are overwhelmingly laudatory, citing his eloquence, his poetic quality, his authenticity, and the relevance of his works to theology, philosophy, history, and literary criticism, to our past and our future. Although Wiesel maintains that he is just a “teller of tales,” Terrence Des Pres emphasizes his qualities as an artist who affects his readers so deeply that “we cannot read him without the desire to change, to lead better lives.”⁸ To Cargas, he is “the most important living writer”⁹ and should have the Nobel Prize for literature as well as the Peace Prize.

The occasional negative appraisals of Wiesel's writing have faulted him for not achieving a “great style,” mixing disparate genres or giving precedence to conscience over craft. Frederick Garber is critical of Wiesel's inability to “sustain his occasional fine moments”¹⁰ and thinks that the books that bring together several shorter pieces are more suited to Wiesel's talent.

Wiesel, however, is unruffled by adverse criticism and takes as a compliment any allusions to his sacrificing craft for conscience. Since he has seen firsthand that culture without a moral dimension may be inhuman, he perceives such criticism as an indication that he has succeeded in communicating morality.

Furthermore, the obligation to express what is impossible to express has produced among survivors a language that is fragmentary, and more silence than words. How does one say the unspeakable and make credible the unbelievable? A recent study of survivors' language by Sidney Bolkosky,¹¹ Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, indicates that the “struggle with narrative forms” is common to all survivors, a fact of which Wiesel is well aware. Des Pres believes that only an “archaic quasi-religious vocabulary” is suitable when writing about the death camps, while Emil Fackenheim opts for a language of “sober, restrained, but … unyielding outrage.”¹² All this suggests how inadequate an understanding most of us have of the survivors' dilemma, and consequently, how inappropriate is traditional criticism.

In order to really understand Wiesel, one must know, in depth, who he is and whence he comes. One cannot separate his life from his work; both possess moral beauty and a deep religious feeling. He may be against God, but he is not without God, and he is always on the side of man. He is authentic and compassionate, and even inspires a kind of reverence. The following words, which analyze the effect on Wiesel of his return visit to his pre-war home in Hungary, could describe as well Wiesel's effect on one who is deeply involved in his works: “There are certain themes and certain experiences that make you change whether you want it or not, when you must reevaluate your relationship with the surrounding society, with man and with God and with yourself” (A 3:41). Reading Wiesel is one of those experiences.

Having survived only to testify, Wiesel is a driven person. He is trying to answer the young boy that he used to be. “I hear him asking me: ‘What have you done with your life?’ I write and I write and I write, trying to tell you what I have done with my life” (A 1:198). Thirty books in as many years plus hundreds of lectures and articles aim not to induce guilt or pain, but to insure hope for the future.

We do not want you to be sad. What do we want you to be? More aware, more open, more sensitive. That is the key: more sensitivity. … We have learned that indifference to evil is evil. We have learned that if evil strikes one people and others do not react, evil has its own dynamics. I wish we could stop that evil.

(A 1:198)

The fact that Wiesel is the first writer to receive the Nobel Peace Prize is recognition that he lives his words. What has he done with his life? Will he succeed in changing man? “The answer will come not from me,” Wiesel says, “but from our children” (A 1:198).

Notes

1. ABC News, “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,” 14 October 1986.

2. Elie Wiesel, Signes d'exode [essais, histoires, dialogues] (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1985), p. 187. Here, and wherever I cite the French edition for a quotation in English, the translation is mine.

3. Irving Abrahamson, ed., Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, 3 vols. (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985). All quotations from this work will be noted in the text, as follows: (A 1:192).

4. Elie Wiesel, Le Jour [roman] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961), p. 86. Starting with Le Jour, the seven French titles under note 4 follow the order of their English equivalents in my text and are from Editions du Seuil unless otherwise noted: La ville de la chance (1962), p. 19; Les Portes de la forêt (1964), p. 236; Célébration hassidique (1972), p. 20; Ani Maamin, un chant perdu et retrouvé [Edition bilingue 1, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 102; Célébration biblique (1975), pp. 54-55; and Le Procès de Shamgorod (tel qu'il se déroula le 25 février 1649) (1979), p. 111.

5. Elie Wiesel, Paroles d'étranger [textes, contes et dialogues] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 157.

6. John K. Roth, A Consuming Fire: Encounters with Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust, with a Prologue by Elie Wiesel (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1979); Harry James Cargas, Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York: Paulist Press, 1976); and Robert McAfee Brown, “The Holocaust as a problem in Moral Choice,” in Elie Wiesel et al., Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1977), pp. 46-63.

7. Wiesel, Célébration biblique; p. 47.

8. Terrence Des Pres, Foreword to Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel, by Ellen S. Fine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. xiv.

9. Cargas, In Conversation, pp. vii-viii.

10. Frederick Garber, “The Art of Elie Wiesel,” Judaism 22 (Summer 1973): 301-308.

11. Sidney Bolkosky, “Against Silence and Disbelief: Toward a New Language of the Holocaust,” Dimensions 2 (Fall 1986): 14-15.

12. Terrence Des Pres, quoted in Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 27: Fackenheim, p. 28.