Elie Wiesel and Israeli writers

It is likely that all the residents of 5 Pinsker Street in Jerusalem heard the shout emitted by Haim Gouri four-and-a half-years ago. Calling out to his wife, he declared, “Alika, you have to hear this! This man – Elie Wiesel – did something for me that no one else ever did. And I didn’t even know about it! Listen – he set aside his own book for the sake of mine!” 

Gouri, who at the time had just celebrated his 90th birthday, rose from his armchair and began restlessly pacing around the apartment. “How could it be that I didn’t know about this? Why didn’t he tell me?”

Gouri’s unsettled state of mind was a result of something I told him in a conversation between us – that Wiesel had set aside a book he had written about Adolf Eichmann’s trial so as not to negatively impact the sales of the English edition of Gouri’s book, Facing the Glass Booth, which was published in Israel shortly after the trial’s end.

But we should start at the beginning. “Israeli authors were beginning to solicit my support in getting their works translated in America,” Wiesel wrote in All Rivers Run to the Sea, noting that he had suddenly become “influential.” Despite his recommendations to publishers, he says, “There were few acceptances, more rejections.” 

Wiesel mentions one element of his relationship with Hebrew writers and literature. From my personal conversations with Wiesel and examination of extant letters, most of which are preserved in the writer’s archives in Israel, I have discovered a fascinating story about his connections to original Hebrew literature, primarily in the first 30 years of the State of Israel – but not only then. 

Wiesel became well-known as an author only in the mid-1960s. His first book, Night, is the most popular and most often translated book on the topic of the Holocaust in the world. It was published in French in 1958 and in English in 1960, but it appeared in Hebrew – translated by Haim Gouri – only in 1965. The book was accepted slowly; it took some time until it became part of the public consciousness in Europe and the US. Today, however, it remains a bestseller, 60 years after it was first published, with hundreds of thousands of copies printed every year. 

In the early 1960s, two other books by Wiesel were published in French, English, and Hebrew – The Town Beyond the Wall and The Gates of the Forest. These books were warmly accepted by literary critics. In Israel, they were both published as part of Am Oved’s popular “Sifriyah La’Am” series. Wiesel was the only author who had two books published in the series over the course of two years. 

From a reporter for the Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot, in New York – writing about the US elections, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Kennedy assassination, along with major and minor events in New York City – Wiesel had quickly transformed into a famous author, whose works aroused great interest and discussion in many academic circles. Already in 1966, a conference dedicated to Wiesel’s books was held in New York.

Wiesel’s publishing success, the positive criticism that most of his books received, and the strong desire of Israeli authors to break out of the borders of their small Middle Eastern country led to many requests for Wiesel’s assistance. Some – like those he mentioned himself – were requests to help Israeli authors through his connections to American publishers. Others were requests that he write articles for journals and participate in events and conferences in Israel. With this as background, we can understand the nature of the relationship and connections that developed between Wiesel and Israeli writers.

From his first days as a writer, Wiesel was at home with world literature. When he worked as a reporter in Paris, he began weaving the initial threads through his connections with the famous French writer who “adopted” him – Nobel Prize winner Franחois Mauriac. In his autobiography, Wiesel tells of his acquaintance in France with Andrי Maurois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Marguerite Yourcenar, Albert Memmi, Albert Cohen, Paul Celan, Andrי Schwartzbart, Samuel Beckett, and Manטs Sperber. Until the day he died, Wiesel felt at home with the French language and culture, even though he lived in Paris for only ten years.

In one of our many conversations, I asked Wiesel for details regarding his relationship with each of these writers. I was interested in understanding how the young Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, had made such connections with some of the most important writers in the world, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Did it have to do with a degree of pity and a desire for recompense, as was the case with regard to Mouriac?

When Wiesel arrived in the US as a journalist in 1956, he began forming connections with writers who didn’t recognize his name at all. The publication of Night, The Town Beyond the Wall and The Gates of the Forest was his calling card – first among Jewish authors like Ben Hecht, Saul Bellow (who eventually brought Wiesel to teach at Boston University), Chaim Potok (who became his close friend), Howard Fast, Meyer Levine, Phillip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Herman Wouk, and literary critic Alfred Kazin. 

Through these authors – and primarily with the help of his literary agent, George Borchardt, who worked with Wiesel from the start and accompanied him for decades – Wiesel became an important part of the American literary scene. 

There were, of course, the great Yiddish writers in the United States and Israel – the poet Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer (who went from being a good friend to a true enemy of Wiesel), Chaim Grade (who remained friendly with Wiesel until his passing), Yankev Glatshteyn, and H. Leivick. There were also all of those who published in the New York Forward, in which Wiesel himself published many articles and stories, most of which were originally printed in the holiday supplements of Yediot Aharonot.

Wiesel also made connections with fellow writers about the Holocaust and its aftermath. He had a close relationship with Aharon Appelfeld (who traveled twice to the US to speak in honor of Wiesel), and he corresponded with both Primo Levi and K. Tsetnik (Yechiel Dinur). Jorge Semprתn, Miriam Akiva, Leyb Rochman, Moshe Prager, and Imre Kertיsz were Wiesel’s good friends.

There were some Israeli writers with whom Wiesel maintained a close and continuous relationship, while his relationship with others consisted only of a single interaction. In this context, I will focus primarily on early Israeli writers and his correspondence with them, which is preserved in various archives, in the National Library, in the Genazim archive of the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel, and in private collections.

It is important to note that Wiesel did not generally write precise dates on his Hebrew and Yiddish letters; he would write the date and the month, but 95% of the time, he neglected to write the year. Thus, anyone examining the archives must do some serious detective work in order to date each letter. The full dates do appear on his French and English letters, which were typed by his secretaries. 

When I first began working on the Elie Wiesel Archive, Wiesel asked me to try to find a letter that had been sent to him by Abba Kovner, the leader of the Jewish partisans and the fighters of the Vilna Ghetto. This letter was very important to Wiesel, and he felt that it should be seen by his friend, Prof. Dina Porat, Kovner’s biographer. Wiesel apparently felt that this letter would clarify the nature of the relationship between him and Kovner, which had at one time been close and had later broken nearly entirely.

In Porat’s book, Beyond the Reaches of our Souls: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, she quoted a part of Kovner’s poem “Sloan Kettering,” in which Kovner articulated a complaint against Wiesel:

Why are you complaining about the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust? Where were you all, the young Jews, during those days (1943)? What did you do to defend the Jews of your communities?

The poem led to tension between Kovner and Wiesel. Porat relates that Wiesel told her that he found Kovner’s statement surprising, given the letter that Kovner himself wrote to Wiesel after Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize. When I found the letter in the archive, Wiesel told me to immediately send it to Professor Porat, as it was important to him that it be published.

A day after Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Abba Kovner wrote to him:

Among all of the Jews who have been awarded a Nobel Prize over the years, I do not believe that even one of them was honored for simply being a Jew. The great scientists, those awarded the Nobel in all fields, including writers and poets, must give at least have the credit for the prize to the One Who gives of His goodness to His chosen ones and provides sparks of inborn talent to human beings – and the rest is up to luck. 

A Jew whose bad luck had him be born in the nineteenth century and who chose to transform his freedom-salvation into testimony for the remainder of his life – he is the one who compelled the entire world to recognize today the power of the historical Jewish experience and its uniqueness in the collective human memory.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Elie Wiesel in particular constitutes worldwide recognition of the universal uniqueness of the message of the Jewish Holocaust – not as an obsession of necrophiles, as some Jews and non-Jews claim, and not as an attempt to cultivate eternal hatred, but rather as a pedagogic obligation to educate towards courage, to distinguish between good and evil, as an eternal value for all generations.

This is but a small token of what my heart felt and wished to express upon hearing this good news.

Congratulations on this well-deserved honor.

In publishing Kovner’s letter, I feel that I am fulfilling one of Elie Wiesel’s explicit wishes, as he wanted very much for the content of Kovner’s letter to reach the general public.

Wiesel responded to Kovner’s letter, which moved him very much, with a letter of his own, opening with the words: “Your words touched my heart. It is true – everything that I do, everything that I write, I do as a Jew. Like you. May you be blessed.”

Wiesel also carried on a correspondence with the writer A.B. Yehoshua, whom he had met in Paris in the 1960s. A week after Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize (October 1986), A.B. Yehoshua (“Buli”) sent him a congratulatory letter:

When my young son asked me yesterday who Elie Wiesel is and why he was awarded the Nobel Prize, I started to tell him, and as I was telling him, I became convinced that there is no candidate more worthy than you to receive this prize! For someone who continues to mention and repeatedly learns about the Holocaust certainly wants peace. I know the depths of the wish to forget and repress with which you began your path of suffering – and you did it alone, a lonely Jew with no guilt and with no quest for revenge, but out of a sense of obligation and love.

There are some Israelis here who will not be pleased for you. Pay no attention to them. It is true that Jews don’t kill one another, but they try their best not to let live!

Your friends here are happy for you, love you, and believe in you.

And although you know that there is no greater negationist of the exile than me, I give you special permission to wander in exile as a messenger… But I have not given you permission to fail to visit Israel again and again, with all its pain and sacrifices, but also its reality and truth.

Be blessed,

Buli

Wiesel’s own letters were usually very brief, not more than one page of short sentences. Wiesel usually responded to correspondence by phone or faxes (the texts of which have obviously dulled over time). His preferred method of response was in person, when he came to Israel on one of his many visits. After the publications of A.B. Yehoshua’s Masa el Tom Ha-Elef (A Journey to the End of the Millenium), Wiesel wrote to him:

I read your book that you sent me. It is one of the best and deepest that you have written. I am certain that it will break open gates and hearts here [in the US] as well as in France.

Wiesel concluded on a very personal note:

From you I am willing to accept things that I prefer not to hear from others.

After the publication of the Hebrew edition of Wiesel’s autobiography, Kol Ha-Nechalim Holkhim el Ha-Yam, A.B. Yehoshua wrote to Wiesel:

The terrible history of the Jews in this century placed you at a crossroads that was never available to a Jew in modern history. You fulfilled the role and the mission that history bequeathed to you – and you did it with tact, humility, perseverance, and recognition of priorities. That is a remarkable accomplishment in the eyes of a partial-Jew like me…

Wiesel’s largest and longest correspondence was with Haim Gouri. They first met in Paris in the early 1950s, and they maintained a close relationship over the course of decades. This is attested to by the dozens of letters they sent one another, which are all preserved in the National Library in Jerusalem.

There were four main topics of the correspondence between Wiesel and Gouri. The first subject of discussion was the mysterious and fascinating identity of “Yosef G.,” which occupied them both in their roles as journalists (as reflected in the title of Gouri’s book, Who are You Yosef G.?). The second topic was the Eichmann trial, and later the trilogy of documentary films that Gouri helped create about the Holocaust: The 81st Blow, The Last Sea, and Flames in the Ashes. The third topic of the correspondence was Gouri’s translation of two of Wiesel’s books, Night and The Jews of Silence. The final topic that Gouri and Wiesel wrote about in their letters was the state of Soviet Jewry, on whose behalf Wiesel labored intensely over the course of twenty-five years.

This brings us back to Gouri’s astonishment, with which we began. In my conversation with Gouri, I told him that I had read all of his correspondence with Wiesel regarding the publication of Gouri’s book, Mul Ta Ha-Zechuchit, in English. I also told him that the Elie Wiesel Archives includes an edited manuscript of all of Wiesel’s articles on the Eichmann trial. I once asked Wiesel why he never published that manuscript. His answer was uncharacteristically hesitant. He initially offered some explanations, but I finally got it out of him: “I didn’t want my book to compete with Haim’s book, which I made a lot of effort to have published in English. After a few years, my book was already unnecessary.”

Wiesel’s admission that he had chosen not to publish his book for the sake of his friend’s book completely amazed Gouri. “I don’t believe it! He set aside his book just like that? That’s something that no one ever did and no one ever does!” I described to Gouri the different chapters in the unpublished book – comprised of Wiesel’s newspaper articles – until he was convinced that I was telling him the truth.The correspondence between Wiesel and Gouri was often emotional and sometimes personal, but always very interesting. In July 1962, Wiesel wrote: “I received your book [Mul Ta Ha-Zechuchit]…and I read it in one breath.” He continued to make a suggestion: “You will have to add an introductory chapter and explain the background and the events that preceded the trial – twenty to thirty pages.” Over the course of eight months, Wiesel negotiated with publishers on Gouri’s behalf. In March 1963, he wrote to Gouri: “I decided that I won’t rest or be silent, as long as I don’t break my contract.” After a year and a half and discussions with five different publishers, there was still no publishing contract, however. Gouri wrote to Wiesel:

Thank you for your sad letter recounting the fate of my book Mul Ta Ha-Zechuchit… I did not write to you lately because I did not wish to upset you, knowing how much love, friendship, and goodwill you invested in it. But I thought of you often, about your amazing and awful The Gates of the Forest, about your recollections of the road to Sighet and away from it – a one-time and terrifying journey.

The negotiations continued for some time until the book was eventually published in English. At the same time, Wiesel extended efforts to ensure that Gouri’s The Chocolate Deal would be published in English and French.

Wiesel’s correspondence with Gouri was his most significant with an Israeli writer, but he also corresponded with Moshe Shamir, Aharon Megged, Hanoch Bartov, and others. His fascinating correspondence with K. Tsetnik, another Auschwitz survivor, is most notable. In August 1961,K. Tsetnik wrote to Wiesel:

It bothers me that it was precisely during your visit to Israel that it happened [K. Tsetnik’s fainting during his testimony at the Eichmann trial]. Oh God, what a catastrophe has befallen me! … I got out of Auschwitz physically intact, but here I have become defective … I dare to ask: Why aren’t your books published in Hebrew or in Yiddish? I ask this as a friend.

K. Tsetnik often began his letters to Wiesel with, “Elie, my dear brother,” and Wiesel responded with, “Yechiel, my dear brother.” The correspondence deals at length with the books that each one had written or was writing, as well as the help that Wiesel provided to have K. Tsetnik’s books published in English. In a letter from October 1986, K. Tsetnik wrote: “I am hereby giving you this book. Please view it as your own; you were its father and mother.” 

After receiving one of K. Tsetnik’s books, Wiesel wrote: “I finished reading it. This work [Tzofen Edama] includes lofty and terrifying pages. Will the reader see what you yourself saw? Will he hear the voices that you hear? I am not optimistic. Our experience will remain ours alone.”

Elie Wiesel was not an Israeli writer, but he extended great efforts on behalf of Hebrew literature, with the goal of bringing it to the center of the global cultural stage. He died on July 2, 2016, at his home in Manhattan at the age of 87. May his memory be for a blessing!