SOURCE: Green, Mary Jean. “Witness to the Absurd: Elie Wiesel and the French Existentialists.” Renascence 29, no. 4 (summer 1977): 170-84.

Elie Wiesel has gained a certain reputation in America as a “Jewish writer,” a survivor of the Holocaust and a teller of Hasidic tales. As the sales of his books in English translation far surpass those of the original French editions, the fact that Wiesel wrote his novels in French is in danger of being quietly forgotten. Yet, although Wiesel first came to France only in his late teens after his liberation from Buchenwald, his contact with French literature and thought had a considerable influence on his novels. In fact, the central concerns of Wiesel's novels reflect those of the French existentialists, principally Camus and Sartre, who dominated the Parisian literary scene to which Wiesel was exposed in the late 1940's.

In making the themes of these French authors part of his own literary creation, Wiesel has woven them together with the memories of his concentration camp experiences and the Hasidic tales of his childhood to produce a new form which does not immediately reveal its existentialist sources.¹ It is important, however, to unravel these strands from the fabric of Wiesel's work, not only in order to determine Wiesel's place within the French literary tradition, but also, more important, to see how he has used the premises of atheistic existentialism in constructing a vigorous contemporary theism. Wiesel's position as a religious existentialist is not unique in literature: his distinguished predecessors include Pascal, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Kafka, as he himself often reminds us in interviews. His own concerns, however, are particularly close to those of Camus and, to a lesser extent, Sartre, and he often seems to have set out with the specific intention of providing a theistic response to the questions raised in their work.

In part because Wiesel's novels rarely use the existentialist vocabulary of Camus and Sartre, the relationship between his work and theirs is not immediately apparent. The idea of the absurd, for example, the point of departure for the French existentialists, seems, on first reading, relatively unimportant in Wiesel's work. Instead, he begins by confronting the Holocaust, an event fraught with personal meaning for him as a Jewish survivor of the camps. Wiesel considers the Holocaust, however, not only as a personal or even a uniquely Jewish experience, but as an event involving all men. In The Town beyond the Wall the protagonist Michael returns to his Hungarian home to confront a by-stander who had observed with indifference the deportation of the local Jewish community. Wiesel strongly condemns this man's indifference as an abdication of his identity as a human being. As men, Wiesel is saying, we were all involved in this drama of suffering and death and must all share in facing the problems which it poses.

The Holocaust, then, plays the same role in the Wiesel canon as the allegorical plague of Camus' novel, a plague which itself reflected the era of the Occupation and the concentration camp. For Camus—and for Wiesel—these experiences point beyond themselves to reveal the nature of the human condition: man is condemned to suffering and death by an irrational universe. Wiesel would seem to agree with Camus' use of the term “absurd” to describe the confrontation of man, with his demands for logic and meaning, and a universe which denies these demands. In the work of both writers, the absurd is not an abstract concept, but a reality experienced by the plague victims of Oran and the inmates of the camps, who seeing that the death sentence is imposed without reference to guilt or merit, become aware of the limitations of their mortality and the absence of rational order in the universe. While Camus makes clear the allegorical nature of his fictional plague, Wiesel's treatment of the Holocaust may appear to be merely historical. Wiesel states emphatically, however, that the Holocaust is not an event limited in time and space, but rather a manifestation of the enduring nature of human existence. As the Hasidic Rebbe says at the end of The Gates of the Forest, “Auschwitz proves that nothing has changed, that the primeval war goes on” (p. 192).² Wiesel himself has said of the experience of the camps that it went “to the limits of the human condition.”³ And in a 1967 symposium on the Holocaust, Wiesel described it as both a historical and trans-historical event: “To the sick person, Auschwitz lies in his despair; to the father whose child is dying, Auschwitz has the face of a child.”⁴

Through his novels Wiesel has developed a certain number of images which evoke the world as revealed by the Holocaust. The forest is one of these. It expresses the nightmare world of pure contingency which Sartre's protagonist discovers in La Nausée and of which Camus speaks in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. In The Gates of the Forest the forest is the place where the characters are forced to flee from their ordered everyday lives in town and where they must live like hunted animals. Its awesome voice, drowned out by other concerns in normal life, is now audible to them: “this roaring voice which, before creation, before the liberation of the word, already contained form and matter, joy and defeat, and that which separates and reconciles them, from all of which the universe, time, and their own secret life were fashioned” (pp. 122-23). It is the voice which spoke to Job from the thunder, the voice of Chaos: “it's madness, pure madness” (p. 123). Like the experience of the absurd in La Nausée, the experience of the forest in The Town beyond the Wall strips the world of false meanings and definitions imposed by human habit: “The universe frees itself from the order in which it was imprisoned. Appearance snaps its ties with reality. A chair is no longer a chair, the king no longer king, the fool ceases to be a fool, or to cry” (p. 180). Echoing the words of Dostoevsky often quoted by Camus and Sartre, Wiesel calls it, “the liberty in which anything is permitted” (p. 180).

Camus sums up his understanding of a universe of death and chaos opposed to human strivings in Caligula's statement, “Men die and are not happy.” This aspect of the absurd finds its expression in Wiesel's novels in the image of night. This is, in fact, the title of Wiesel's first novel which describes his concentration camp experiences, and it continues throughout his novels to represent those things which deny human values. At the end of Dawn, Wiesel's protagonist, after having killed a man, sees his own face reflected back at him in a darkened window pane: his has become the face of night. The progression of Wiesel's personal discovery of meaning in human life is tellingly revealed in the titles of his first three novels: Night, Dawn, Day (in English, The Accident).

As the images of night and the forest represent forces of the non-human universe, the prison reflects man's position within it, walled in by the limits which it sets to his freedom. The image of a man in prison, often condemned to death, has been used by writers in the existentialist tradition, at least since Pascal, to describe the human condition, and never more than in the French literature of the 1930's and 40's. Sartre's Le Mur and Camus' L'Etranger take place in the cells of men condemned to death, and in La Peste Camus makes the entire city of Oran into a vast prison. Critics have, in fact, lamented the omnipresent prison cell in the literature of this period, but it is an image almost thrust upon writers of the 30's and 40's by the historical situation and, in addition, one appropriate to their vision of the human condition.

Prisons, similarly, abound in Wiesel's novels, most evidently in the concentration camps described in Night and evoked in the other novels. But prison scenes are not limited to the camps. The plot of Dawn revolves around two men, a British soldier and a Jewish terrorist, who await execution in a form of cell. In The Town beyond the Wall, emprisoning walls are everywhere, a fact noted by the American translator who changed its original French title, La ville de la Chance. Its protagonist Michael is forced to stand with his face to the wall until his legs give out, a torture ironically called The Prayer. Later he is placed in a cell with a religious cellmate who asks him, in a scene reminiscent of the visit of the priest in Camus' L'Etranger, whether he has heard the voice of God. “‘No,’ Michael said, ‘It never got through to me. The walls must have been too thick’” (p. 145). There are also the walled garden of Michael's childhood, the walls of his small airless room in Paris, the symbolic wall of the Iron Curtain which Michael and Pedro must traverse to reach their destination. Seen in this way, The Town beyond the Wall illustrates the thesis set forth by Gregor's father in The Gates of the Forest, “It's man's duty to make a free choice and to push back walls” (p. 34).

Man abandoned in the forest, lost in the night, bound in by prison walls—all of these images reveal Wiesel's vision of the human condition, but none so forcefully questions its justice as the image of the suffering and dying child.⁵ Examples of unmerited suffering have traditionally been used to challenge the existence of a just world order, and in literature the child has often embodied the idea of innocence. It is the suffering of innocent children which most troubles Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov and which leads him to revolt against God. The theme recurs at the center of Camus' La Peste, where the long, agonizing death of a child forms a background for the confrontation of Father Paneloux and Doctor Rieux on the subject of theodicy.

Since Wiesel himself was in a concentration camp when still a child (although just old enough to escape extermination), it is only natural that images of suffering children recur in his work. The little sister Tzipora, who first appears in Night, continues to haunt his work, appearing at length in The Town beyond the Wall and A Beggar in Jerusalem. In the latter novel Katriel's wife mourns a dead child, as does the mother of the would-be suicide of Wiesel's most recent novel, The Oath. The most striking and certainly the most horrible treatment of the death of a child occurs in the scene in Night where a child, along with two adults, is condemned to death by hanging. The child, being too light to weight the rope, does not die immediately, and the other prisoners are forced to watch his agony. It is this episode which most strongly threatens the protagonist's faith in God: “‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows’” (p. 76).

Children also play an important role in The Town beyond the Wall, especially little Yankel, an even younger child who has been Michael's companion in the camps. Wiesel follows the hopeless effort of the boy to come to terms with his experience as a Piepel, a favored mascot of a camp guard, possessing the power of life and death over the other inmates. This role seems to fascinate Wiesel, perhaps because it so vividly illustrates the irrational nature of the actions taken in the camps. Having too intimate an experience of the absurd, Yankel arranges a suicidal traffic accident. Michael spends a week at his bedside watching his slow death, which calls into question the accepted order of things: “All the men on earth bore a single face: that of my dying friend. Their destinies were measured by his. A child who dies becomes the center of the universe; stars and meadows die with him” (p. 99).

Sharing with the French existentialists a vision of the human condition, Wiesel also shares with them their stress on human freedom. As for Sartre, freedom for Wiesel is the quality which distinguishes humanity: in The Town beyond the Wall, Michael says to Pedro, “Freedom is given only to man. God is not free” (p. 101). In the parable of creation told by Gavriel in The Gates of the Forest, laughter is seen as the manifestation of human freedom, and in the same novel Gregor's father declares, “It is man's duty to make a free choice …” (in the original French, more strongly, “se choisir libre”).⁶

Sartre views man as a being without previous definition who creates himself by his actions: “man … is condemned every moment to invent man.”⁷ Almost echoing these words, Wiesel writes in The Accident, “Man must keep moving, searching, weighing, holding out his hand, offering himself, inventing himself” (p. 125).

Man is free but how is he to exercise this freedom in the face of the absurd? This question, which preoccupies Camus and Sartre, is at the heart of all of Wiesel's novels, and it seems to reflect a very personal search for meaning. Wiesel's characters are often tempted to give up the struggle by committing suicide. The protagonist of The Accident has let himself be run down by a taxi because of his inability to bear the guilt of surviving the Holocaust, a suicide attempt like the child Yankel's. Like all of Wiesel's protagonists, he must find a reason for continuing to live. Camus, too, felt compelled to handle the problem of suicide in his Mythe de Sisyphe. Although it may seem a logical human response to the dilemma of the absurd, both Camus and Wiesel strongly reject suicide because it resolves the problem by removing one of the elements in confrontation: to commit suicide is, in effect, to accept the supremacy of an irrational, meaningless world order.

Madness, a suicide of reason, seems to represent a similar temptation for Wiesel's characters. Although madness sometimes has a positive side in his work, revealing an irrationality allied with the divine, in The Town beyond the Wall it clearly signifies submission to the chaos of the universe. Old Martha, the mad-woman, is a recurrent figure in the novel, offering her favors to the protagonist as a means of escape. At the end of the novel Michael is thrust into endless captivity among fellow prisoners who have already gone mad. The temptation to join them is strong, but he realizes that to accept madness is to admit defeat at the hands of his jailers, to ally himself with the absurd. There is a certain analogy in this situation with that of Camus' Caligula, who reacts to his discovery of the absurd by trying to escape the human condition and himself playing the role of an irrational destiny. For Camus and for Wiesel, man's obligation is to resist the irrational cruelty of the world order rather than to become part of it.

Wiesel's characters are saved from suicide and madness by an attitude of what Camus would call revolt. Whereas the idea of the absurd can itself furnish no basis for positive action, both Camus and Wiesel find such a grounding in the sentiment of revolt aroused in man by consciousness of his condition. The response of many of Wiesel's characters is similar to that of Camus' Sisyphus; eternally condemned to roll his rock up the hill from whose summit it will immediately tumble down. Yet his freedom defies the supremacy of the gods, and his happiness denies the punishment: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. … If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days.” Thus, Camus concludes, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”⁸ The same feeling of rebellious joy is evoked by the laughter and song of Wiesel's Hasids at the end of The Gates of the Forest. The Rebbe explains the peculiar meaning of the Hasid's song to Gregor: “It's his way of proclaiming, ‘You don't want me to dance; too bad, I'll dance anyhow. You've taken away every reason for singing, but I shall sing’” (p. 196). Earlier, Gregor's friend Gavriel had told him that God's gift of laughter gave man a weapon of vengeance, and Wiesel's characters typically react to tragedy with a burst of laughter.

The militant Jewishness of Wiesel's protagonists is, in fact, an aspect of their revolt. In the symposium on the Holocaust, Wiesel expressed his own feelings on the subject: “You, God, do not want me to be Jewish; well, Jewish we shall be nevertheless despite your will.”⁹ For Wiesel, the Jew plays the role of the eternal rebel: throughout their history Jews have felt the irrationality of the human condition and have known the depths of despair. By their very continuing to live and create in the face of this fate, they are revolting against it. Again quoting Camus, Wiesel says of his people,

I do not like to think of the Jew as suffering. I prefer thinking of him as someone who can defeat suffering—his own and others.' For his is a Messianic dimension; he can save the world from a new Auschwitz. As Camus would say: one must create happiness to protest against a universe of unhappiness. But—one must create it. And we are creating it. We were creating it. Jews got married, celebrated weddings, had children within the ghetto walls. Their absurd faith in their non-existent future was, nevertheless, an affirmation of the spirit.¹⁰

For Wiesel, as for Camus, the concept of revolt carries within it a demand for reaching out to other human beings. In the course of his examination of revolt, Camus discovered a new cogito: “I rebel,—therefore we exist.”¹¹ That is to say, in his movement of revolt man finds in himself qualities which link him to other men; in his assertion of his own human dignity, he is also necessarily asserting the rights of all men. It is this feeling of responsibility for others which provides a reason for Wiesel's characters to go on living and which gives meaning and direction to their lives. In The Town beyond the Wall, Michael's friend Pedro explains, in specifically Camusian terms, “To say ‘I suffer, therefore I am’ is to become the enemy of man. What you must say is ‘I suffer, therefore you are’” (p. 127).

This movement of concern for the other is not mere sentimentalism on Wiesel's part. It results from a philosophical view of man as responsible for all men, a view not far distant from Camus' or even from Sartre's formulations in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme: “in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”¹² In The Oath the narrator's teacher Moshe (another recurring Wiesel character) says: “Every man can and must carry creation on his shoulders; every unit is responsible for the whole.”¹³ And at the end of The Gates of the Forest, the Rebbe explains: “Doesn't helping a human being mean rescuing him from despair? Doesn't it mean subordinating destiny to your idea of man?” (p. 194). This concept of individual responsibility for all men is an illustration of Wiesel's characteristic blend of existentialist concepts with Jewish belief, in this case, the traditional teaching that the coming of the Messiah is dependent on the faithful behavior of each individual Jew.

This philosophical conclusion is expressed more often through action than in abstract terms. The narrator of The Accident abandons his pursuit of death to save his despondent friend Kathleen. Gregor in The Gates of the Forest devotes himself to saving his wife Clara from the claims of her dead lover. Michael of The Town beyond the Wall, who has withstood torture to protect his friend Pedro, finds a meaning even in hopeless imprisonment by trying to save his demented young cellmate. The old man in The Oath breaks his vow of silence to save a young would-be suicide. In fact, a frequently recurring pattern of action in Wiesel's novels involves a somewhat weak and despondent protagonist who, often strengthened by contact with a stronger, more optimistic friend, overcomes his despair in an attempt to save someone yet weaker than himself.

But the relation of man to man in Wiesel's books does not always involve a stronger character reaching out to rescue a weaker. There are also virile friendships, like that of Rieux and Tarrou in La Peste, which are characterized by long conversations and intimate understanding. These friendships are central to the Wiesel philosophy: they strengthen the protagonist and give him courage to go on. Michael says to Pedro in The Town beyond the Wall: “Together, we'll win. When two solitudes unite, there is the world on the one hand, and they on the other—and they are stronger than the world” (p. 134). This type of friendship is often consecrated in Wiesel's work by an exchange of names. In The Gates of the Forest, when Gregor meets the stranger Gavriel in the cave, he gives him his name. In The Town beyond the Wall, Michael and his friend Pedro feel themselves able to exchange identities, and at the end of the book this exchange is repeated with the madman Michael has begun to cure: “You'll tell me your name and you'll ask me, ‘Who are you?’ and I'll answer, ‘I'm Pedro.’ And that will be a proof that man survives, that he passes himself along. Later, in another prison, someone will ask your name and you'll say, ‘I'm Michael.’ And then you will know the taste of the most genuine of victories” (p. 189). This exchange of names is significant, then, as a device which man may use to overcome his own mortality, again an idea taken from Jewish tradition, which requires that a dead man's name be perpetuated.

If human relationships are the sphere of affirmation against the absurd, then an absence of relationship must contribute to chaos and meaninglessness. In The Town beyond the Wall, Wiesel uses the Sartrean concept of the Other, whose glance has the power to reduce a human being to the status of an object. Michael has returned to his former home, now behind the Iron Curtain, in order to confront the man who had passively observed the rounding up and deportation of the Jewish community, including Michael's own family. The man later admits to Michael that, while his wife had cried at the spectacle, he had taken refuge in the idea that the whole episode was only a play in which he himself had no role. Under his gaze, the condemned Jews had become objects, “living sticks of wood” (p. 159). In Wiesel's view, this man is not an exception, but rather, “a symbol of anonymity, the average man” (p. 164). His condemnation of this attitude recalls Sartre's castigation of the bourgeoisie of Bouville in La Nausée; Wiesel charges him with leading an inauthentic existence: “You think you're living in peace and security, but in reality you're not living at all. People of your kind scuttle along the margins of existence [perhaps like the insect-like creatures in La Nausée]. Far from men, from their struggle, which you no doubt consider stupid and senseless” (p. 172).

Wiesel continues to charge this man with attempting to evade the limits of his existence as a man, reiterating the plea with which Camus ends L'Homme révolté: “in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.”¹⁴ At the end of The Town beyond the Wall, Michael says to his cellmate: “It's in humanity itself that we find both our question and the strength to keep it within limits. … A man is a man only when he is among men. It's harder to remain human than to try to leap beyond humanity” (p. 188).

Wiesel's commitment to action on behalf of his fellow man extends to his own activity as a writer. It seems clear from the fact that all of his novels involve the Holocaust that his novelistic activity is a form of witness. The importance of this witness as a reason for remaining alive is made very forcefully, for example, in The Oath, where the Old Man, the sole survivor of the extermination of the village of Kollvillàg, must live on as the keeper of the Chronicle which relates the village history: “And once a messenger, he has no alternative. He must stay alive until he has transmitted his message” (p. 33). The aim of this witness is not only to preserve the past, however, but also to influence the future. Again and again in Wiesel's novels we find the figure of Moché the beadle, who first appears in Night. The survivor of the massacre of an entire village, he has returned to the protagonist's town to attempt to warn the population there. But his warnings go unheeded until it is too late. The approach of the Holocaust is also the terrifying message brought to Gregor in The Gates of the Forest by Gavriel, whose very name suggests his role as messenger.

Art, for Wiesel, also seems to have a purpose beyond mere communication. The telling of tales, song, dance—all of these activities which are so important in Wiesel's novels are rooted, even more fundamentally, in man's need to create, to “invent himself.” In The Town beyond the Wall, Wiesel provides a sort of parable on the origin of art:

if a man has something to say, he says it most perfectly by taking unto him a woman and creating a new man. And then God remembers that he too has something to say; and he entrusts the message to the Angel of Death: … The dialogue—or the duel, if you like—between man and his God doesn't end in nothingness. Man may not have the last word, but he has the last cry. That moment marks the birth of art.

(p. 103)

The dance of the Hasids, the song of the Jews marching off to execution—these are assertions of human qualities in the face of all that denies them, thus an important expression of man's revolt. The activity of witness is itself a way of transcending the physical death of loved ones and the near-annihilation of a tradition of Jewish teachings. As Wiesel says in a review of another novel about a now-extinct Jewish community, “Every literary creation aims to correct injustice.”¹⁵ The image which epitomizes this view of art as man's revolt occurs in Night when the protagonist's friend Juliek extricates himself and his beloved violin from beneath a pile of dead and dying in order to play a final fragment from Beethoven. “He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings—his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future” (p. 107). What is expressed by Juliek's art is simply man's creative power in the face of death, and his message is not really intended for a human audience barely able to hear him. He plays for himself and, beyond that, for God.

The responsibility for others fundamental to the ethics of Wiesel and the French existentialists makes the issue of violence a particularly complicated one. Discussed by Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's disciple, in Pour une morale de l'ambiguité, it becomes a central issue for Camus in L'homme révolté. There Camus admits that in the modern world the taking of life is sometimes a necessary step in the struggle to defend human values, but he questions whether it is a permissible act. He concludes that murder is a denial of the very human solidarity affirmed by the movement of revolt: thus, necessary but impossible. The solution to this dilemma, for Camus, lies in the example of the Russian terrorists portrayed in Les Justes, who killed only to accept death themselves, in order to restore balance to the world.

Wiesel confronts the same problem in his second novel, Dawn, and both his statement of the problem and his resolution of it are embodied in a concrete situation. Elisha, the protagonist, has become part of a Palestinian Jewish terrorist organization shortly after his liberation from the Nazi camps. He is convinced that the establishment of a Jewish state represents the only future left to his people, and this belief gives him the strength to engage in raids on British army outposts despite his aversion to violence. One night, however, he is chosen to perform an even more difficult task, the killing of a British hostage whom the terrorists have taken to prevent the execution of one of their own men. The moral case for the murder of the hostage is made as strong as possible. World opinion condemns the execution of the captured terrorist and the British have only to bow to it in order to save their own man. They refuse to give in, however, in large part because they believe the Jews are too moral to go through with the threatened killing. To be merciful to the hostage, then, is to encourage the British to execute more captured Jews and to weaken the cause of a Jewish Palestine, desperately awaited by the boatloads of concentration camp survivors daily being turned back by the British authorities.

Convinced of the necessity of this killing, Elisha nevertheless feels the judgment of his dead parents, teachers and fellow students—and even of the little boy whom he once was. Their silent figures are there to participate in his act: like Sartrean man, in choosing for himself, Elisha must choose for others. As the repository of their teachings and the only living witness to their existence, his actions reflect on the meaning of their lives as well. Elisha poses to himself the objection to murder so forcefully expressed by Camus: in committing murder, man attempts to move beyond human limitations, to become God. Like Camus' moral terrorists, Elisha goes through with the killing, but in doing so he understands that he has changed his role from that of victim to executioner and has identified himself with the Nazi torturers that haunt his memory. Although the protagonist continues to live at the end of the book, he bears a heavy burden of guilt.

The case against murder is made with similar reasoning by both Camus and Wiesel, and the Wiesel novel, which is clearly more accepting of violence, seems almost to have been written directly in response to L'Homme révolté. Wiesel's character does, after all, choose to carry out the execution in full knowledge of what he is doing, and he feels no need to do away with himself afterward. While Camus' abstract discussion of murder and its ideological justifications in L'Homme révolté does not seem to relate to any particular cause for which he himself would be ready to kill, Wiesel puts his discussion in the context of Israel, in whose existence he strongly believes. He has publicly defended Israel's actions against such moralists as François Mauriac, who had condemned the Jewish state as “avid for conquest and domination” (Dawn is dedicated to Mauriac). To this charge Wiesel replied with a line from the classical French dramatist Corneille: “What do you want them to do?” The implied rhetorical answer is, “Die?”¹⁶

Thus, despite his aversion to violence, Wiesel seems willing to accept it as the price of continuing human life—without Camus' demand that the murderer forfeit his own life as well. His conclusion is thus similar to that of Sartre in Le diable et le bon dieu. The strong male characters in Wiesel's novels do not hesitate to participate in war-like activities: Gad leads the terrorists in Dawn, Leib leads the partisans in The Gates of the Forest, and the narrator's friends, Gad and Katriel, die fighting in A Beggar in Jerusalem. In this last novel, dealing with the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, Wiesel again confronts the moral implications of violence. The victorious Israeli soldiers whom Wiesel describes, both in the body of the novel and in the introduction, are astonished and disconcerted by their victory and even more so by their new-found role as conquerors of innocent Arab children: “victory is gradually losing, not its significance, not its necessity, but its taste of joy” (p. 24). Wiesel thus views the taking of human life as a necessary consequence of moral action, to be accepted not with joyful righteousness but with humility and compassion.

While adopting Camus' attitude of revolt and certain other ideas central to the thought of the French existentialists, Wiesel differs fundamentally from his atheistic contemporaries by his firm belief in God. It is certainly for this reason that he has manifested such hostility to Sartrean philosophy, to the point of refusing to admit the striking parallels between the ideas of the Sartre-de Beauvoir circle and his own. His criticism of the Parisian post-war intellectual atmosphere in The Town beyond the Wall clearly has Sartre as its target:

Despair—they said—stands guard at every exit, hell is the neighbor who snores all night, the absurd has usurped the throne abdicated by God, therefore you have to do something! … God is dead, and only the false messiahs, the false prophets, knew it. And no one shouts louder, no one makes himself more clearly understood than a false prophet announcing the arrival of a false messiah.

(p. 73)

This expression of hostility to Sartre's atheism is easily understood. While Wiesel has been willing to enter into dialogue with those atheists who have wrestled with the question of God,¹⁷ he seems to recognize that Sartre has never really taken the existence of God seriously.¹⁸

If Wiesel is less hostile to Camus, it may be because in contrast to Sartre, Camus is in constant sympathetic dialogue with theism, and the problem of belief in God runs throughout his work. For Camus, God is an intriguing but abstract philosophical concept, one which could resolve a number of problems besetting human existence. In L'Etranger the priest offers God as a guarantor of human immortality; in La Peste He is proposed as the explanation and justification of human suffering and death; and in La Chute as the giver of grace, the restorer of innocence. But Camus steadfastly refuses to accept any of these tempting solutions, which would require belief in an entity inaccessible to human experience. In L'Homme révolté he specifically criticizes the existentialist philosophers of the past who, like Kierkegaard, have made a “leap of faith” beyond the limits of human knowledge. Belief in God is, in Camus' opinion, not only unjustified by human experience but even more important, incompatible with an attitude of revolt against an unjust universe for which God would have to be held responsible. “From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment,” Camus states, “he kills Him in his own heart.”¹⁹

The problem of evil, which becomes the central issue in La Peste, is also of primary importance to Wiesel. As he recounts in Night, his personal experience in the Nazi death camps came close to destroying his own faith: “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. … Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust” (p. 44). His novels are filled with accusations against the divine justice, “that transcendent inhuman Justice in which suffering has no weight in the balance” (The Town beyond the Wall, p. 59). In The Gates of the Forest Gregor tells of a rabbinical court in a concentration camp which tried God for murder and found Him guilty. The Rebbe replies by admitting: “He is guilty. He has become the ally of evil, of death, of murder” (pp. 196-97). Yet, although Wiesel's attitude toward God was profoundly altered by his confrontation with radical evil, he is incapable of denying God's presence. Like his protagonist Michael in The Town beyond the Wall, Wiesel's revolt can never go beyond the confines of theism: “I go up against Him, I shake my fist, I froth with rage, but it's still a way of telling Him He's there …” (p. 123). Wiesel himself has echoed these words: “I have my problems with God, believe me. I have my anger and I have my quarrels and I have my nightmares.”²⁰ But Wiesel's God always retains the unshakeable reality of another person, and his characters, like their author, do not hesitate to dialogue with Him as equals.

The strange Hasidic story which ends The Town beyond the Wall illustrates the interdependent relationship between man and God in Wiesel's work. Legend relates that man and God decided to change places, and that man, now possessing omnipotence, refused to change back. “Years passed, centuries, perhaps eternities. And suddenly the drama quickened. The past for one, and the present for the other, were too heavy to be borne. As the liberation of the one was bound to the liberation of the other, they renewed the ancient dialogue whose echoes come to us in the night, charged with hatred, with remorse, and most of all, with infinite yearning” (p. 190).

This concept of a God open to human criticism is radically different from that of Camus, who sees even the slightest attack on the divine perfection as a fatal flaw in the entire structure of belief. It must be Wiesel's Jewish background, with its stress on the covenantal relationship between God and man, which gives him the basis for his particular response. Even more specifically, the Hasidic stories which colored Wiesel's childhood are filled with examples of such accusatory dialogues with God. In Souls on Fire, his non-fiction study of various Hasidic masters, Wiesel speaks at length of the rebellious attitude of such men as Levi-Yitzhak of Berditchev, who did not hesitate to accuse God of injustice. Wiesel explains that such accusations were not considered blasphemous because, “Jewish tradition allows man to say anything to God, provided it be on behalf of man.”²¹

Because of their freedom to enter into dialogue with their God, Wiesel's protagonists are able to escape the dilemma of the problem of evil in both its classical form, as expressed, for example, by Hume, and its modern version, made particularly acute by the vivid memory of the Holocaust. One contemporary formulation of the problem of evil was proposed to Wiesel by Richard Rubenstein, a modern Jewish philosopher who has himself adopted a Camusian atheism:

I have had to decide whether to affirm the existence of a God who inflicts Auschwitz on his guilty people or to insist that nothing the Jews did made them more deserving of Auschwitz than any other people, that Auschwitz was in no sense a punishment, and that a God who could or would inflict such punishment does not exist. In other words, I have elected to accept what Camus has rightly called the courage of the absurd, the courage to live in a meaningless, purposeless Cosmos rather than believe in a God who inflicts Auschwitz on his people.²²

This situation is similar to that which confronts Camus' characters in La Peste. While Father Paneloux collapses under the strain of maintaining his faith in a God who tortures innocent children, the protagonists choose to reject God in order to affirm the innocence of man. Wiesel, in contrast to both Camus and Rubenstein, simply refuses to accept this formulation of the problem. As we have seen, he insists again and again on the innocence of the victims of the Holocaust and does not hesitate to point an accusing finger at God. Yet, for him, such an accusation does not constitute grounds for the denial of God's existence. Without attempting to put forth a detailed explanation of God's seeming injustice; Wiesel's protagonists elect to live with the constant tension of believing in a God whose actions they do not always condone.

Wiesel has never explained in rational terms why they make this choice. He rather leaves us with a question, like the Rebbe in The Gates of the Forest, who answers Gregor's anguished question, “After what has happened to us, how can you believe in God?” with the further question, “How can you not believe in God after what has happened?” (p. 192). By implication, the existence of even an incomprehensible God who, nonetheless, provides an overarching framework of meaning is preferable to the acceptance of a state of Hobbesian warfare as the ultimate reality. Wiesel finds the atheistic alternative more destructive to man than the problems and paradoxes of theism. He points out that atheistic humanists were the first to lose their will to survive in the concentration camps and that the survivors of Auschwitz, those who have lived the problem of evil in the most personal way, are not among those who propose a God-is-dead theology.²³ Belief in God is thus, for Wiesel, the very foundation for man's continuing revolt.

In La Peste Camus charges that if a man really accepted the existence of God, he would cease to fight against human suffering on earth. He reasons that if God is held responsible for this suffering, He could be expected to provide both its justification and its remedy. As has been pointed out earlier, Wiesel refuses to see such ethical inaction as a necessary consequence of belief in God, and his characters work unceasingly on behalf of their fellow men. They are not content to await passively the arrival of a promised Messiah; rather, they elect to bring about his coming through their own action. At the end of The Gates of the Forest Gregor says:

Whether or not the Messiah comes doesn't matter; we'll manage without him. … We shall be honest and humble and strong, and then he will come, he will come every day, thousands of times every day. He will have no face, because he will have a thousand faces. The Messiah isn't one man. Clara, he's all men. As long as there are men there will be a Messiah.

(p. 223)

Wiesel's novels confront the same contemporary problems of human action in the face of the absurd that dominate the works of Camus and Sartre. While he has adopted many of their fundamental perceptions of the human condition, Wiesel brings to these insights his own, searing personal experience of Auschwitz and his individual form of belief in God. His novels provide a forceful theistic alternative to the atheistic philosophies developed by Camus and Sartre, a theism which, however, approaches similar problems in similar terms. Wiesel thus must be seen as something more than an “ethnic” novelist whose limited message is directed toward a limited group. Rather, he must be placed in the company of those writers who, like Camus and Sartre, use the novel as a means of exploring the fundamental philosophical and religious questions of the modern era.

Notes

1. Although the topic has not been studied in depth, certain parallels with existentialist thinkers have been suggested by Maurice Friedman in “Elie Wiesel: the modern Job,” Commonweal; LXXXV (October 14, 1966), 48-52, and Robert Alter in his chapter on Wiesel in After the Tradition (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969), pp. 151-160.

2. All citations in my text from The Town beyond the Wall, The Gates of the Forest, Night, The Accident, and A Beggar in Jerusalem refer to the English translations published by Avon books. These editions are more easily obtainable than those in the original French, a fact which reflects the complicated nature of Wiesel's literary identity.

3. New York Times, February 10, 1970, p. 48.

4. “Jewish Values in the post-holocaust future; a symposium,” Judaism, XVI (Summer 1967), 291.

5. This image is discussed in particular by Thomas A. Idinopulos in “The Mystery of Suffering in the Art of Dostoevsky, Camus, Wiesel and Grunewald,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLIII (March, 1975), 51-61.

6. Les Portes de la Forêt (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), p. 32.

7. Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), p. 28.

8. The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 91.

9. “Jewish values in the post-holocaust future,” p. 291.

10. Ibid., p. 293.

11. The Rebel, p. 22.

12. Existentialism, p. 20. Wiesel's view of the possibility of human relationships, however, is much more optimistic than Sartre's. Directly contradicting Sartre's well-known statement in Huis clos, Wiesel's protagonist in The Accident declares, “Hell isn't others; it's ourselves” (p. 24).

13. The Oath, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 190-191. Further references in my text refer to this edition.

14. The Rebel, p. 306.

15. New York Times Book Review, September 1, 1974, p. 5.

16. New York Times, February 10, 1970, p. 48.

17. See, for example, his dialogue with Richard Rubenstein in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, ed. Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), pp. 256-277.

18. As Sartre states in Les Mots, any religious élan he may have had in his youth was stifled by the too-ready availability of bourgeois Christianity: “Faute de prendre racine en mon coeur, il a végété en moi quelque temps, puis il est mort” (Les Mots, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, p. 83).

19. The Rebel, p. 62.

20. The German Church Struggle, p. 271.

21. Souls on Fire, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 111.

22. The German Church Struggle, p. 262.

23. Ibid., pp. 271-273.