Elie Wiesel’s Unending Search
By Donna Rifkind
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 24, 2009; C01
A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE
By Elie Wiesel
Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson
Knopf. 274 pp. $25
When writers become statesmen — Günter Grass, say, or Nadine Gordimer —
it’s easy to forget that they first connected to audiences in one-on-one
encounters between author and reader. These days, we’re more apt to regard the
large-scale public face of Elie Wiesel: his Nobel Prize, his "Oprah" appearances,
his condemnations of the Armenian and Darfur genocides, the news that his
life savings were pillaged by Bernard Madoff. We’re less likely to remember
that "Night," Wiesel’s internationally best-selling Holocaust-survival memoir,
was rejected in the late 1950s by major American publishers before it finally
found a home, for a $100 advance, at a courageous then-independent house
called Hill & Wang. The first print run of "Night" was 3,000 copies and took
three years to sell.
The publication of Wiesel’s latest novel provides a good opportunity to
return to that intimate connection that he first established with those few early
readers of "Night." The book’s style and themes will be familiar to those
acquainted with his previous fiction (now 80, he has written more than 50
books), yet "A Mad Desire to Dance" shows the sensibility of a literary wanderer
who has not finished searching for answers to his original anguished questions.

The new novel’s narrator is 60ish Doriel Waldman, himself a certain kind of
spiritual wanderer. What Doriel asks, again and again, is how he, a Holocaust
survivor, can hope for faith, equanimity or even sanity during a life
"amputated" by overwhelming personal suffering and loss. Like other Wiesel
protagonists, he’s preoccupied with madness — his own and the world’s — and he
seeks treatment in the office of Thérèse Goldschmidt, a Jewish psychotherapist
who also managed to survive the war.
If nothing else, Doriel’s sessions with his therapist prove how thoroughly
unsatisfactory is the shorthand description "survivor." It’s true that Doriel
survived the war as a young child in Poland, hiding in a barn with his father
while his mother, blond and passing as a gentile, traveled as a secret
liaison for the Jewish Resistance. Yet for Doriel, survival has meant not triumph
but a life painfully truncated. Most of his family died by the time he was11:
his two siblings as victims of the Nazis, and his parents in a car crash in
France shortly after the war, preparing to make their way to Palestine.
Since childhood Doriel has drifted, staying with an uncle in Brooklyn,
wandering among yeshivas in New York and Jerusalem, spending time near his
parents’ graves in France, alighting in Manhattan. He never managed to maintain a
strong connection to another person or to lay his ghosts to rest. For what
purpose has he survived? For this empty pilgrimage?
It’s this mystery, and more, that Doriel dances fitfully around during his
therapy sessions. There is also the question of where he acquired his
considerable wealth, and the nagging suspicion, whose clues he has attempted to bury,
that his mother may have had an affair during her Resistance missions. On
the whole, his visits to Goldschmidt are mutually frustrating experiences. The
doctor despairs of curing his bottomless despair, while the patient dodges
unbearable truths in a filibuster of philosophizing and storytelling.
Some of Doriel’s stories are glancingly personal, touching on several of his
doomed romantic relationships, or on his spectral reconnections with other
survivors. Others are woven from classical Jewish texts, for Doriel is a
serious and sometimes too-fervent scholar, giving lessons to adolescents on
medieval Jewish history. He’s been taught that memory is the cornerstone of his
religion — over and over again in their liturgy, faithful Jews exhort themselves
never to forget — but how can one live within that faith if forgetting is
the only way to endure?
This is a ruthless book, with little of the redemptive spirit that American
readers have grown attached to in tales of the Holocaust. It’s a difficult
story, moreover, told in a difficult way, deliberately discursive and without
regard for chronology. Its purpose is to disorient the reader, echoing Doriel’s
psychological dislocation, wandering as he wanders. The translation provides
additional obstacles, distancing readers from the story with distracting
word choices ("fecundated"?) and calcified dialogue.
Surprisingly, though, despite these impediments, a reader willing to navigate
the thickets will find rewards. The novel’s grim satisfactions lie in a
sense of shared responsibility between teller and listener, a confidentialyet
far-reaching partnership that began four decades ago with "Night." "I tell my
students and my readers," Wiesel has said, "that whoever reads or listens to a
witness becomes a witness."
Rifkind is a book reviewer based in Los Angeles.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress