Out of Silence Toward Life

A BEGGAR IN JERUSALEM by Elie Wiesel, translated from the French by Lily Edelman and the author. 21 1 pages. Random House. $5.95.

When 6,000,000 died, Elie Wiesel survived. The implications of that selection have haunted him ever since, and lent somber substance to his writing (seven books, one play). Wiesel was at work in Manhattan on his eighth book when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War broke out in 1967. Like thousands of Jews all over the world, he was unable to resist some sort of involvement. "I had to put everything aside," he remembers, and "I went to Jerusalem." This uniquely complete novel is the result of Wiesel's pilgrimage. It undertakes nothing less than the telling of the story of one post-World War II Jew as the sum of all his people.

The book is a complex interlacing of myth and mystery, parable and paradox, and straight description of an unusual war. At its center is a brief sketch of a now completed circle of Jewish history --from the Roman razing of the great Temple in Jerusalem and the diaspora, through the aftermath of Christ's crucifixion and Hitler's Final Solution, to the recapture of the Wailing Wall on the Temple grounds by Israeli soldiers in 1967. Outwardly, it is a cycle from defeat to victory. Inwardly, it represents the record of a profound moral dilemma. For the ancient Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed only three weeks after its defenders broke a tenet of the religious law. To regain the Temple, Jews were taught, would involve not force of arms but strict observance of moral law. Wiesel states the problem by telling a parable about an undiscovered kingdom that maintains impregnable defenses--except on the Sabbath.

A slightly mysterious character named Dan the Prince tries to persuade the rulers that the sanctity of the Sabbath must be violated in order that the kingdom may be preserved militarily, for it will not exist at all if the people who observe the sanctity of the Sabbath are destroyed. The undiscovered kingdom, faced with the dilemma of expediency versus a national spiritual responsibility, is clearly Israel, and Author Wiesel seems reluctantly to recognize the merits of Dan's arguments.

Consumed by Fire. In Wiesel's novel Dan the Prince is part of a band of beggars who meet each night within the shadow of the Wailing Wall after the Six-Day War to tell tales. Some are mad, some are drunk, some are blind. But all of them are ostensibly seers. Among them is David, the book's narrator and central figure. Like Wiesel, David was born in Transylvania and has survived the Nazi death camps. Unwilling or unable to die, he seems doomed to live out the prediction of a Nazi lieutenant who tried and failed to execute him. "You'll try to reveal what should remain hidden, you'll try to incite people to learn from the past and rebel, but they will refuse to believe you. You'll possess the truth, you already do; but it's the truth of a madman." Like Elie Wiesel himself, David is drawn to Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, and he is hoping to find death. Psychologically it is inconceivable to him that the Jews will not be overwhelmed as they have been in the past. "We were going to be consumed by fire once more," he predicts, "and once more the world would let it happen."

But instead of death David meets Katriel, a gentle Talmudic scholar who fears both killing and being killed, yet nonetheless has decided to fight. When Katriel disappears, the role of survivor-witness again falls upon David--but this time with a considerable difference. Earlier, Katriel had been asked, "What do you expect of life?" and had replied, "Life itself." Through some blessing, it is inertia of life, not of death, that now preoccupies David. He still ponders the morbid though moral question of how one can "work for the living without by that very act betraying those who are absent." But instead of being drawn toward the 6,000,000 dead, David subsumes the missing Katriel into his own life. After the victorious war, Wiesel writes, "a page has been turned. The curse has been revoked in this place and its reign terminated." There is little affirmation in the discovery, merely an awareness that "what is important is to continue."

Untrustworthy Words. Despite his own eloquence and the book's interlocking questions, Wiesel distrusts words. "They destroy what they aim to describe," Katriel says. "By enveloping the truth they end up taking its place." Questioning silences, Wiesel suggests in A Beggar, can be more trustworthy. They do not curtail explorations with limiting answers. Wiesel has observed elsewhere that "art must be a result of cumulative silences. The silences must become so full that they finally break out. Then you start writing."

The great achievement of A Beggar in Jerusalem is that Wiesel has shaped a story that shows men during a modern war yet does justice to the brooding silences in which all violent action and its consequences are pondered and perhaps judged.

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