Free And the Sea Is Never Full by Elie Wiesel Page B

exception of the later novel
The Forgotten
, it is without doubt the most depressing fictional tale my pen has ever committed to paper. While working on it, I am deep in a depression that on the surface seems unwarranted. Things are going well, both professionally and personally. Marion has become my translator, so I no longer worry about the English-language editions of my work. Our one-year-old son’s smile delights me. Teaching is exciting; my books are being bought by an increasing number of publishers abroad. Robert McAfee Brown at Stanford University, John Roth at Claremont, Harry Cargas in St. Louis, Lawrence Langer in Boston, and Irving Halperin in San Francisco all incorporate my books into their programs. And yet I sense disaster. As the writer Cynthia Ozick observes: “It is as though, in your novel, you foresaw the Yom Kippur War and the exasperating solitude of Israel.” In truth, never has the Jewish state been so close to catastrophe.
    Why did I set the action of this novel at the beginning of the twentieth century? To dissociate it from my personal experience, to distance it from the era of
Night
?
    The theme: A young stranger wishes to die, and it falls to a wandering old man named Azriel to dissuade him. What can he tell the young stranger that will renew his will to live? He tells him a story—his own, the one he had vowed never to reveal.
    Through this story Azriel describes the life and destiny of anannihilated Jewish hamlet. It is all there: friendship and hatred; fanaticism and terror; the chroniclers and their fate; the tensions between societies, religions, and generations; testimony and silence; silence above all; silence as means and as end.
    October 5, 1973. The Yom Kippur War, terrible and shattering. We learn the news during services. Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, dressed in white as was the high priest of long ago, asks the congregation to pray with increased fervor. In the middle of the
Musaf
service I am called outside: I must urgently call the Israeli Mission. I remove my
talit
and go to the synagogue office. A diplomat requests a statement for the press. Is it true that the Germans often chose the Day of Atonement to heighten their campaigns of brutality against the inhabitants of the ghettos? As a rule I am wary of such analogies. But today I say: Yes, the Germans knew the Jewish calendar and used it against us. I return to my seat. The congregation is deep in prayer, reciting the
Amidah
. And I realize that this is the first time since liberation that I have violated the sanctity of the holiest day of the year.
    The year 1973 contains more bad omens than promises. Yasir Arafat is reelected to head the PLO. In Chile, Salvador Allende is assassinated by the enemies of democracy. In Southeast Asia the war continues: Tons of explosives fall on Laos and Cambodia. In Paris the negotiations between Henry Kissinger, representing Nixon, and Le Duc Tho, Ho Chi Minh’s emissary, seem to be going nowhere. In America, the general public follows the news from the various fronts with resignation. But there is a new interest: Watergate. And the forced resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, indicted for accepting bribes from private companies.
    And now, the war against Israel.
    This one is unlike the others. In past wars, the Israeli army had always imposed its own rhythm, its own strategy. In this war, the adversary managed to deliver the first blow, unleashing a striking offensive.
    Depressing days, oppressive nights. I have trouble concentrating as I face my students. Rebbe Nahman and his princes, the Besht and his legends, no longer hold my thoughts, which leap toward Suez and the Golan on fire. The news reports from Israel are crushing. What am I to do? How could I help? Write articles, make speeches? The time for that is past.
    As always, when Israel lives through a crisis I feel like the medieval poet Yehuda Halevy, who said that his heart was in the East though he himself lived far away, in the