Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage

There are two survivors, then, a Yiddish and a French -- or perhaps we should say one survivor who speaks to a Jewish audience and one whose first reader is a French Catholic. The survivor who met with [Mauriac] labors under the self-imposed seal and burden of silence, the silence of his association with the dead. The Yiddish survivor is alive with a vengeance and eager to break the wall of indifference he feels surrounds him. The question of how he can hope to break through the world's apathy by writing, to his "dear reader," in Yiddish is one [Elie Wiesel] never raises in Un di velt nor explicitly answers anywhere else. But the answer is implicit in the gap between volume 117 of the Polish Jewry series and that "slim volume of terrifying power," as the blurb on my copy of Night puts it. Wiesel found the audience he told his Yiddish readers he wanted. But only, as it turns out, by suppressing the very existence of this desire, by foregrounding the reticent and mournful Jew who will speak only when at the urging of the older Catholic writer. Wiesel began by preaching to the Jewish converted, but soon enough, one might say, the preacher himself underwent a kind of conversion. By the time Wiesel was negotiating with his French publishers, the survivor who pointed an accusatory finger at [Ilsa Koch], then raising her children in the new postwar Germany, had been supplanted by the survivor haunted by metaphysics and silence. It is this second version of how Night came to be written that has attained mythical status, most directly because it appears in Mauriac's foreword to the work (included in each new edition and translation) but also because of Wiesel's own accounts of the interview. And the myriad works of commentary on Wiesel have seized upon this theme, producing endless volumes on the existential and theological silences of his work, on the question of what has been called "the limits of representation." What remains outside this proliferating discourse on the unsayable is not what cannot be spoken but what cannot be spoken in French. And this is not the "silence of the dead" but rather the scandal of the living, the scandal of Jewish rage and unwillingness to embody suffering and victimization. The image that dominates the end of Night -- the look, as Mauriac describes it, "as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among shameful corpses" -- is precisely the image that Wiesel shat