All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [236]
The entire incident left me troubled and sad, especially since it had an unpleasant sequel. While Zalmen was being performed in Tel Aviv, a man who claimed to have been an aide to the late prime minister Eshkol asked me to support an Israeli committee for Russian Jewish intellectuals. He wanted me to introduce him to rich people. I replied, politely, that I did not do fund-raising, not even for Russian Jews or Israel. But he was so insistent that in the end I made him an offer: Just as the proceeds from the American production had been donated to the New York Conference on Soviet Jews, so all the proceeds from the Israeli production would go to his committee. I told him I would so instruct Le Seuil that very day. For months thereafter he called me from Jerusalem two or three times a week: “Le Seuils check still hasn’t arrived. It’s outrageous!” Though it did take time, he eventually collected quite a hefty sum. I expected a word of thanks, which never came. The same was true of a certain New York organization: it received the royalties and forgot to say thank you.
Let me backtrack a little, for I have not yet spoken of the events that marked the 1960s: the war in Vietnam, the beginnings of ecumenicism, the Prague Spring, the May ’68 riots in France. All these events brought about changes in our sensibilities, in our way of looking at the world and at our responsibility for it.
The Chicago Seven in the United States, with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his slogan “We are all German Jews” in France; the occupation of the Sorbonne; Columbia University students clashing with the police, demanding change. There were those who viewed the revolt of youth as signifying a thirst for transcendent truth and justice. I happened to be in France in May of 1968, and I loved the students’ mixture of combativeness and generosity. Some of the slogans were wonderful: “Power to the imagination,” “It is forbidden to forbid,” “Changer la vie” I was less appreciative of slogans such as “CRS = SS?” (the CRS is the French state police). To compare the French police to the SS was not only historically inaccurate and politically outrageous, but in thoroughly bad taste. It was not entirely the students’ fault. The philosophy of ’68 was linked to the Occupation and the Resistance. Listening to or reading this new generation of French intellectuals made you think you were back in 1944, when life was a struggle against received ideas and oppressive laws, a fight for freedom, for the right to say and write whatever you pleased. But so much had been said and written since the Liberation.
I speak of these times in The Fifth Son:
America, Europe, and Asia underwent deep, gripping convulsions on a global scale, shaking the youth of my generation.…
Ideas and ideals, slogans and principles, rigid old systems and theories, anything linked to yesterday and yesteryear’s supposed earthly paradise was rejected with rage and scorn. Suddenly children struck fear in their parents, students in their teachers. In the movies it was the criminal and not the police who won our sympathy, the malefactor and not the lawman who had the starring role. In philosophy there was a flight to simplicity, in literature a negation of style. In ethics humanism stirred laughter.… Universities no longer taught literature or sociology but revolution and counterrevolution, or even counter-counterrevolution of the right, the left, or somewhere in between. Students could no longer write a sentence or formulate a coherent thought, and they were proud of it. If a professor happened to voice his displeasure, he was boycotted, called a reactionary, told to go back to his university titles, scholarly works, and archaic concepts. Next time let him be born into another society, another era.
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