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Elie Wiesel's literary work prompted one reviewer to recall Isaac Bashevis Singer's definition of Jews as "a people who can't sleep themselves and let nobody else sleep," and to predict, "While Elie Wiesel lives and writes, there will be no rest for the wicked, the uncaring or anyone else." If uneasiness is the result of Wiesel's work, it is not a totally unintended result. Since the publication of Night in 1958, Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, has borne a persistent, excruciating literary witness to the Holocaust. His works of fiction and non-fiction, his speeches and stories have each had the same intent: to hold the conscience of Jew and non-Jew in a relentless focus on the horror of the Holocaust and to make this, the worst of all evils, impossible to forget.
Wiesel refuses to allow himself or his readers to forget the Holocaust because, as a survivor, he has assumed the role of messenger. It is his duty to witness as a "messenger of the dead among the living," and to prevent the evil of the victims' destruction from being increased by being forgotten. But he does not continue to retell the tales of the dead only to make life miserable for the living, or even to insure that such an atrocity will not happen again. Rather, Elie Wiesel is motivated by a need to wrestle theologically with the Holocaust.
The grim reality of the annihilation of six million Jews presents a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to further theological thought: how is it possible to believe in God after what happened? The sum of Wiesel's work is a passionate effort to break through this barrier to new understanding and faith. It is to his credit that he is unwilling to retreat into easy atheism, just as he refuses to bury his head in the sand of optimistic faith. What Wiesel calls for is a fierce, defiant struggle with the Holocaust, and his work tackles a harder question: how is it possible not to believe in God after what happened?
It is not enough merely to value Wiesel for the poignancy of his experience and then summarily write him off as another "death of God" novelist. As bleak and nihilistic as some of his work may be, taken as a whole his writings are intensely theological. The death of God is not of more interest to Wiesel than the impossibility of God's death. And if this paradox is bewildering, it must be remembered that the Hasidism in which Wiesel's work is rooted is fascinated, rather than repelled by a paradox. Wiesel himself says, "As for God, I did speak about Him. I do little else in my books."
Gary Henry
WordPoints
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