ELIE WIESEL’S UNENDING SEARCH
By Donna Rifkind
Washington Post
March 23 2009
A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE
By Elie Wiesel
Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson
Knopf. 274 pp. $25
When writers become statesmen — Gunter 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 Therèse 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 was 11: 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 confidential yet 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.