All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [189]
My only response was silence. Once again I recalled Mauriac’s warning: first they build statues to you, then they dismantle them. Of course, literary envy is hardly new. Even the Talmud refers to kin’at sofrim, or writers’ jealousy. Tolstoy called Shakespeare a scribbler, Strindberg accused Tolstoy of plagiarism.
At the end of the daily Amidah prayer, we ask the Lord to spare us envy: “May I not feel it toward others, may others not feel it toward me.” I understood this prayer far better once I began to write. Too mystical for some, I was not mystical enough for others; too Jewish or not Jewish enough, too much or not enough the believer, too accessible or too obscure. They think you have power, and they insist they have claims on you. Since you have attained “success,” it is incumbent upon you to help all those who demand your assistance. How many writers are angry with other writers because they did not praise their work, because they refused to supply a blurb for the jacket or failed to place their manuscript with his or her publisher?
I realize I ought not to linger on this unpleasant subject. But I have not yet spoken of Alfred Kazin. This critic remains one of my great disappointments. I forget who it was who said, “The writer the gods wish to destroy, they make Kazin’s friend.” He is among the few people whose paths I regret ever having crossed. When I was unknown, his praise of Night in an intellectual weekly called The Reporter helped me get noticed. When, at last, several of my books had found readers, he did what he could to turn them away. Why? I have been told he has acted similarly with other writers. His generosity is often short-lived. In 1994 he caused a furor when he accused his former friend Saul Bellow of racism.
In his most recent outburst of venom, he wrote the following ghoulish and mean-spirited lines about a writer who left us a remarkable body of work: “Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide—in sensational fashion, of course—sitting in the bathtub, his head in a plastic bag.” According to Kazin, it was just another publicity stunt. “I never managed to believe a word he said,” Kazin wrote in The New Yorker. “He always manufactured himself in public. Probably it was all tied to the fact that he was a Holocaust survivor.” Once again he let the mask slip: he distrusted Kosinski, repudiated and condemned him in large measure because he was a survivor.
There was a time when we saw each other or spoke on the phone regularly. He was a member of a literary panel founded by survivors of Bergen-Belsen, headed by Yossel Rosensaft. Kazin accompanied the group to Belsen and then to Jerusalem. Rosensaft took good care of him, providing a luxurious hotel room, pocket money, gifts for him and his wife. Back in Manhattan he even invited him to his home. But all Mr. Kazin found to say about his hosts in a smug magazine article was that Yossel’s wife was the owner not only of a luxurious apartment but also of an inordinately large number tattooed on her arm. As though she had ordered it from Cardin. As for me, he was annoyed with me for having too sad a face and too frail a body. But worst of all, in a text in which he recalled “what he owed” to Primo Levi and me, he wrote that he would not be surprised to find that the episode in Night describing three inmates who were hanged together had been invented. How dare he? There were thousands of witnesses, some of them still alive, among them Yaakov Hendeli, who now lives in Jerusalem, and Freddy Diamond of Los Angeles, whose brother Leo Yehuda was the