Sounds of Silence

By J.D. Reed

by Elie Wiesel

Summit; 346 pages; $13.95

Of all Stalin's victims, none would seem so obscure as the Soviet writers who were rounded up and murdered on the night of Aug. 12, 1952. It was the Premier's last act of anti-Semitic paranoia, and he made certain that if his victims were barely known in life, they would be totally obliterated in death. It was not enough that the victims were to vanish from society, they were also to disappear from history.

But, as George Eliot observed, there is a roar on the other side of silence, and in recent years the voice of Soviet Jewry has sometimes been loud enough to awaken whole nations. Even those lost souls of the '50s are no longer still; they speak with renewed eloquence in The Testament, Elie Wiesel's 18th and most accomplished book.

A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, frequently mentioned as a Nobel candidate, Wiesel has made Nazi genocide his central theme for 25 years. Here he explores a different kind of angst: the transformation from practicing Jew to militant Communist, a journey taken by thousands of thinkers and millions of chanting followers from the steps of the Winter Palace to the barbed wire of the Gulag. Wiesel reduces that odyssey to the tale of a single wanderer, Paltiel Kossover, a minor poet whose life becomes a battle between the divine and the dialectic.

Paltiel's memoirs are smuggled out of prison by a sympathetic court stenographer who passes the manuscript to Kossover's mute son Grisha. The boy's inability to speak is the symbolic disability of a new generation. But Grisha escapes his father's fate when he emigrates to Israel with the tale committed to memory.

The Testament follows Paltiel through a roiled landscape: Berlin and Paris in the '30s, party betrayals during the Spanish Civil War, a mission to Palestine, back to Russia where he becomes a gravedigger in the last days of the war.

Down through the decades, Kossover moves through history like a sleepwalker. In the beginning, he substitutes the Cause for God: "In that way I could accept everything without reservation or hesitation. . . the Party held the truth and the keys to the future." When he marches with militant workers, he suddenly feels the weight of phylacteries in his knapsack, but his revolutionary fervor is seldom leavened by thought. It takes a phosphorescent, spectral figure to rekindle any moral sense. David Aboulesia, who mysteriously appears whenever pain grows too intense to bear, warns him, "If you believe you must forsake your brothers in order to save mankind, you will save nobody, you will not even save yourself." It is a bitter prediction: Kossover's return to faith is tragically late. Yet it is his testament that 30 years later transfigures his life and makes the fate of Russian Jewry an omnipresent matter of life and death.

Elie Wiesel once wrote of his fellow concentration camp victims: "So as not to betray ourselves by betraying the dead, we can only open ourselves to their silenced memories--and listen." He listens to Stalin's victims with full attention, and he reflects in the tone of the great Russian intimates of suffering: Chekhov, Babel, Mandelstam. Wiesel needs no tract; the yearning of a single martyr can redeem humanity. Paltiel Kossover awaits the Angel of Death in his cell: "I love all the persons I see in the distance, moving in joy and melancholy; I feel sorry for them. They are all mortal and behave as if they were not. I should like to comfort them, help them, save them. I should like to tell them the story of my life." --By J.D.Reed

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