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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Page 2
By Jennifer Flynn
In her comparison of the acclaimed autobiographical novel Night and Wiesel's earlier, lesser known Yiddish narrative, Naomi Seidman cites differences in theme, content, and the depiction of Wiesel's self. In her interpretation, the famed French version has an overall tone of Jewish mysticism, meaning that it centers on the cosmic implications of the Holocaust, and depicts Wiesel as the philosopher, pondering the "mystery of God's silence in the face of evil" (Seidman 1). Because Night maintains this somewhat enigmatic theme, Seidman contends that it lacks the rage of the Yiddish version. In Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, Wiesel openly condemns man's tendency to forget the past, neglect atrocity and turn a blind eye to horrors in the world. To explain the disparity between these works, Seidman claims the author's interest in attracting a larger and primarily Gentile audience caused him, perhaps unwittingly, to redirect his hostility from man to God, thus creating a "compromise between Jewish expression and the capacities and desires of non-Jewish readers" (14). With the author's accusatory finger shifted away from his audience, the appeal and the influence of his work widened, thereby giving Wiesel the ample platform he desired. According to Seidman, the process of writing his experiences in two languages for two audiences led the author to create "two survivors, then, a Yiddish and a French - or perhaps we should say one survivor who speaks to a Jewish audience and one whose first reader is a French Catholic" (8). She insists that neither text is "more authentic," and acknowledges that "any conversation is a balancing act between two speakers, any text a reflection of its audience as much as its writers" (14-15). However, she clearly believes Wiesel sacrificed the anger of the first text to create the latter. To show this change, Seidman writes, "The Yiddish survivor is alive with a vengeance and eager to break the wall of indifference he feels surrounds him" (8). In contrast, the French survivor conducts a spiritual quest that "labors under the self-imposed seal of silence" (8). Thus, Seidman believes Wiesel suppressed his rage in order to come to terms with God in the aftermath of religious persecution. While both the hostile and spiritual survivors deliver insightful representations of Wiesel, Seidman maintains that Night lacks the fury of its Yiddish predecessor. This loss causes her to pronounce, "Wiesel found the audience he told his Yiddish readers he wanted. But only, as it turns out, by suppressing the very existence of this desire" (8). In other words, the furious narrator of Un di Velt Hot Geshvign finally broke through the world's indifference, but only after being recast as the passive, French seeker of spiritual truth.
If, instead of following Seidman's content-driven exploration, one concentrates on Wiesel's transformation of the autobiographical structure, the discrepancy between Wiesel's two works is better explained. While the Yiddish version bears witness to Wiesel's actual experiences during the Holocaust by providing a straightforward testimony, the French text explores his overall transformation and emotional responses through an experiment with form. By adding an imaginative arrangement of time, metaphor, and narration to tell his story in French, Wiesel forced the autobiographical genre to suit his total experience, rather than confining his story within the traditional structure of the testimonial form. Furthermore, the unique construction of the narrator allowed for an investigation of the variable nature of his self. These elements may seem more akin to literature than narrative. However, Wiesel is quick to dismiss claims that his work is fictional, plainly stating in his memoirs that: " Night is not a novel" ( Memoirs 271). While an author's opinion of his own work is seldom objective, Holocaust scholar Barbara Foley concurs with Wiesel's assessment of Night by writing, "Wiesel is not fictionalizing his experience at Auschwitz; he never permits his reader the luxury of believing that his represented world is an invented one" (341). Thus, while there are elements of fiction in Night , they never detract from its stark realism. Its novelistic devices enhance the vividness of the author's experiences for the reader without misrepresenting them. Thus, while the Yiddish work possesses vivid emotions and a deep portrayal of Wiesel's self, the French work offers these same things but shaded with a different literary approach. Thus, contrary to Seidman's claim, Wiesel is able to render his autobiographical self even more revelatory and complete in Night than it is in the Yiddish. The following analysis will explore Seidman's research, and trace the origin of the autobiographical Holocaust novel to uncover a more fitting theory about Wiesel's motives, method and literary achievement.