by Elie Wiesel
So be it. I shall be a second-class Jew.
And so, while in times of crisis Israelis ask the Diaspora for support, as soon as they no longer feel threatened, their behavior changes abruptly. Some of their voices get too shrill; they get angry too fast. Among the more obtuse and egocentric commentators, lacking even a modicum of culture, there are a sculptor notorious for his vulgarity and a humorist known for his obscenity. They envy and hate us and each other. Such behavior may well occur in other countries, but in Israel it takes unusual proportions. The saying goes that it is impossible to meet someone who does not hate someone. The fanatic secularists hate the religious; the fanatic religious hate those who are less religious. The hate of one Jew for another sometimes seems greater than that reserved for enemies of the state. It is the main topic of magazines, newspapers, and radio. Political discourse is rarely on a high level; derision substitutes for humor, snickering for laughter, insults for wit. Malice replaces intelligence; rudeness covers subtlety. Debates are simplistic and reductive, discussions no longer about ideas but about material gains. And then there are the rumors. Nowhere else are they as vile, as poisonous. And they are everywhere. What is lacking is a sense of history. The debates in the Knesset often attain a frightening level of violence.
These feelings date from before the cowardly assassination of Rabin. I have lived in fear of the consequences of the hatred that has befallen the country for a long time.
True, other societies experience quarrels and antagonisms. The right to criticize, to oppose, to contradict, and even to denounce is the price of democracy. What would become of a political, economic, or literary system without rivalries? In civilized countries there are limitations to that right, but, for better or worse, Israel refuses limitations. Why, asks the Talmud, did God compare the people of Israel both to the stars and to dust? When Israel wants to attain the summits, none ascends as high; but when it allows itself to slide toward the abyss, it plunges to unprecedented lows.
How can I reconcile these images of Israel with the love I feel for it? I love Israel in times of joy and in times of mourning, in its hours of glory and in its periods of doubt and anguish. And when I feel saddened by it I think of Israel’s young people, who will soon be summoned by the army. I think of the dreamers in front of the Wall. I think of all those mothers and fathers who lost their sons in combat. In times of doubt it is their faces that represent the eternal image of Israel.
On Becoming a Speaker
AND THIS IS HOW one beautiful day I became a speaker.
Dov Judkowski, the head of Yedioth Ahronoth, who in 1956 named me New York correspondent, was right: To give lectures in the United States is, as everybody knows, big business. With a little luck, lecturing can generate considerable income; not as substantial as that of a rock singer or a baseball champion, of course, but who can compare to a rock star or a stadium god?
I remember my first experience. It was 1960. Night had just been published in the United States. A few weeks later the Eichmann trial was headline news. I get a call from the president of a Jewish club on Long Island who invites me to come speak about my book to an audience of some five hundred couples. My honorarium? One hundred dollars, almost half my monthly salary. As I hesitate, she adds: “We have all read your work; we are totally enchanted by it. Come, we need to learn, and you are the one who can teach us.” She has such a lovely voice. Am I going to fall in love? Again? I accept. The engagement is for two or three months hence. Too bad. I am lonely, but let me be patient. At least I’ll have time to prepare myself. We agree on a date. My topic? Literature, philosophy. I devote many hours to perfecting my speech in English, the first I shall deliver in America. In my European frame of mind, a lecture demands serious research, reflection, structure.
In the taxi that takes me to Long Island that Sunday, I reread my thirty typed pages; I add notes in the margins; I am almost ready: I should be able to keep going one hour, perhaps one and a half. Suddenly a wild thought crosses my mind: The woman with the beautiful, voluptuous voice surely mistook me for someone else. Why would she invite me, a novice writer, a total unknown? Mile after mile, my doubts get stronger, and when I finally arrive at my destination I am convinced that the audience is expecting someone else.
The woman with the voice does not disappoint me: She is even more beautiful than I imagined. Graceful, smiling, warm, she thanks me for coming. I could fall in love with her very quickly, even more quickly than usual, but she introduces me to her husband, an accountant for an important electronics firm. They accompany me into the hall: All the women are dazzling and, as expected, all have escorts. I am seated at the head table to the right of my hostess.
In time I follow her to the podium. She presents me to the public with effusive praise in the American way. She proclaims that I am a great writer, then corrects herself immediately: Great? The greatest of this generation. Not only that, of all generations. In other words, I am a genius. If one were to believe my presenter, one might conclude that the deaths of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky were occasioned by sheer envy over my accomplishments. “All of us have read and urged others to read your magnificent book!” she exclaims. “Future generations will echo what I am saying here, on behalf of all of us: We admire your talent and we love you for sharing it with us.” I decide to test them.
Now it is my turn to speak. I thank her awkwardly and launch into a tale, improvising as I go along, that has no connection whatsoever with Night. I set the action in nineteenth-century France, where a Jewish seminarian becomes infatuated with a Christian “Mademoiselle” Bovary. I stress the ethical problems involved. The situation is reminiscent of Corneille’s dramas. Duty and passion, religion and heresy. I mix quotations from Seneca and Kant and Spinoza, my favorite, why not? I wait for one member of the audience to stop me, to tell me that this is not the book he read. Nothing happens. I speak for three-quarters of an hour; even I have no idea where I’m going. The seminarian is on the brink of suicide when he learns that his beloved has fled from a convent somewhere in the countryside.
The time has come to conclude, for if I don’t, I might be tempted to call upon the Bible and assorted medieval mystics and even upon texts that have come down to us from “the night of time”—hence the title of my book. My discourse is rewarded with thunderous applause. I don’t know what to make of it. Clearly my intuition had been correct. There was in this hall not a single person who had read my poor little book, the only book that bore my name. Still, I urge myself not to be too hasty. They may be shy, or they don’t want to offend me, embarrass me. During the question-and-answer period they will surely express their astonishment at the difference between my reading of my book and theirs.
Well, the question-and-answer period is upon us and everybody refers to the outrageous and incoherent tale I have just invented. Why did the seminarian wait so long before renouncing his love? Why did the young woman not consider conversion to the Jewish faith? As I stammer, my hostess accepts three more questions and concludes the session. I follow her into an office where she hands me my due. We are alone and I use the opportunity to tell her a Hasidic story:
Invited by a disciple from a neighboring village to attend a circumcision ceremony, a rabbi hires the only coach in the village to take him there. He and the coachman begin the journey in high spirits: the rabbi because he is about to perform a mitzvah, a good deed, and the coachman because he will earn a few zlotys. At the bottom of the first hill the horse halts, exhausted. The coachman dismounts and begins to push the carriage. Of course the rabbi, too, leaves the carriage and helps push. They push and push until they finally arrive at the Hasid’s doorstep. That is when the rabbi tells the coachman: “There is something I don’t understand. I understand why I am here; the Hasid wishes me to participate in his ceremony. I also understand why you are here; this is how you make your living. But the horse, this poor horse, why did we bring it along?”
My hostess with the beautiful voice is speechless for a moment. The
n she confesses: Neither she nor any member of her group has read my book. But then why did she invite me? It was a simple mistake: She was confused by a New York Times review of two books, mine and another, in the same issue.
Another lesson in humility, this one administered in a Catskill resort: A Jewish group awards me some kind of prize. Some fifty people queue up to shake my hand and congratulate me. I hear whispers: “It doesn’t look like him. He looks different in the movies.” They had mistaken me for Eli Wallach.
Flattered, I tell myself: At least we share the same initials.
For years, I roam the continents to the point of total exhaustion. I speak so much that I begin to loathe the sound of my voice. After every lecture I emerge with a sense of frustration and loss. I feel as if I have given three lectures in one: the one I meant to give, the one I gave, and the one the public heard. And then, too, how is one to prevent repeating oneself, and how is one to avoid clichés? And yet one must improvise, for if one confines oneself to reading the text, one ends up boring one’s audience and even oneself. And what if someone in the room has heard what I have to say, if in a different form? Oh well; he or she has probably forgotten by now.
I accept the topics that are suggested to me with the exception of the Holocaust. I worry lest it become routine. There was a time when few spoke of it, and it was important to lead the way. That is no longer the case. Of course my reticence is frequently misunderstood: I speak about the Bible, the Talmud, the Hasidic movement, yet the questions I am asked nevertheless refer to the Event.
Sometimes I seem to unleash demons. In San Antonio, Texas, a man stands up to confront me: “How can you write about the Holocaust when in fact that is nothing but a Jewish invention?” In St. Petersburg, Florida, a wild man launches into a similar declaration and manages to elude authorities for a while before being removed from the hall.
In a Washington, D.C., university, a group of African Americans charge into the lecture hall. Security people are about to oust them, but I ask them not to: “Since these young men wish to be heard, let them come forward.” I invite them to the podium and tell their leader: “The mike is all yours.” Taken aback, he stammers a few words about racial intolerance. “Perfect,” I say, “that is my subject as well.” He sits down, as do his comrades.
In the town of Iasi, Romania, during a commemoration of the 1941 massacre of the Jews, a hysterical woman interrupts my speech: “Lies, lies! No Jew was ever killed here! Nor anywhere else!” Her cohorts applaud. She is asked to leave. The many officials present are embarrassed. The governor apologizes, as does the mayor, the prime minister, the president. Later I am told that the woman was the daughter of the Fascist general Antonescu’s former chief of police.
It sometimes happens that before taking the floor I must listen to three, four, five speakers. They don’t all recognize the virtue of brevity. They remind me of a story told to me by Meyer Weisgal, Chaim Weizmann’s close associate: During a charity dinner a speaker launched into a riverlike discourse, giving no hint of exhaustion. Eventually, Weisgal tugged at his arm and whispered without undue discretion: “But, sir, that’s enough; please stop!” The speaker’s pitiful reply: “I’d like to…. I just don’t know how.”
In the course of my public lectures I sometimes am interrupted by listeners impatient to express their disagreement. At the Centre Rachi, in Paris, during a presentation on Rabbi Akiba’s troubling adventure in the Pardes, the orchard of forbidden knowledge, a woman yelled incoherently. She came up to me at the end and explained the reason for her anger. It seems I should have condemned Rabbi Akiba. And why would I condemn the founder of the Talmud? “Because he cheated on his wife with the governor’s spouse.”
Another kind of incident occurred in Washington, where the Kennedy Foundation organized an international “Science and Conscience” conference. The inaugural session was followed by several roundtable discussions. Participating in mine were the Nobel laureate biochemist Jacques Monod, Mother Teresa, and a few academics. I spoke of Jewish attitudes toward living beings: To save a human life one has the right—even the duty—to violate the laws of Shabbat. The moderator, an assimilated Jew who was evidently uncomfortable at hearing a Jew speak of his Jewishness in front of such an elite public, pulled the microphone away from me in the middle of my speech. I was too shocked to react, but a priest seated in the rear rose to protest.
In Moscow, things didn’t go so well either. As I began to speak—this was in January 1990—during a conference entitled “Global Survival,” I stressed the role of memory in education. Again, I was expressing my views as a Jew. I asked Mikhail Gorbachev for a firmer stance against racism and anti-Semitism. Quoting Soviet radio, which described the “pogroms” in Armenia, I chose to demonstrate that all hatreds are linked. I asked that Stalin’s crimes be recognized as crimes against humanity. And that investigators, policemen, torturers, judges, and executioners be denied leniency. I asked the president of the Soviet Union to open the archives of the infamous Stalin-era trials. We have the right, I insisted, to know details of the imprisonment and execution of Yiddish writers such as Peretz Markish and Der Nister. A Jordanian delegate expressed his displeasure. He was furious with me and said so openly. Yet I had not even mentioned the Middle East; I had not pled for Israel. He took exception because, apparently, my discourse was … too Jewish. He then evoked Yitzhak Shamir, whom he called a hawk. I was Jewish, he was Jewish, therefore we were all hawks. And all guilty. Guilty of dwelling on our past. After all, the Jordanian delegate proudly concluded, he, too, had been in Auschwitz. He omitted to say that he had been there … as a tourist.
In Madrid during a Young Presidents Organization conference, I am constantly reminded of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews and therefore deal with the theme of exile. In the beginning was exile. The child is exiled from his mother’s womb. Then he is exiled from his home to attend school, and from his family to get married. I note that in our time we experienced the ultimate exile: The victim ceased being a person and became an object. To general surprise, a German businessman rises, red with indignation: He has had enough of feeling guilty, he says. He has had enough of hearing about the past. It is time to … That is when I put him in his place by asking a series of questions, each one beginning with the words: “How dare you….”
This confrontation becomes the topic of subsequent conversations. The German delegation requests a meeting with me. I ask whether the delegate had spoken on their behalf. After consulting briefly they express their disapproval of their fellow delegate, who promptly asks to be heard again. I refuse to listen unless he first apologizes. He finally does.
In all my lectures on Jewish themes, I emphasize Judaism’s ethics, which, by definition, decry racism. A Jew must not be racist; Jews are committed to fighting any system that sees in the other an inferior being. That is why anyone—regardless of his or her color, ethnicity, or social standing—can become a Jew; all he or she has to do is accept the Law. On the other hand, every person is entitled to dignity and respect; no need to espouse Judaism for that.
Invited to address a prestigious South African university, I set a condition: Black students must be allowed to attend. The university agrees. People commend my “courageous attitude.” But it was not a matter of courage—it was simply a matter of not giving in to a system I abhor. As a rule I like to speak to mixed audiences: young and less young, Jews and Christians, believers and nonbelievers.
During a conference of Catholic intellectuals a speaker declares that the Holocaust presents as serious a problem for Jews as it does for Christians. I feel the need to correct him. And I remember the shock I provoked when I said: “Just a moment, my friends. The situation is not the same: The victims may be my problem; the killers are yours.”
Speaking in Stockholm’s cathedral, I say: “You must understand that the Jew that I am cannot look upon the cross as you do. For you, it represents mercy and love. For us, it evokes terror and persecution.”
On the occasio
n of a visit to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the school’s commander, General Palmer, organizes a parade in my honor: “The parade is yours,” he says saluting. I am astounded: This whole parade is mine? What am I to do with it? Four thousand cadets, their sparkling uniforms and banners flapping in the wind, salute me as if I were a head of state. The Jewish child in me thinks he is dreaming. Never in my life have I been a soldier. And suddenly these future officers—perhaps generals—looking grave and solemn, do me the honors reserved for a president.
That evening my topic is “The Meaning of Freedom”:
Man is free, for God wants him to be free. All things are foreseen by God, we are told by our Masters, and yet we are free, free to choose every moment of our life. We are free to choose between life and death, between the next instant and death, between good and evil, laughter and tears, free to choose compassion over cruelty, memory over oblivion, beauty over ugliness, morality over immorality, and we are free to choose between freedom and absence of freedom.
… Though chosen by God to be the first believer, Abraham was free to reject that mission. He could have said no, but he didn’t. Does it seem like a paradox? I am free not to be afraid of paradoxes.
The idea, I believe, is simply not to confuse divine freedom and human freedom. The two are connected but not identical. God is free, and man must be free…. Now what is freedom? Freedom to the slave is not the same as freedom to the owner of the slave…. Freedom is not a given; it is something one must constantly fight for. Freedom is not even given by God. Freedom belongs to the human domain. It is up to us to shape and nourish it.
Other moments come to mind, special moments. On a visit to the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in the north of Israel, I finally meet “Antek,” Yitzhak Zuckerman, the former deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto. We have known each other for twenty years—from afar. Every time we made plans to meet, one of us had to cancel. This time, no matter what, the meeting will take place.
