Legends of Our Time Read online

  ALSO BY ELIE WIESEL

  Night

  Dawn

  The Accident

  The Town Beyond the Wall

  The Gates of the Forest

  The Jews of Silence

  A Beggar in Jerusalem

  One Generation After

  Souls on Fire

  The Oath

  Ani Maamin (cantata)

  Zalmen, or The Madness of God (play)

  Messengers of God

  A Jew Today

  Four Hasidic Masters

  The Trial of God (play)

  The Testament

  Five Biblical Portraits

  Somewhere a Master

  The Golem (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  The Fifth Son

  Against Silence (edited by Irving Abrahamson)

  Twilight

  The Six Days of Destruction (with Albert Friedlander)

  A Journey into Faith (conversations with John Cardinal O’Connor)

  From the Kingdom of Memory

  Sages and Dreamers

  The Forgotten

  A Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  All Rivers Run to the Sea

  And the Sea Is Never Full

  Memoir in Two Voices (with François Mitterrand)

  King Solomon and His Magic Ring (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  Conversations with Elie Wiesel (with Richard D. Heffner)

  The Judges

  After the Darkness

  Wise Men and Their Tales

  Copyright © 1968 by Elie Wiesel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., in 1968, and subsequently by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1982.

  Published by agreement with Elirion Associates.

  Schocken and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this book have appeared in Commentary, Hadassah Magazine, and Jewish Heritage.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Wiesel, Elie, 1928–

  Legends of our time.

  Translation of: Le chant des morts.

  Reprint. Originally published: 1st ed. New York: Holt,

  Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

  I. Title.

  [PQ2683.I32C513 1982] 843’.914 82-3225 AACR2

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80641-3

  www.schocken.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. The Death of My Father

  2. My Teachers

  3. The Orphan

  4. An Evening Guest

  5. Yom Kippur: The Day Without Forgiveness

  6. An Old Acquaintance

  7. The Promise

  8. Testament of a Jew from Saragossa

  9. Moshe the Madman

  10. The Wandering Jew

  11. The Last Return

  12. Appointment with Hate

  13. Moscow Revisited

  14. The Guilt We Share

  15. A Plea for the Dead

  Introduction

  The old white-bearded Rebbe looked at me disapprovingly. “So, it’s you,” he sighed, “you are Dodye Feig’s grandson.” He had recognized me at once, which both pleased and embarrassed me. I have not been so identified since my childhood; since the war.

  Twenty years have elapsed since he last saw me. We were still in Hungary. My mother brought me to him to obtain his blessing. Now we were alone in the room, in a suburb near Tel Aviv. And for some reason I felt more uncomfortable than then.

  He sat in his armchair and studied me. He had not changed much. His face remained friendly and pained. His smile contained all the wisdom in the world.

  “Hmmm, Dodye Feig’s grandson,” the Rebbe repeated as if to himself. His eyes were resting upon me and I wondered whom he saw. And why he turned sad all of a sudden. Then I realized that unlike him I have changed in more than one way; I was no longer his disciple.

  “Rebbe,” I said, “I have been working hard to acquire a name for myself. Yet, to you I am still attached to my grandfather’s.” It was a poor attempt to break the tension; it failed. Now he seemed somewhat angry: “So, that’s what you have been doing all these years,” he remarked. He nodded his head and added: “What a pity.”

  My mother’s father was among his favorite followers. Dodye Feig was more famous as a Hasid than his grandson shall ever be as a writer. Was that the reason for the Rebbe’s anger? I dared not ask him. I became again in his presence the child I once was who would only listen.

  “Tell me what you are doing,” the Rebbe said in a soft voice. I told him I was writing. “Is that all?” he asked in disbelief. I said, yes, that’s all. His expression was so reproachful that I had to elaborate and explain that some writings could sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds. He did not seem to understand.

  I was afraid of that. If I had waited so many years before I came to see him—although I knew where he could be found—it was because I did not want to acknowledge the distance between us. I was afraid both of its existence and its absence. All the words that for twenty years I have been trying to put together, were they mine or his? I did not have the answer but, somehow, I was afraid that he did.

  “What are you writing?” the Rebbe asked. “Stories,” I said. He wanted to know what kind of stories: true stories. “About people you knew?” Yes, about people I might have known. “About things that happened?” Yes, about things that happened or could have happened. “But they did not?” No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end. The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: “That means you are writing lies!” I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: “Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred.”

  That was all I could say. Was it enough? I did not know. The Rebbe let it stand. He stared at me for a long moment until his face lit up again. He asked me to come closer; I obeyed. “Come,” he said, “Dodye Feig’s grandson should not go away empty-handed. Come and I shall give you my blessing.”

  And I did not dare remind him that for so many years I have tried so hard to acquire for myself a name which needed to be blessed, too. Only after I had left him did I realize that perhaps the time has come for Dodye Feig’s grandson to take my place at the typewriter.

  1.

  The Death of My Father

  The anniversary of the death of a certain Shlomo ben Nissel falls on the eighteenth day of the month of Shvat. He was my father, the day is tomorrow; and this year, as every year since the event, I do not know how to link myself to it.

  Yet, in the Shulchan Aruch, the great book of precepts by Rabbi Joseph Karo, the astonishing visionary-lawmaker of the sixteenth century, precise, rigorous rules on the subject do exist. I could and should simply conform to them. Obey tradition. Follow in the footsteps. Do what everyone does on such a day: go to the synagogue three times, officiate at the service, study a chapter of Mishna, say the orphan’s Kaddish and, in the presence of the living community of Israel, proclaim the holiness of God as well as his greatness. For his ways are tortuous but just, his grace heavy to bear but indispensable, here on earth and beyond, today and forever. May his will be done. Amen.

&nbs
p; This is undoubtedly what I would do had my father died of old age, of sickness, or even of despair. But such is not the case. His death did not even belong to him. I do not know to what cause to attribute it, in what book to inscribe it. No link between it and the life he had led. His death, lost among all the rest, had nothing to do with the person he had been. It could just as easily have brushed him in passing and spared him. It took him inadvertently, absent-mindedly. By mistake. Without knowing that it was he; he was robbed of his death.

  Stretched out on a plank of wood amid a multitude of blood-covered corpses, fear frozen in his eyes, a mask of suffering on the bearded, stricken mask that was his face, my father gave back his soul at Buchenwald. A soul useless in that place, and one he seemed to want to give back. But, he gave it up, not to the God of his fathers, but rather to the impostor, cruel and insatiable, to the enemy God. They had killed his God, they had exchanged him for another. How, then, could I enter the sanctuary of the synagogue tomorrow and lose myself in the sacred repetition of the ritual without lying to myself, without lying to him? How could I act or think like everyone else, pretend that the death of my father holds a meaning calling for grief or indignation?

  Perhaps, after all, I should go to the synagogue to praise the God of dead children, if only to provoke him by my own submission.

  Tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of my father and I am seeking a new law that prescribes for me what vows to make and no longer to make, what words to say and no longer to say.

  In truth, I would know what to do had my father, while alive, been deeply pious, possessed by fervor or anguish of a religious nature. I then would say: it is my duty to commemorate this date according to Jewish law and custom, for such was his wish.

  But, though he observed tradition, my father was in no way fanatic. On the contrary, he preached an open spirit toward the world. He was a man of his time. He refused to sacrifice the present to an unforeseeable future, whatever it might be. He enjoyed simple everyday pleasures and did not consider his body an enemy. He rarely came home in the evening without bringing us special fruits and candies. Curious and tolerant, he frequented Hasidic circles because he admired their songs and stories, but refused to cloister his mind, as they did, within any given system.

  My mother seemed more devout than he. It was she who brought me to heder to make me a good Jew, loving only the wisdom and truth to be drawn from the Torah. And it was she who sent me as often as possible to the Rebbe of Wizsnitz to ask his blessing or simply to expose me to his radiance.

  My father’s ambition was to make a man of me rather than a saint. “Your duty is to fight solitude, not to cultivate or glorify it,” he used to tell me. And he would add: “God, perhaps, has need of saints; as for men, they can do without them.”

  He could be found more often in government offices than in the synagogue—and, sometimes, in periods of danger, even more often than at home. Every misfortune that befell our community involved him directly. There was always an impoverished, sick man who had to be sent in an emergency to a clinic in Kolozsvar or Budapest; an unfortunate shopkeeper who had to be bailed out of prison; a desperate refugee who had to be saved. Many survivors of the Polish ghettos owed their lives to him. Furnished with money and forged papers, thanks to him and his friends, they were able to flee the country for Rumania and from there to the United States or Palestine. His activities cost him three months in a Hungarian prison cell. Once released, he did not utter a word of the tortures he had undergone. On the very day of his release, he took up where he had left off.

  My mother taught me love of God. As for my father, he scarcely spoke to me about the laws governing the relations between man and his creator. In our conversations, the Kaddish was never mentioned. Not even in camp. Especially not in camp.

  So I do not know what he would have hoped to see me do tomorrow, the anniversary of his death. If only, in his lifetime, he had been a man intoxicated with eternity and redemption.

  But that is not the problem. Even if Shlomo ben Nissel had been a faithful servant of the fierce God of Abraham, a just man, of demanding and immaculate soul, immune against weakness and doubt, even then I would not know how to interpret his death.

  For I am ignorant of the essentials: what he felt, what he believed, in that final moment of his hopeless struggle, when his very being was already fading, already withdrawing toward that place where the dead are no longer tormented, where they are permitted at last to rest in peace, or in nothingness—what difference does it make?

  His face swollen, frightful, bloodless, he agonized in silence. His cracked lips moved imperceptibly. I caught the sounds, but not the words of his incoherent memory. No doubt, he was carrying out his duty as father by transmitting his last wishes to me, perhaps he was also entrusting me with his final views on history, knowledge, the world’s misery, his life, mine. I shall never know. I shall never know if he had the name of the Eternal on his lips to praise him—in spite of everything—or, on the contrary, because of everything, to free himself from him.

  Through puffy, half-closed eyelids, he looked at me and, at times, I thought with pity. He was leaving and it pained him to leave me behind, alone, helpless, in a world he had hoped would be different for me, for himself, for all men like him and me.

  At other times, my memory rejects this image and goes its own way. I think I recognize the shadow of a smile on his lips: the restrained joy of a father who is leaving with the hope that his son, at least, will remain alive one more minute, one more day, one more week, that perhaps his son will see the liberating angel, the messenger of peace. The certitude of a father that his son will survive him.

  In reality, however, I do not hesitate to believe that the truth could be entirely different. In dying, my father looked at me, and in his eyes where night was gathering, there was nothing but animal terror, the demented terror of one who, because he wished to understand too much, no longer understands anything. His gaze fixed on me, empty of meaning. I do not even know if he saw me, if it was me he saw. Perhaps he mistook me for someone else, perhaps even for the exterminating angel. I know nothing about it because it is impossible to grasp what the eyes of the dying see or do not see, to interpret the death rattle of their last breath.

  I know only that that day the orphan I became did not respect tradition: I did not say Kaddish. First, because no one there would have heard and responded “Amen.” Also because I did not yet know that beautiful and solemn prayer. And because I felt empty, barren: a useless object, a thing without imagination. Besides there was nothing more to say, nothing more to hope for. To say Kaddish in that stifling barracks, in the very heart of the kingdom of death, would have been the worst of blasphemies. And I lacked even the strength to blaspheme.

  Will I find the strength tomorrow? Whatever the answer, it will be wrong, at best incomplete. Nothing to do with the death of my father.

  The impact of the holocaust on believers as well as unbelievers, on Jews as well as Christians, has not yet been evaluated. Not deeply, not enough. That is no surprise. Those who lived through it lack objectivity: they will always take the side of man confronted with the Absolute. As for the scholars and philosophers of every genre who have had the opportunity to observe the tragedy, they will—if they are capable of sincerity and humility—withdraw without daring to enter into the heart of the matter; and if they are not, well, who cares about their grandiloquent conclusions? Auschwitz, by definition, is beyond their vocabulary.

  The survivors, more realistic if not more honest, are aware of the fact that God’s presence at Treblinka or Maidanek—or, for that matter, his absence—poses a problem which will remain forever insoluble.

  I once knew a deeply religious man who, on the Day of Atonement, in despair, took heaven to task, crying out like a wounded beast, “What do you want from me, God? What have I done to you? I want to serve you and crown you ruler of the universe, but you prevent me. I want to sing of your mercy, and you ridicule me. I want to place my
faith in you, dedicate my thought to you, and you do not let me. Why? Why?”

  I also knew a free-thinker, who, one evening, after a selection, suddenly began to pray, sobbing like a whipped child. He beat his breast, became a martyr. He had need of support, and, even more, of certitude: if he suffered, it was because he had sinned; if he endured torment, it was because he had deserved it.

  Loss of faith for some equaled discovery of God for others. Both answered to the same need to take a stand, the same impulse to rebel. In both cases, it was an accusation. Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

  Many years have passed since I saw my father die. I have grown up and the candles I light several times a year in memory of departed members of my family have become more and more numerous. I should have acquired the habit, but I cannot. And each time the eighteenth day of the month of Shvat approaches, I am overcome by desolation and futility: I still do not know how to commemorate the death of my father, Shlomo ben Nissel, a death which took him as if by mistake.

  Yes, a voice tells me that in reality it should suffice, as in previous years, to follow the trodden path: to study a chapter of Mishna and to say Kaddish once again, that beautiful and moving prayer dedicated to the departed, yet in which death itself figures not at all. Why not yield? It would be in keeping with the custom of countless generations of sages and orphans. By studying the sacred texts, we offer the dead continuity if not peace. It was thus that my father commemorated the death of his father.

  But that would be too easy. The holocaust defies reference, analogy. Between the death of my father and that of his, no comparison is possible. It would be inadequate, indeed unjust, to imitate my father. I should have to invent other prayers, other acts. And I am afraid of not being capable or worthy.

  All things considered, I think that tomorrow I shall go to the synagogue after all. I will light the candles, I will say Kaddish, and it will be for me a further proof of my impotence.