The Forgotten

by Elie Wiesel

  FAREWELL

  It comes back to me now … the well.… I’m afraid of the well; it’s always night in the well. Afraid I’ll answer its mysterious call … Before I was born, a peasant woman threw herself into that hole.… They said she was in love … pregnant … couldn’t resist the Tempter’s laughter.… Yes, it comes back to me: the Tempter sent for me at midnight.… Ah, but the rabbi had taken me under his wing.… I remember the rabbi.… I remember my bar mitzvah.… The synagogue crowded … people I knew, that I’ve forgotten now … My father, proud … My father, uneasy … The rabbi smiled upon him.… I love the rabbi, I love him greatly, but the image is hazy.… Vague features, a bushy white beard; I remember his bushy white beard.… He’s speaking; the rabbi’s talking about … I don’t know what he was talking about. Maybe the danger of the Tempter: he steals what is most precious to us. From some he steals the heart. From others, vision. He stole my tongue. For a joke … How to protect myself from him? The rabbi didn’t tell me. Perhaps he did, but I’ve forgotten.… He’s speaking.… Soon it’s my turn.… I’m afraid I’ll forget my speech, and yet I know it by heart. I’ve delivered it many times to a friend at the yeshiva.… I’m perspiring, I’m short of breath.… If I forget one sentence, one quotation, it will all be lost.… One word, if I forget one word … I look at my father, I think of my mother.… The rabbi has finished.… I step up on the bimah, I kiss the velvet cloth that covers the holy ark.… I begin … my voice is feeble, too quiet.… Someone coughs, the rabbi gives me an encouraging glance, the Tempter’s laughing raucously, and I’m doing all I can to drown him out.… I raise my voice, or at least try to.… The words fight me, they won’t come, the Tempter’s holding them prisoner.… But the rabbi is stronger; he closes his eyes and murmurs an incantation, and the Tempter flees, releasing my words.… Now I can’t get them out fast enough.… I have no idea now what I said.… I recall one quotation, only one … from the Gaon, yes, the Gaon Reb Eliahu of Vilna: “The goal of redemption is the redemption of truth.” How did I use it? I can’t remember. Why does it linger like a lost soul in the ruins of my memory? Perhaps because my father had said it over and over from my earliest childhood: Truth, my son, truth, truth must not die.… All else matters less. Take care to be truthful always.… Truthful with your friends, truthful with God, truthful with yourself.… Most of all, he said, most of all, at the hour of your death you must know that you have not helped to kill the truth.… Truth dies every time a man turns away from it.… I’m thinking about it now, Malkiel my son. Oh, I know, I’m nowhere near death; but my reason is. At night, in the dark, I wonder: where is truth, in the light or in the shadow? In presence or in absence? And I wonder: was the life I lived the life I was destined to live? Did I never mistake the path? Have I been a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good Jew? I should have thought of that long ago … when I had all my faculties … when I still knew how to fit the pieces together.… No more, not now … Sometimes I tell myself, God is cruel, as cruel as the Tempter.… Since He has not permitted me to know the answer, why did He reveal the question to me? Why does He insist that this old man die in remorse and doubt? What has He to gain by my loss? What is His goal? The goal of redemption … of which redemption? Why must it have a goal? Do I myself still have a goal? Is there anything tangible, durable, real left of me at all?… I have nothing, I am nothing … more than a shadow and less than a man … But what is man deprived of memory? Not even a shadow …

  The light is dimming within me, and I don’t know if it’s night or weariness or the rain. It’s exasperating, but my eyes are heavy as their gaze wanders around me, far from me, drawing nameless images. Who has stepped between me and the world, between things and their shape?

  Malkiel my son, you are in me but you are somewhere else; you are my life but you are on the other side of my life; I no longer know what you’re looking for. I wonder if I’ll still be here when you come back: I mean, I wonder if I’ll know it’s you.

  All I know at this moment is that God has punished me. Our sages are right: the Tempter is not sin but punishment.… Ah, my son, I will not rise up against God’s will. I have no doubt deserved His punishment. But why this one and not another? I’d have preferred anything, even death. I’d have preferred death to this agony of memories wrestling and drowning.

  What have I done to be reduced to this? If you hear me, God, answer me. No, I take it back, forgive me: answer me so that I can hear You.

  But even if You answer, my question remains: What can I have done, as a Jew or as a man, to bring down upon me not damnation but obscurity, not death but dissolution?

  Taking your advice, Malkiel, and Tamar’s, too—love her, my son, love her as I love you, as I loved your mother; I mean, love her with utter and ever greater love—I began to trust in the word, that is, in the human voice. I told you, I told both of you, so many things.… I forget what they were.

  But I think I know this: I did not tell you the essential. Yes, Malkiel, I am still lucid enough to admit it: there is something important, vital, that I especially wanted to pass on to you, perhaps a kind of testament. And each time, I said to myself, That can wait. I said to myself, This is so essential that I won’t forget it, even if I forget all the rest. And now I’ve forgotten that, too.

  But I am trying to remember. I must. More than my honor is at stake; my right to survive is at stake. I must not take this essential thing to my grave with me. It must stay on here, in this world, as an offering or a sign, all that remains of a vanished life.

  I try, believe me. I turn pages, I dig up graves, I search every corner of my being. Who or what was it about? A person? Friend or enemy? An event? A glorious moment, or an infamous plot? I don’t know, my son; I no longer know. There are words I will never be able to speak again.

  I don’t even know why I sent you to that remote village where I knew happiness as a child and a youth, Sabbath eve with your grandparents, and the anguish afterward, at midnight, when I heard the Tempter’s icy laugh.

  What message were you to bring back to me?

  What answer to what riddle?

  I will forget everything; I know that. Talia’s name, too? No. Not hers. Nor yours. Names are important to a Jew. You will have a son one day; what will you call him?

  Nothing is more important to a father than to earn his son’s admiration. Have I earned yours? You won’t hold it against me too much if I desert you along the way? Will you forgive me, will you?

  Is it not a father’s duty to help his son remember, to magnify his past, to enrich his memory? I cannot shake the depressing thought that I have failed you in this respect. In leaving you, I bequeath to you a black curtain.

  Is that enough for you to think of me without bitterness?

  How I wish I could have seen you in the role of father! Will you tell your son how I yearned for it? Will you tell him I did my best to reach you, in the name of my parents and ancestors? To remain a Jew? Never to abandon the memory of his forefathers? To remain faithful to the image a Jew ought to have of himself? Never to deny the Jew in him but to urge him to solidarity with his people—our people—and through them with all of humanity? Will you tell him about his grandfather’s love for the strange and magnificent community of Israel, which extends from you to Moses? And from you, Tamar, to Sarah? Thanks to them, I shall live on; thanks to you, Abraham lives. What will I become without you two? Don’t tell your son, and don’t tell your father, that we must belong to the world at large, that we must transcend ourselves by supporting all causes and fighting for the victims of every injustice. If I am a Jew, I am a man. If I am not, I am nothing. A man like you, Malkiel, can love his people without hating others. I’ll even say that it is because I love the Jewish people that I can summon the strength and the faith to love those who follow other traditions and invoke other beliefs. A Jew who denies his Jewishness brings shame upon all who preceded him. Tell your son not to bring shame upon me. A Jew who denies his Jewishness only chooses to lie. If he li
es to himself, how can he be honest with others?

  All that, Malkiel my son, all that, Tamar my daughter, is part of the essential thing but is not all of it. And even this I can tell you only thanks to the rare flashes of light that God in His mercy still grants me.

  They say that before dying a man sees his whole past. Not I. All I see is bursts and fragments. But perhaps that is because I am not yet going to die, not physically, at any rate. Is that why I still cannot recall the essential thing that I want so much to pass on to you, Malkiel?

  That doesn’t matter, my son.

  Even as I speak to you I tell myself that you will discover in your own way what my lips cannot say.

  God cannot be so cruel as to erase everything forever. If He were, He would not be our father, and nothing would make sense.

  And I who speak to you cannot say more, for

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ELIE WIESEL received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 1986. His Nobel citation reads: “Wiesel is a messenger to mankind. His message is one of peace and atonement and human dignity. The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author.” He is Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the author of more than forty books.