To keep describing Wiesel in all the obituaries as a
survivor does an injustice to the totality of his life and
accomplishments.
“You came for me?” asked a bewildered Mikhail Gorbachev.
“As a Jew, I owe you that much,” responded Elie Wiesel.
French
president Mitterand sent Wiesel aboard a government plane to Moscow,
where he met Gorbachev immediately after the 1991 coup failure, several
months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
“When Gorbachev saw me he was moved. I asked myself, why
was he moved, with tears in his eyes? Because he had just realized that
his friends were not his friends. Every single one had betrayed him.
Those whom he had elevated, abandoned him. I have rarely seen a man as
lonely as he was. And here comes a young Jew, and says I’m here to help
you, to give you support. I was thinking: I’m a yeshiva bucher from
Sighet, and all of a sudden I’m involved with presidents, bringing
personal messages, and traveling in government planes. I was
surprised.”
Wiesel’s life-long self-image as “a yeshiva bucher
from Sighet” provided important hints not only into his pre-Holocaust
life, but also insights as to how the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate
viewed himself. Wiesel has been described as a modem prophet, a moving
writer, a brilliant teacher and even a Jewish superstar. He is best
known, however, as a survivor of Nazi horrors. Yet to keep describing
Wiesel in all the obituaries as a survivor does an injustice to the
totality of his life and accomplishments. Elie Wiesel did not merely
survive, he triumphed. And if he would have paused long enough to
consider it toward the end of his remarkable life, he might even have
said he was happy.
Passing away at 87, Wiesel marked nearly 60
years since the publication of the best-selling Night and almost three
decades since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “I can’t believe
it,” he said in a conversation with this writer, smiling and shaking
his head at the incredible path his life had taken.
Books were everywhere at Wiesel’s home on the 26th floor of a
nondescript Upper East Side Manhattan apartment building. A visitor is
first confronted by thousands of books in Hebrew, Yiddish, French, and
English that cover nearly every inch of space between the floor and
ceiling of the L-shaped living room. One upper shelf in a corner is
devoted to the more than 30 titles bearing Wiesel’s name. People are
not aware that when he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, he
was also being seriously considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Two
framed pictures are the lone exceptions to the otherwise book-lined
walls. When Wiesel sat at his large desk, he faced on the far wall a
sketch of Jerusalem. When he turned around to use the computer, he
looked right into a dark black-and-white photograph of the house in
Sighet where he grew up, which is featured in his memoirs along with 16
pages of family photos.
“Since I began writing, I always face that house,” he said in a television interview. “I must know where I come from.”
Eliezer
Wiesel was born in the picturesque town of Sighet, below the
Carpathian mountains that were once home to the Ba’al Shem Tov, the
father of Chasidism. Tantalized by Chasidic tales his grandfather told,
Wiesel’s happiest childhood memories were punctuated with singing
Shabbat songs, eating chocolates and studying a page of Talmud under a
tree while the other youngsters played ball.
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“He was a
little sickly and certainly what we call bookish,” recalled Professor
David Weiss Halivni, who studied in cheder with Wiesel in Sighet.
Halivni, a former professor of religion at Columbia University and one
of Wiesel’s closest friends, said that even as a child, Wiesel was
“artistically more sensitive” to the mystical teachings of their
teacher. Halivni believed Wiesel's sense of humor was conditioned as a
child. “Maybe he had a premonition,” he said.
“We were in the
ghetto together. He was on the last transport. I was on the first. I
left on Monday, he left Thursday,” recalled Halivni. “So we came to
Auschwitz at different times.”
“We met in Auschwitz,” said Rabbi
Menashe Klein. Wearing a black Chasidic robe, tzitzit, white beard and
sidelocks, Klein strikes one as Wiesel’s Old World alter ego. This is
perhaps how Wiesel himself might have looked had his life, his studies,
and his preoccupation with mysticism not been interrupted by history.
“Somehow we got to Buchenwald and were liberated there together,” he
said. “We went to France then, and Professor Wiesel attended the
Sorbonne. I, on the other hand, kept dwelling in our Torah.”
Rabbi
Klein, whose study in Brooklyn was also crowded with religious books,
explained that Wiesel took a different path after the war as a result
of the shock of his experiences during the Holocaust.
After the
war, Wiesel studied in Paris, where he earned money directing a choir.
Later he became the Paris correspondent for the Israel daily, Yediot
Aharonot, earning $30 a month. His big break came when he moved to New
York to work with the Yiddish Forward, earning $175 a month as a copy
editor; writer and translator. “I remember when he lived on 103rd
Street,” says Halivni. “He had only a small room, narrow, dark—you
could see the poverty. I remember him sitting on the floor surrounded
by records of Bach. At that time he was practically starving.”
In
1956, Wiesel stepped off a curb in Times Square and was struck by a
speeding taxi. Following the accident, which left him hospitalized for
seven months, Wiesel desperately needed money and tried covering the
United Nations on crutches for Yediot. Golda Meir, then foreign
minister, took pity on the young journalist and would invite him back
to her hotel suite, where she would prepare omelets and tea and brief
him on the day’s events. In 1967, his books, which had been commercial
failures, began to sell, and Wiesel was able to leave daily journalism
to concentrate on book writing.
So powerfully embedded in the
popular psyche is Wiesel’s association with the Holocaust that many
would find it surprising that the topic rarely came up in his classes or
in his writings.
“When people didn’t talk about the Shoah, I
felt I had to. So many people are doing it now, I don’t need to any
more,” he explained. In fact, he always thought twice about raising the
issue. “I’m afraid of making it into a routine. I want it that
whenever I mention the word Shoah, I should stop for a second and my
voice should tremble, my whole being should tremble before pronouncing
that word.”
Halivni left public speaking about the Holocaust to Wiesel. “But when he comes to see me,” he said, “He listens and I shout.”
While
the Holocaust rarely figures prominently in Wiesel’s public life in
the later years of his life, his sensitivity as a survivor gave him an
appreciation for every moment, and for life’s fragility. He and his
wife, Marion, used to travel on separate flights. “Just in case,” he
said, like a quick prayer, eyes flashing toward Heaven.
It also drove him to work hard.
“There
are people who want to do more than they can. Wiesel is one of them,”
said Rabbi Klein, who, like Wiesel, went to sleep late and woke up
early to study and write. “For Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize is no more
than a ladder, a step, toward fulfilling a goal for which he remained
alive: to do for the Jewish people.”
“A person cannot live with
the feeling that they have achieved the highest,” said Halivni, who
claimed that the Nobel Prize had been a mixed blessing for Wiesel.
“The
Nobel Prize did not become an end, rather a new beginning.
He realizes
that the Nobel Prize was given to him as ‘Mr. Jew,’ and therefore he
owes it to the Jewish people. In a sense it entails a greater
responsibility. It has imposed a burden on him; the possibility of
extending help, because of his connections, is much bigger. There is
nothing more frightening for a sensitive person than having power.”
While
New York is far from Sighet, Elie Wiesel was never far from the forces
that molded his childhood: chasidism and the Holocaust. And the
struggle of these two forces to coexist in one soul is what shaped Elie
Wiesel until his last day, providing the creative tension for his
achievements and writings. Deep within him lay a young yeshiva bucher
from Sighet; deep within he believed he survived the Nazi horrors for a
purpose.
* * *
Clad in a well-tailored gray suit and
hugging a velvet blue Torah scroll, Elie Wiesel danced in a tight
circle with his friends and sang songs of praise to the God he had so
often challenged. Wiesel was glowing; gone was the trademark somber
look that is naturally chiseled in his sullen, handsome face. It was
Simchat Torah for the Jewish people. Yet for Wiesel it was more; it was
also his birthday.
“We never celebrated birthdays at home,”
Wiesel said of his childhood. He rarely celebrated the occasion because
“to me every minute is a victory.”
Wiesel credited his sanity
to his family and friends. “I read, I listen to music, I speak with
friends. My life is full. The main thing is not to waste time.” But then
he added, “Sometimes I think that I too am insane. I was always in the
minority, like the madman. When I began to talk about trying to teach
the Shoah, how many others were there? When I began for Russian Jewry,
how many others were there then?”
“What keeps Wiesel sane?” pondered
Rabbi Menashe Klein. “We sing together, eat together, daven together,
walk together. He comes here before every holiday. Mostly we meet, we
talk.” Klein says that Wiesel, who sang in a choir as a child, still
loved to sing Chasidic melodies. “He would begin singing Friday night
at 5:30 p.m. and wouldn’t stop until after 2 a.m.”
Wiesel said
that his daily study of Jewish texts was essential for him. “I love to
study. It gives you a good sense of proportion. After all, what Rambam
says maybe is more important than the article I wrote for The New York
Times.”
Wiesel's preoccupation with books began early. When
others were hording food and valuables, the young Wiesel brought books
to study onto the cramped cattle car to Auschwitz.
Dr. David
Weiss Halivni and Wiesel expressed their friendship by always speaking
Hebrew to each other. Halivni was one of the few who could really make
Wiesel laugh. “The lightest moments we have are when we bring up
characters from Sighet,” he said.
What kind of characters? There
was the shadchan (matchmaker), Ziegenfeld, who always walked with an
umbrella. And then there was the tall shochet (ritual slaughterer) and
his short wife. And many others. “Hardly a conversation passes when we
don’t talk about Sighet,” Halivni said. “When describing these things,
recapturing the comical aspects of Sighet, then I see him having a
hearty laugh.”
Was Wiesel happy? To his friends, the question
seemed irrelevant. “We never think in those terms,” said Halivni. He
explained that Chasidic spirituality gave Wiesel freedom—a second
liberation—and that Wiesel “needs the joy of Chasidut because he cannot
always live in the shadow of the Holocaust.”
Wiesel, hesitant
to allow an affirmative answer, gave a traditional response. “We don’t
speak about happiness in our faith, we speak about simcha vesasson (joy
and gladness). What do we ask for? Shalom, yes. We mainly ask for
Yirat shamayim (fear of heaven), for study, for chaim shel Torah (life
of Torah). What is Torah? Meaning. My life has been the pursuit of
meaning, not joy.”
For Wiesel, without a Jewish context there
was no enjoyment. When asked. about simcha vesasson in his own life, he
paused briefly, and then his words flowed in his soft French accent.
“Nineteen forty-eight, when Israel was born. I remember that Shabbat in
Paris. I felt joy that came from history. Then the ‘67 war. Shichrur
Yerushalayim (the liberation of Jerusalem), something that remains with
me. And Simchat Torah in Moscow with young people.”
Yet “there
is something missing, and when something is missing, happiness can’t be
present because happiness means nothing is missing. What is missing?”
The Boston University professor paused and then answered the question.
“Certainty. You have the haunting feeling that history is trying to
purge itself of its demons, of its nightmares with the pursuit of
violence of bloodshed, of hatred.
“In this generation, the
pursuit of pleasure is at the expense of happiness. Pleasure is instant
pleasure. Everything we are obtaining is instant. Instant meaning,
instant love, instant philosophy, instant truth.
“The Gaon of
Vilna said that the hardest mitzvah to accomplish is ‘v’samachta
bechagecha' (rejoice in your holidays). ‘Do not steal,’ ‘do not kill,’
everything is easy. ‘Vesamachta bechagecha!’ To make sure that you
rejoice,” Wiesel said energetically.
Wiesel’s voice then became
barely audible, his downward gaze was steady. His consciousness seemed
to have been transported to another time. “Another kind of joy, even
deeper than that, and more personal, was the birth of my son... even
more, the brit of my son. To me in my life, it has the importance of
the birth of Israel, the reunification of Jerusalem. I felt it in my
body, in every cell of my body....”
The phone broke his trance,
and Wiesel walked over to his executive-size mahogany desk to answer
it. On it sit two photographs: One of him with his wife and their son
Shlomo-Elisha, and one a close-up of their son, both taken at least 35
years ago. Wiesel named his son after his father, who was in the camps
with him and died only weeks before Wiesel’s liberation. “I was 16
years old when my father died,” writes Wiesel in his memoirs.
“My father was dead and the pain was gone. I no longer felt anything. Someone had died inside me, and that someone was me.”
“My
father had no official position in the community, he was a kind of
intercessor in the community, he was a grocery store owner,” Wiesel
said in a tone of great respect. “Somehow, I don’t know how, he always
defended the Jews with the authorities. Therefore, when something would
happen, they would come to my father.” At times his father was so busy
with Jewish communal business that the young Wiesel would only see him
at home on the Sabbath.
Wiesel himself had no official position
in the Jewish community, yet he has served as an intercessor with
heads of state, including President Reagan prior to his trip to Bitburg
and President Clinton, to ask him to do more to help the Bosnians. As
Prime Ministers, both Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu tried
convincing Wiesel to accept the position of President of the State of
Israel. “The need to help Jews, I think I am following in my father’s
footsteps and I think he would have wanted it that way,” said Wiesel.
Wiesel said that he has only recently realized the similarities between
himself and his father, and explains that it took a long time to come
to this conclusion “because of kibbud av (respect of one’s father), I
didn’t dare compare myself with him. He saved Jewish lives; I didn’t. I
try to teach, but he saved Jewish lives. He was arrested, he was
tortured. I was not. So how can I compare myself to him?” Just as
Wiesel struggled with being a son, he also wrestled with being a
father. “The hardest is to be a good father, always” confessed Wiesel.
Halivni says that it is not easy being the son of a great man.
Shlomo-Elisha, a Yale graduate who now works in finance, had been heard
to say, half-jokingly: “It’s hard growing up in a house where your dad
is the arbiter of morality in the 20th century.”
Wiesel believed
that “the father-son relationship is a test, both for the father and
for the son. When the son leaves home, it is harder for the father than
for the son,” he said, hoping not to betray the privacy of his family
life while trying to convey the love and understanding he had for his
son. “The son has to free himself on the one hand, and at the same time
be loyal,” he said, speaking perhaps about both his relationship with
his father and his son’s with him. “The hardest things are the most
rewarding.”
Yosef I. Abramowitz, Elie Wiesel’s student, serves as CEO of Energiya Global Capital and can be followed @KaptainSunshine
