All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [187]
I also changed publishers in the United States several times, but, unlike in France, the practice is common here. Few writers publish all their work with a single house. After The Accident, Arthur Wang judiciously advised me to take my next novel to a larger house. Paul Flamand put me in touch with Mike and Cornelia Bessie at Atheneum. I gave them The Town Beyond the Wall The Gates of the Forest, Legends of Our Time, and The Jews of Silence were published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, A Beggar in Jerusalem and Souls on Fire by Random House, The Testament and The Forgotten by Summit/Simon and Schuster.
These changes upset me, even though they were useful and often necessary. I simply followed my editors. When they changed houses, I went with them.
Peter Mayer was—at the time—the boy wonder of American publishing. He made a success of everything he undertook professionally. As publisher of the paperback editions of my works he got so interested in the landscape of my books that he accompanied me to Sighet and Jerusalem. When he attended a Friday evening service at the Wall, completely unprepared for the experience, he burst into tears. Eventually, his career took him from Avon Books to Penguin. One day he wrote me a long letter. The bottom line was that he was not taking the rights to The Forgotten; the hardcover edition was not selling briskly enough. Business is business.
Arthur Kurzweil is a different kind of publisher. As the talented head of Aronson Books, he mainly reprints titles that he considers essential reading. He was my student at City College and at one point wanted to write a book about me. I discouraged him. “Instead,” I said, “why don’t you write something about yourself?” He did. His book on Jewish genealogy is a “must” for any Jewish home.
Everything went well at Hill and Wang. Its efforts, as a small house, were highly focused, and during the months after Night was published, the company promoted it exclusively, with great fervor, and successfully. The literary pages were unanimous in their praise. For the most part the reviewers understood the work well and captured its essential themes. The important newspapers praised the book’s austere style and its dimension of truth. My moment of triumph came when The New York Times Book Review invited me to write reviews. (In my own Uncle Sam’s view, that was at least as good as a Nobel Prize.)
When La Ville de la Chance (in the American edition, The Town Beyond the Wall) was published in Paris, a reporter from Belgian Radio asked me—and I quote—“How much longer are you going to wallow in suffering?” In France, as in the United States, some critics began to suggest that the time had come to let go of the subject. Their objections were less literary than personal. Had they said that my characters were too transparent or too opaque, that my words or images were unsatisfactory, I could have learned to live with it. But most framed the discussion in other terms, questioning the theme and my own experience. In other words, either overtly or obliquely, they expressed annoyance with me for having lived a past different from theirs and for being the Jewish witness that I am. Even when my theme was the Bible, the Talmud, the Middle Ages, or Hasidism, there were those who linked the works to the Holocaust.
In France my novels now met with silence, or smug politeness. I was awarded the Prix