by Elie Wiesel
This statement reflects my own feelings about teaching.
In the mid-sixties, I receive a warm and exciting letter from a dean at Yale, offering me a position. He does not know me personally, nor has he checked my qualifications to teach at an institution of higher learning. The offer is attractive: two courses per semester—one on literature, one on Hasidic thought—a salary three or four times what I am earning, a stimulating environment, a prestigious title at one of the most renowned universities in the world. For a young writer who still has trouble making ends meet, it seems unbelievable.
I immediately send off an enthusiastic response. Back in my apartment on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, I find myself pacing as I consider my new duties. Feverishly I go over possible topics for the first semester. Which texts of Rebbe Nahman will I suggest to my students? How can I make them discover the intensity of the Besht’s fervor? Suddenly I am content with the world around me, and even with myself. After all, how many boys from Sighet have ever been invited to teach at Yale? My worries are over. My insecurities vanish. Long live academia! My fellow journalists at the U.N. have never seen me so ebullient. I am asked if I have just won the lottery. I say: “No, but …” I tell them what has happened. In his usual friendly, supportive way, the reporter Dick Jaffe ventures: “It’s Yale that won the lottery, not you.”
Just then I am asked to go to Paris, where my publisher, Le Seuil, seems to require my presence. El Al offers me a free ticket. Fortune is smiling on me. My new novel has not disappointed. That splendid radio station France-Culture proposes a series of interviews. Why not? I am in no mood to refuse anything. Then, suddenly, during one of the recording sessions, I begin to have doubts: What shall I do at Yale? Once I begin I will have to continue; therefore there would be no more solitude, no more trips, no more adventures. No, I couldn’t give up all that. I wasn’t ready. But how does one say no to Yale? And what about the “famous” argument: How many boys from Sighet have ever been invited to teach at Yale? In my tiny hotel room as I respond to the reporter’s questions, I am struck by the obvious answer: It’s certainly true that very few natives of Sighet have ever been invited to Yale, but how many among them have refused the invitation?
At New York’s City College, I take Yossel Rosensaft’s son, Menachem, as my assistant. Intelligent, hard-working, knowledgeable, he is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins. His main task: to help me prepare the curriculum for the various courses and to read and correct the exams and term papers. And to grade them, which I am incapable of doing. That is to say, I am incapable of giving bad grades. I can’t stand seeing an unhappy young face—unhappy because of me. In fact, if a student receives a bad grade, it is the student’s fault, not mine. Still, it makes me uncomfortable. The same is true of Menachem, for that matter. As he is younger, he is a bit more demanding. The students don’t resent it. Years later, after founding the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Menachem would be one of the very few to strongly oppose President Reagan in the Bitburg affair.
I am close to all my students; my door is always open to them. I try to make them my friends even though at first they intimidate me, as I probably intimidate them. Will I succeed in guiding them as I teach them? I take my responsibilities very seriously. Every hour of lecturing takes four hours of preparation. Never have I studied so much. Though I may not be the best lecturer at the university, surely I am one of its most diligent students.
As an adolescent I dreamed of becoming a writer and a teacher. Today, I am both. The itinerary has not corresponded to my dream, but its starting point and goal are the same. Could it be that an individual’s fate is sealed from the moment he takes his first step?
At the very beginning, I become aware of a strange fact: Nearly all of my students are children of survivors. It takes me awhile to understand that for them I am a substitute for their fathers. Since their fathers were unable or unwilling to share their past with them, they turn to me and take an interest in mine. Later it is the parents who come to see me, to talk to me about their children. I thus become a human bridge between two worlds.
How was I to speak to my students about those years of darkness without shifting the burden to them? How was I to convince them that in spite of everything, mankind deserves our faith?
I remember a student, a nineteen-year-old girl, who, holding back her tears, asks me a question that is troubling her: “Will my father remain a survivor the rest of his life?” I give her a text by Jean Améry in which he says: “Just as someone who has been tortured remains tortured, so does a survivor remain a survivor forever.”
A student despairs of being able to make her mother happy: “I have never seen her smile,” she says. Another student: “My parents love me too much; their love is too heavy to bear.” Still another: “My parents’ sadness prevents them from loving each other.” Outside the classroom we speak more about their personal problems than about the work.
Another student appears in my office and bursts into sobs: “Every time my parents look at me, I know it’s not me they see.” His father had lost his first wife and children. His mother, too, had seen her husband and children disappear. They had met in a camp for displaced persons shortly after liberation; they had a son, my student. His experience became central to my novel The Fifth Son.
In class the mood becomes oppressive whenever we touch on subjects related to the camps. At times I still feel compelled to teach the history and literature of the Holocaust. Since very few other professors are teaching the subject, I have no choice; all the more since the director of Jewish Studies has insisted that at least one of my courses be devoted to the topic. Sometimes the students remain seated, heads buried in their hands, unable to go to their next class to listen to lectures on biology or physics. I too feel the weight and destructive force of the theme; I sleep poorly. Even though I know how to share, there are limits. I feel that I cannot and should not be completely open. In speaking of the victims, how can I prevent a student from identifying me with them? How does one speak openly and restrain oneself at the same time? I tell my students: “Together we are going to encounter madness on a global scale. We must take care not to be contaminated.” I also say to them: “What are we about to learn here? To read, to weep, to dream the end of the dream. And later, to fall down, but also to rise again, to take one step and then another.”
I read and reread the great classical and medieval texts of Jewish martyrology: the persecutions during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, the public executions, the forced conversions. I hope to discover how the experience of those past ordeals eventually became integrated into history. I search for examples. I find none. Valley of Tears by Mordechai HaCohen of Avignon? The Crusades along the entire length of the Rhine, the expulsions, the pogroms, the massacres, and collective suicides? No analogy can hold. In those days disasters were localized and salvation possible, through either escape or conversion. During the Night all gates were sealed. And yet my students want to learn, to acquire my knowledge.
We read the diaries of Anne Frank and Moshe Flinker, the poems of Theresienstadt’s children. The innocence, the wisdom, the maturity, of these children make my students curse the world that allowed this to happen. We analyze the diaries of Emmanuel Ringelblum, Chaim Kaplan, and Shimon Huberband, and the letters of Mordechai Anielewicz. Sometimes we stifle a sob as we hold up a bloodstained image, so that a new generation may know, so that humanity may remember.
Ringelblum had a committee of one hundred chroniclers inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Disguised as members of the cultural religious circle Oneg Shabbat, they would gather every Saturday. Together they became the memory of a besieged Jewish community. They knew and described the degradation of hunger, the cold, the exhaustion of the elderly, the ravages of disease, the cowardice of the informers, the profiteers patronizing the cabarets—yes, there were such people. All this in the ghetto. And on the other side of the walls were the Shmalezowniks, the Polish informers who patrolled the streets
looking for “Aryan” Jews, whom they recognized by their sad eyes. Inside were the orphaned children and their cries of agony. Ringelblum describes the despair but also the spiritual resistance of poorly armed men and women. And the fact that the first bullet fired by the resistance was aimed at the converted Jewish policeman Sherinsky. And what about Adam Czerniakow, the president of the Jewish Council? Was he right to commit suicide?
Kaplan wrote his diary in Hebrew, his last words a cry of anguish: “If I am caught, what will happen to my testimony?”
Rabbi Huberband had a thousand and one stories about the courage and faith of the victims. His stories even tell of nonbelievers sacrificing themselves to honor God: by attempting to save sacred scrolls from burning synagogues.
And then there are the shattering, harrowing accounts by Zalmen Gradowski, Zalmen Leventhal, and Reb Arye Leib Langfus about their hapless comrades in misfortune: the members of the Sonderkommandos detailed to burn the corpses of the Jews gassed at Birkenau. These are writings of unbearable intensity written by dying men, every account a poem, every poem a prayer. How did these writers manage not to lose their minds? Where does one draw the strength to take in the deeds they report? If there is such a thing as incandescent words, theirs are. I tell the students: “If these people had the strength to write them, we must have the courage to read them.” To teach their writings is to respond, however inadequately, to their desperate call for justice.
For some twenty years, long before the publication of their testimony, Voices in the Night, for which I wrote the preface, I was haunted by these fiery pages. How can one forget the Dayyan, the rabbinical judge, and his description of the transport from Bendin? Inside the gas chamber, a rabbi who begins to dance and sing…. I read and reread those lines and I want to … I no longer know what I want to do. Not to sing ever again? Two Hungarian Jews ask a member of the Sonderkommando: “Should we say the Vidui?” He answers: “Yes.” And so one of them removes a bottle of spirits from his bag, shares it with the others, and they all drink with joy—yes, the chronicler indeed wrote “with joy.” And they called out: “LeChaim—to life!” Yes, that is what the chronicler wrote: “to life!” As for me, there grows inside me a silence so immense that it will taint all future joy.
The rabbinical judge’s account goes on. Naked children are marching to their death, the Rabbi of Boyanne shouting in the face of an SS killer: “Do not imagine that you will succeed in annihilating the Jewish people!” At the height of his exaltation he puts on his hat and roars, “Shma Israel”—Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. A Slovakian woman, already undressed, on the threshold of the gas chamber, proclaims loudly: “A miracle is still possible….” I feel for Reb Arye Leib Langfus a tenderness, a love close to pain.
In his account of Treblinka, Yankel Viernik wonders if he will ever laugh again. As for Gradowski, he doubts that, if he survives, he will ever again be able to weep.
Silence reigns as the students study. Silence reigns as the instructor teaches. Silence reigns as the dead burst into the room, bathed in a dim, hazy light. They evolve in a universe parallel to our own, within a creation on the other side of Creation, and perhaps of the Creator Himself. They are on the other side of language. A striking fact: The killers succeeded in finding words to describe the crimes; the victims did not. They failed to find the words that would allow the memory of their suffering to survive them.
These courses were necessary, essential, but I would not teach them very long. Young professors take up where I leave off.
• • •
Three years later, I resign from City College and join the faculty of Boston University, where, to this day, I hold the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, and continue to teach in the departments of philosophy and religion. As University Professor it is my privilege to choose not only my course topics but also my students.
It was John Silber, the formidable Kantian scholar, who convinced me to join his faculty. At the time he was president of Boston University; he is now its chancellor. His powers of persuasion are quite extraordinary.
Silber is not only superbly intelligent but also patient and determined. This is how he persuaded me: “Above all, you are a writer, aren’t you?” Indeed I am. “Then you need time to write, don’t you?” Indeed I do. “Come to Boston, and you will teach only one course per semester and deliver three public lectures.”
The advantage seemed considerable; at City College I had to teach two courses. And so I accepted—but I miscalculated. My weekly trips from Manhattan to Boston would take twice as long as the six hours spent at City College.
I liked John from the beginning: a man of integrity, unafraid of being unpopular. We became close very quickly. A brilliant debater, he does not tolerate hypocrites. In twenty-five years, this incorrigible optimist has succeeded in transforming a second-rate school of higher learning, deep in red ink, into one of the best universities in the country. Still, I might not have succumbed had it not been for the fact that a new admissions policy had lowered standards at City College.
How was I to announce my resignation to Ted Gross? He proved to be understanding. “The academic world is very mobile in the United States,” he reassured me. I telephoned Yitz Greenberg, who was spending a sabbatical year in Jerusalem. He too understood. In fact he did not stay on at City College either.
In Boston too, my students bring me joy. To witness the awakening of knowledge, that unique light of understanding, of recognition—is there a more beautiful moment for a teacher? As you look on, a veil seems to lift from your students’ gaze. Suddenly they seem open to an idea, able to admire a poem, to resolve a literary or philosophical enigma. Is there a more creative, more gratifying kind of happiness?
I give biblical, midrashic, Hasidic lectures. I teach the Book of Job: the Jewishness and non-Jewishness of the character. The role played by Satan. The tragedy of Job’s wife, his children’s death, his betrayal by his friends. Where is God in all this? And the absurd, inconceivable end: Job, once again, the head of a large family? Are we to believe that he will regain his happiness? And what about his children: How do they cope with their predicament? Do they know that they are but successors, surrogates?
The Besht and his disciples. The place Hasidism assigns to exuberance, to friendship, to stories. The Besht or the value of simplicity in human relations. The Besht and the victory over anonymity. The Besht and the quest for meaning.
The great Masters: the wisdom of Rebbe Pinhas of Koretz, the wrath of Rebbe Mendel of Kotzk, the anguish of Rebbe Bunam of Pshiskhe. Every student has his favorite Master. As for me, I love them all.
We embark on the comparative study of ancient texts describing the deaths of the great Masters—of Moses, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, as well as Giordano Bruno. Might Sylvia Plath be right? Is there an art to preparing oneself for death? Is there a death that is anything but solitary?
There are countless other themes: friendship in ancient and modern times, fervor and madness, faith and rebellion in literature, the complex relationships between Masters and disciples from antiquity on, attitudes toward evil and suffering: indifference or empathy, resignation or rebellion, active despair or passive despondency, the dehumanization of the executioner as opposed to the humanity of the victim. Can evil ever be transformed into virtue? Does suffering ever lead to redemption? We delve into ancient and modern texts. We explore Babylonian literature and the Book of Proverbs.
And then there is my passion for Kafka: Kafka and Aesop, Kafka and theology, Kafka and psychology, Kafka and politics, Kafka the literary figure, Kafka the philosopher, Kafka and women, Kafka and the Jews. An unexpected consequence of my passion for Kafka: The Saudi daily Al sharq al-Awsat accuses me—in 1993—of taking part in a conspiracy with Max Brod, who, sadly but unbeknownst to them, has been dead for quite a few decades, a conspiracy that, it claims, aims to conceal the alleged anti-Zionist leanings of the Prague author and to portray him as a fervent Jewish nationalist.
We find enchantment in the universe of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav. Enthralled we read his stories, follow him in his journeys. Princes and madmen, lost princesses and raving beggars: How is one to resist them? Each tale contains others, creating concentric circles whose fixed center is the deepest core of man, the individual self at the heart of the collective self, the memory of memory. In all these tales we deal with human beings, not specifically with Jews—haunted creatures looking for one another, for themselves in others; survivors of disasters; messengers and beggars; vagrant children with princely pasts. All of them are searching for love.
In his tale “The Seven Beggars,” we find this beautiful passage:
At the center of the world there is a mountain and on the mountain there is a boulder, and out of the boulder there flows a spring. Now, every thing has a heart, a heart that is a complete being with a face and arms, and legs, and eyes and ears. And this heart is alive, burning with desire to rejoin the spring at the other end of the world, on the other side of the abyss. This heart suffers: the sun follows it, leaving it parched. To survive, it imagines the spring, but the more the heart imagines it, the more its desire to approach it grows. But, as soon as the heart comes close to the mountain, its peak disappears before its eyes and with it the spring. Then its soul takes flight, for it lives only by the love it has for the spring. And if this heart were to stop beating the whole world would be reduced to nothingness. Thus it remains far away, on the other side of the abyss, protected by a bird with widespread wings, doomed to look upon the spring while knowing that they will never be one.
