All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [107]
My big problem was that Yedioth Ahronoth would publish only articles directly or indirectly related to Israel and/or the Jews, or at the very least to their enemies. This was the result not so much of indifference to the rest of the world as of lack of space, caused by a paper shortage. Newborn Israel, weakened by a merciless war, was racked by an unending economic crisis. For my newspaper, poorer and weaker than the country itself, the outside world existed only insofar as it was good or bad for the Jewish state.
But there was no lack of subjects for any self-respecting foreign correspondent. All you had to do was open your eyes, leaf through a magazine, attend a political demonstration, or read the obituaries. There was the beginning of the war in Indochina; the death of Léon Blum, who, like me, had been in Buchenwald; the death of André Gide. A succession of strikes and political scandals was erupting. Governments rose and fell at a pace no playwright would have dared attempt. The chasm between the Communists and their adversaries widened. The literati debated whether collaborationist writers whose works had been banned should be pardoned. François Mauriac pleaded for compassion, Louis Aragon for severity. Eventually, the National Committee of Writers was torn apart by tensions dating from the Occupation era. It was also the heyday of existentialism: Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, the Café de Flore and the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Long live polemical literature and the philosophy of commitment! Later I wrote of this period in my novel The Town Beyond the Wall
I was intrigued and stimulated by the intellectual and artistic ferment of Paris. Still working on my education, I was an insatiable patron of the library. Never have I read so much. I devoured the works of Malraux, Mauriac, Paul Valéry, Georges Bernanos, Ignazio Silone, and Roger Martin du Gard. I read everything by Camus (why did he submit to German censorship and agree to delete the chapter on Kafka from his Myth of Sisyphus?) and Sartre (couldn’t he have waited until Liberation to have his No Exit performed?) and was fascinated by the break between them. I discovered de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, and William Faulkner; Cervantes and Miguel de Unamuno, and of course Kafka. I compared their questions to mine. Could one be holy outside religion? Was there a secular priesthood? Where did man’s responsibility end and God’s begin? Would existence be absurd without God? I needed to be guided, but François was nowhere to be found. Nor was Shushani. I went back to my manuscript on asceticism determined to finish it, but doubt assailed me. What was so urgent about that theme?
Strangely, with the exception of the moving testimony of David Rousset and a few works by surviving resistance fighters (among them Robert Anthelme’s L’Espèce humaine), there was practically no concentration camp literature. It was as if people were afraid or ashamed to broach the subject. Were they still too close to it, too busy reintegrating themselves into society, too busy remaking their lives? As elsewhere in Europe, many books appeared on the Occupation and the Resistance. That was the great theme. Plays, films, documentaries, essays, novels—the source seemed inexhaustible. The men and women who had valiantly confronted the occupier and driven him out were glorified. The heroism of the few obscured the cowardice of the many, concealing the suffering of the victims who had been so readily sacrificed by a defeated and passive France tainted by collaboration. It was more expedient to depict the courage of underground fighters than the humiliation and betrayal of the Jews who were persecuted not only by the Germans but also by the gendarmerie and the police. The letters of denunciation recovered