Review of Elie Wiesel: The Testament. New York: Summit Books, 1981.
Published November 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.
Solzhenitsyn speaks for the Russia crushed but could not kill: the Russia of czarism and the Orthodox Church. He does not, cannot, speak for the old Russian underground. Solzhenitsyn’s master, Dostoyevsky, speaks of, if not for, part of that underground, the pat that dreamed of democracy, or socialism. Neither can speak for the other part of the underground, the only international nation: the Jews.
For years some Jews allied themselves with the secular underground. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, they were taught, and enemies were never scarce. Still, an unusually large number of Jews not only allied themselves with socialism particularly communism but–to use apt religious language–converted to it. Why?
Stalin took the precaution of murdering anyone who could have answered. Elie Wiesel, one of the best Jewish writers alive (there are reasons why he will not regard that designation as condescending), undertakes to speak for the dead, to re-member the Russian Jewishness that Stalin tried to dismember.
The Testament begins in Israel. Wiesel, himself a minor character in the novel, watches Soviet Jews arrive at Lod Airport in July, 1972. From “the realm of silence and fear” they enter Israel silently and fearfully. But memory, memory of lovers, family, and (true) comrades fast overcomes silence and fear. Soon they can laugh and weep, toast life, the future, peace–perhaps their first free expression of feeling in a lifetime of enforced guardedness.
Wiesel sees a young man who does not participate. He is a mute, the son of Paltiel Gershonovich Kossover, a poet `liquidated’ by Stalin some twenty years before. Taken back to Wiesel’s apartment, he insists on staying awake all night; it will transpire that he wants to write his father’s memoir, his testament, from memory.
Soviet communism, Judaism travel (or, as is said of Jews, wandering), silence fear, memory, reunion, love, family,, friendship, laughter, life, the future, peace, freedom, poetry: Wiesel presents his themes in the brief prologue. In Paltiel Kossover’s letter to his son, which follows the prologue, we learn the poet’s teachings on some of these themes. “[T]he very essence of the noble tradition of Judaism” consists of a kind of universal memory system, the Book of Creation wherein “all our actions re inscribed.” Memory serves Creation, life (and therefore the future) because without it there is only oblivion. And although Paltiel Kossover does “not know what life is” and will “die without knowing,” he knows that communism, in exacting selective amnesia, does not serve life. “Don’t follow the path I took,” he tells his son, “it doesn’t lead to truth.” “Truth, for a Jew, is to dwell among his brothers. Link your destiny to that of your people, otherwise you will surely reach an impasse.” Although “I lived a Communist… I die a Jew”; having lived, inadvertently, for death, he dies for life–a theme on which Christians have no monopoly.
The novel explore the subtleties of these themes, the gaining of these teachings. Wiesel juxtaposes short chapters concerning Paltiel Kossoer’s son–especially his recovery of his father’s memoir–with sections of the Testament, the story of a Jew wandering from his native city in Russia and the faith he learned there to Romania during the First World War, Berlin in the 20’s, Paris in the 30’s, briefly to Palestine and then to Spain during the civil war, to Moscow during the Second World War and finally back to his native city, the prison there and to Jewishness.
All Jews “were victims of fear” during Paltiel Kossover’s childhood in Russia. There was fear of stern teachers–a fear that led to knowledge something to love–and fear of Christians and their pogroms, which led neither to knowledge nor to love. His mother’s songs (the source of his poetic nature?) soothed the fear of teachers, but the only immediate remedy for the fear of death at Christian hands was silence; the Kossover family hid beneath the door of the barn while murdering toughs shrieked “Death to the Jews!” Throughout The Testament, silence means both the babbling of false prophets and the poetry of true ones.
The move to Romania brought no real uprooting, for “Jews remain Jews wherever they are: united, charitable, hospitable,” part of “a timeless community” without geographical boundaries. Yet these aspects of Judaism led Paltiel Kossover away from Judaism, as he saw the suffering of the poor and wanted to relieve it. Jewish messianism fascinated him; it also prepared him for communism. Fortune intervened in the shape of a fellow student, “a master at the seduction and corruption of the mind,” who introduced him to Marxist political action and thought, not only as an expression of the will to justice but as a vehicle of the friendship Paltiel craved.
Wiesel’s best writing arises from his perception that most human beings, even intelligent ones, enact contradictory ideas and feelings while remaining quite decent and only a bit guilt-ridden. Despite his partial conversion to Marxism, on the eve of his departure for Berlin (he wanted to evade Romanian conscription), Paltiel sincerely and doubtfully promised his father to remain a Jew. And in Berlin, further seduced by a nubile young communist who lectured him in bed, on Darwin and historical materialism, h continued to pray, albeit surreptitiously. Only after intense action–a street fight with Nazis–and his girlfriend’s ensuring care did he forget his observances for the first time. Forgetting: few of the great modern anti-religious philosophers believed they could induce men to reject God, but they knew that a certain kind of life, a life of activity in and for this world, might induce men to forget God.
The triumph of Nazism in 1932, a triumph Berlin’s communist prophets failed to predict, eventually led Paltiel Kossover to Paris. He met two remarkable men: the mysterious David Aboulesia, a wanderer searching for the Messiah, and Paul Hamburger, a brilliant Jewish communist intellectual and organizer. Hamburger saw, as Paltiel did not, that the Moscow trials must involve a grotesque betrayal of the revolution. Before he obeyed Stalin’s order to return to Moscow, he told Paltiel to get out of Paris, to go to Spain.
Describing the brutality of both sides in the civil war, Paltiel reflects that the Jews fighting there did not share in it. “If he Spaniards massacred one another, if they set their country on fire and bled it, it is because, in1492, they burned or drove away their Jews,” leaving no moderating sense of humaneness in Spain. Jews who were engaged in the internecine struggles on the left developed split personalities; when Paltiel inquired after a friend who had disappeared, a Jewish communist who worked for the security forces offered the Party line in French, sympathy in Yiddish.
Despite such incidents, Paltiel Kossover returned not to his family in Romania but to the Soviet Union, which he still believed was the messianic country. Upon his arrival, another security man warned him no to talk too much because “a past is only cumbersome.” Memory, Jewishness, speech: “You’re not at the yeshiva here, young man,” a member of the Jewish Writer’s Club in Moscow told him. “Don’t force us to listen to things that must not be heard.” Hitler invaded before the authorities got around to silencing the annoying poet. During the war, Paltiel revealed himself as one of those persons, uncommon but not rare, whose timidity in ordinary life gives way to courage when it matters. Unfit for military service, he displayed heroism as a stretcher-bearer–typically, he seems not to see his own heroism even as he writes about himself years later.
It is easy to forget in Moscow. Paltiel married the woman who would give him his only son, and he stayed in Stalin’s Russia, ally of the new Israel, after the war. Wiesel depicts neither evil nor stupidity here–simply life, ordinary life with its conveniences and compromises, overcoming memory.
Stalin, however, preferred extraordinary life for his subjects. The Party line changed, and “a new-style pogrom” began, directed against Jewish writers. “I could not accept that the Party could condemn an entire culture, annihilate an entire literature…. Why attack a language? Why would anyone wish to exterminate Yiddish?” Returning to his native city, Paltiel Kossover also returned to Judaism before his inevitable arrest and torture. Sustained by his memory of family (particularly his father and his son) and friends, he overcame the fear that began in childhood in this city with some, if not all, of the faith he learned there and was punished for there, at the beginning and the end of his life. He answered his own question of the Party in words he spoke before his executioner’s bullet could silence him: “You must understand,” he told a jailer, “the language of a people is its memory.” Totalitarianism, as Orwell knew, as Solzhenitsyn knows, finds memory radically inconvenient. It therefore permits only its own constantly manipulated anti-language.
What could Solzhenitsyn say to Paltiel Kossover? For the most part he is silent on the Jews. His Russia mistreated Jews before Stalin did–less systematically, it is true, but the fact remains. The wanderer David Aboulesia tells Paltiel, “if hou believe you must forsake your brothers to save mankind, you will save nobody, you will not even save yourself.” He speaks against the communists, of course. But what of the Christ Solzhenitsyn reveres? Beyond the dialogue between international Judaism and international communism, we hear the dialogue between the Jewish nation and the Christian nations. And beyond it we hear another dialogue: the dialogue between Jesus and his fellow Jews. Is there a writer today who can renew it?
2016 NOTE: Although this was not known in the West at the time, Solzhenitsyn–at times unjustly tarred with anti-Jewishness–did not at all remain silent on Jews and Judaism. He wrote a two-volume study of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, published in 2002. For an excellent account of this book, see Daniel J. Mahoney: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Wrier and Thinker (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014).
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