All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [207]
Danny Stern had read the account of my “Return to Sighet” in a magazine. He phoned and asked to meet me. “I’ve published some novels,” he said as he shyly handed me a manuscript, “but they really don’t count. I think this may be my first true literary effort.” This very anxious, gentle man had a passion for literature, particularly contemporary literature. “Do you teach?” I asked. No, he worked in advertising and played the cello. Fine, I would read his manuscript. I felt flattered. It was the first time an American writer had sought my advice.
The title of his novel, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die, was taken from the liturgy of the High Holidays. Its action took place in the camps, where the main character holds a post important enough to influence the inmates’ fate.
I tend to be suspicious of fiction whose theme is Auschwitz. Talent is not enough. Something else is needed. Danny knew it. There was a hesitancy in his writing, as though he were unsure, phrase by phrase, of how to continue.
Danny had never written on the subject before. A profoundly and authentically Jewish writer, he explores in his book the Jewish past through characters firmly anchored in the present. His publisher asked me for a few lines to help his novel. I was happy to do it.
Israeli authors were beginning to solicit my support in getting their works translated in America. I was suddenly feeling myself becoming “influential.” I recommended several of them to publishers and editors. There were a few acceptances, more rejections. Still, Hanokh Bartov published his novel on the Jewish Brigade, Haim Guri his news articles on the Eichmann trial. Several magazines requested my collaboration. I met Philip Roth, who had recently written a harsh critique of Exodus, contrasting it to Dawn. I savored the philosophical humor of his short stories, admired the lucidity of his novels. Arnold Foster, who led the major battles against anti-Semitism as head of the Anti-Defamation League, spoke to me of his nephew Harold Flender, author of a Hemingwayesque novel called Paris Blues. We met and became friends. Harold later wrote a vivid account of the rescue of the Danish Jews, and never abandoned the theme of the camps. (When he died a suicide a few years later, I was devastated.)
I continued to ask myself harrowing questions. Had I finally made something of my life? Had I made something of my survival?
In 1964, twenty years after leaving my town and the mountains that surrounded it, I published The Gates of the Forest. It was an elegy to friendship, a hymn to solitude, a flight from myself into myself, and a song of remembrance for Maria. I developed various themes already touched on in The Town Beyond the Wall: the call of God, the provocation of His intervention in human history, the interrogation of silence by silence. Gates examines the implications of faith, The Town the rush toward madness. The two novels are of a piece but bear little resemblance to each other.
In 1965 an unexpected journey to the Soviet Union became a turning point in my life. Meir Rosenne and Ephraim Tari, two of the most effective and devoted young diplomats in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, prepared me. Both spoke French, were interested in literature, and, as it turned out, belonged to a semiofficial government office reporting directly to the prime minister. Meir in New York and Ephraim in Paris oversaw clandestine activities on behalf of Soviet Jews. It was an arduous task, more dangerous than it appeared. Arduous because even the largest and most influential Jewish communities refused to become actively involved. They were delighted to aid Israel, but the desperate Jews behind the Iron Curtain were both distant and invisible. Nobody seemed to know what concrete action Soviet Jews really wanted Jews in the West to take for them. The fact was that it was far more comfortable to express solidarity with our heroic Israeli brothers than with our unfortunate Soviet cousins. Also, as Israel