Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections (review)

172 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 he explores international developments in eugenics with an emphasis on American policy. He is unyielding in his criticism ofNazi eugenics and racial science and Marxist state policy, e.g., contemporary China's efforts at biological engineering. These are unconscionable feats ofending life and are not comparable to responsible mercy-killing, which, he argues, is motivated by respect for individual autonomy and compassion for a person suffering from an incurable disease. Finally, in Part Three he grapples with a variety of Holocaust theories (economic, literary, philosophical, political, and social) and the section is highlighted by a forceful and effective criticism ofnamed historians in the field (e.g., Bauer, Goldhagen, Hilberg, Katz, etc.). The author's cross-disciplinary scholarship is deceptively compact and demands the careful attention of the reader to follow the line of argument. Multiple hours of archival research are poured into an arduous writing style at once insightful and confrontational. The reader feels frustration (the prose is in the European analytic tradition), and possibly confusion (the vocabulary is technical), in the beginning but definitely admiration at the end. An important journey to Nazi evil and back. Zev Garber Judaic Studies Los Angeles Valley College Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections, edited by Alan Rosen. Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1998. 344 pp. $30.00. For nearly half a century, Shoah survivor (Auschwitz and Buchenwald) and Nohel laureate Elie Wiesel's superb gifts as activist, commentator, speaker, professor, and mainly storyteller have seized a world-wide audience in an emotional grip that borders on biblical religiosity. Shoah-invested novels like Night, with its chilling vow, "Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence ... those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust," parallel in reverse the Tokhexah Warnings in Deut. 28. His poignant writings on the Jews of Eastern Europe (The Oath), Russia (e.g., Zalmen, or the Madness ofGod, The Jews ofSilence, etc.), and Israel (e.g., Dawn, A Beggar in Jerusalem, etc.) are a striking reminder ofa people's desperate struggle not to be silent, to define itself, and to forge a new destiny One Generation After the (V)eit Hot Geshvign. Wiesel unveils fresh insight and poignancy in Messengers ofGod, Five Biblical Portraits, Four Hasidic Masters, and Souls on Fire; and his rendition entices even the reader with scant knowledge of the biblical hero and Hasidic master. He plumbs the ashes ofthe murdered European Jewry, for whom he tirelessly campaigns as "a messenger to mankind-not with a message ofhate and revenge but with one of Book Reviews 173 brotherhood and atonement.") Arguably, through his writings, teaching, and public appearances, Wiesel has emerged as the most visible messenger ofthe Event to millions in the post-Auschwitz age.2 Wiesel writes masterfully, with a Kafkaesque pen, and his themes include pogroms, the destruction of the shtetlekh (Jewish villages), songs of mourning and exile, the madness of the Messiah, divine love and silence, and the guilt and obligation of survival, all of which are interwoven with threads of Hasidic tales, Kabbalistic mysticism, talmudic wisdom, and pietistic folklore. Theologically, his testimony is a continuous Din Torah (a disputation based on the judgment of the Torah) with God, who did not uproot Auschwitz "in the world which He created according to his will" (Kaddish prayer), and with radical dehumanization, the existence of which raises the possibility that the world is either not listening to or does not care about the lessons that can be learned from the Shoah. Wiesel has done more than anyone to establish "Holocaust" (a word that invokes images offire and burnt offerings)as the accepted term for the Judeocide that occurred during World War II. Because the term is associated with the akedah, or "binding," of Isaac in the biblical story in which Abraham is tested and Isaac is victimized (Gen. 22), the use of the term permits Wiesel to question the intentions of God.3 This act of questioning does not diminish the paradox of the Shoah, but serves to make the issue more significant and more troubling, and therefore more full of hope. Wiesel has strongly advocated that the specific...