Elie Wiesel
Joseph Berger writes about Elie Wiesel.
Mr. Wiesel was the author of several dozen books and was a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, both the traumatized survivors and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren, seemed frozen in silence.
But by the sheer force of his personality and his gift for the haunting phrase, Mr. Wiesel, who had been liberated from Buchenwald as a 16-year-old with the indelible tattoo A-7713 on his arm, gradually exhumed the Holocaust from the burial ground of the history books.
It was this speaking out against forgetfulness and violence that the Nobel committee recognized when it awarded him the peace prize in 1986.
It sometimes seems to me it’s the only thing there is to write about. It keeps happening, and when it happens it ruins everything, so until it stops happening…how can we not keep talking about it?
While many of his books were nominally about topics like Soviet Jewry or Hasidic masters, they all dealt with profound questions resonating out of the Holocaust: What is the sense of living in a universe that tolerates unimaginable cruelty? How could the world have been mute? How can one go on believing? Mr. Wiesel asked the questions in spare prose and without raising his voice; he rarely offered answers.
“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” he told Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times in an interview in 1981. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”
He did do something with his life.
“What is the sense of living in a universe that tolerates unimaginable cruelty?”
Elie Wiesel was a great and strong human being. That phrase, though, pushes one of my hot buttons. I know what he means. But the words are wrong.
The universe had nothing to do with it. We’re living among people who tolerate endless cruelty.
It’s not some unstoppable force. It’s us.
(I know you’ve made that point, talking about other atrocities in other posts.)
We’re part of the universe, so the universe has something to do with it. Its absolute indifference to our suffering is hard to grasp.
(I realize words like “tolerate” and “indifference” anthropomorphize the universe somewhat, but.)
Hitch was not impressed by him:
https://www.thenation.com/article/wiesel-words/
Hitchens, from FEBRUARY 2001. His pseudo-left commitment to Edward Said and Co. still unshaken.
I am bothered by the ‘there must be a reason’ tone of the quotes from Wiesel. I know he didn’t really kowtow to religion, but that line of thought is horribly close.
So Hitchens wasn’t impressed by him, so what? And can we not call him “Hitch” in that toadying way unless he was actually a friend of ours? It gets on my nerves because so many of the Gamergate crowd do it.
My first news that Wiesel had died came from Hitchens’s close friend Salman Rushdie on Facebook. Salman didn’t bother to mention that Hitchens wasn’t impressed by him; it probably didn’t seem all that pressing.
It might pay to read what Hitchens wrote (and other critiques of Wiesel’s worldview) before being so dismissive.
I’m not a big fan of Hitchens’ ideology, apart from the zingers directed at religion. He was less a secular humanist than a Tory Protestant bigot, especially when it comes to the Irish. In fact, I came to detest him at the end, so don’t get any ideas that I see him as some sort of long lost pal.
I think I’ll leave it to dril to have the last word on Hitchens and Wiesel
https://twitter.com/dril/status/399175271091171328
I have read it, as a matter of fact, though it was a long time ago. I don’t have an uncritical view of Wiesel. But just saying “Hitch sez” isn’t a very substantive contribution.
“Hitch sez”
Alexander Cockburn also sez
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/21/truth-and-fiction-in-elie-wiesels-night/
You’re missing my point.
Also, Alexander Cockburn is notoriously a fucking fool.
Counterpunch, perhaps the only site that can boast of being anti-Elie Wiesel and pro-Pol Pot.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/pol-pot-revisited/
Wow, so all those photos of piles of skulls – faked! All those first hand accounts – faked!
A friend posted this piece by Corey Robin on Facebook for discussion. Robin has spoken critically of both Hitchens and Wiesel, if that matters (I think not really). I think this is a thoughtful essay making some good points.
I haven’t sorted out what I think about Elie Wiesel. He was certainly a controversial figure and attitudes to him seem to range from adulation to disgust. When both he and Norman Finkelstein, himself a controversial figure, were both invited to speak at a conference about the Holocaust in Oxford, it is rumoured that the organisers went to some lengths to make sure the two did not actually meet.
“Hitch” or “Hitchens”? In Oxford in the late 60’s only those who were, or affected to be, members of his inner circle[1] called him “Hitch” — You could really wind him up by calling him “Chris.”
As for the article on Cambodia, my second wife was a journalist working for Hong Kong TVB at the time, although this was before I met her. She actually visited Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and I have a feeling that her accounts of what happened might be a tad more accurate than this article’s account. Also where did Chomsky say the genocide in Cambodia had been overestimated by a factor of 1000? Do these people just make up ‘facts’ to suit their story?
Footnotes:
[1] Those with the delusion that the way to kick start the revolution was to put on a leather jacket and hand out leaflets to car workers at Cowley.
I felt a similar reaction as quixote #1 and John #4.
The NY Times quoted Wiesel, “If I survived, it must be for some reason.” I can interpret that most favorably as his mind working after the fact to create a story with a reason to give his terrible experiences a positive meaning.
But as rhetoric it reads the same as, “Everything happens for a (moral) reason.” That rhetoric mixes moral feeling with superstition, and from that superstition, someone can argue for whatever they want, e.g. the universe wants them to be wealthy or whatever.
I try to think of morality in terms of real people and systems (e.g. societies, corporations, etc.) as Julia Sweeney said in her one-woman show Letting Go of God in practical terms
Yes, that’s a point. It’s probably why Wiesel has never been one of my go-to thinkers on the meaning of Nazism. On the other hand I can see another reading of “If I survived, it must be for some reason,” which is as a way of dealing with survivor guilt. You could translate it into “Since I survived when so many others didn’t, I’d better damn well make some good use of my survival.”