Aviad Poznansky
Senior Thesis | 2024
When Words Fail: The Existential Anguish of Breaking the
Silence in Jewish Witness Memorialization and Translation
April 12, 2024
Aviad Poznansky
Firstly, I would like to thank Professor Gillman for providing invaluable inspiration and advice throughout the writing of this thesis. I certainly would not be able to discuss Jewish Literature so extensively if not for the excellent education I received through her class and her mentorship thereafter. I am also immensely grateful for Mrs. Brown’s continuous support and guidance since the initial formation of my ideas for this thesis. I would also like to formally express my gratitude to my good friend Felix Harari for his constant encouragement, well-informed feedback and honest interest in this work. Lastly, I am incredibly indebted to my parents for their unconditional support of my interest in this topic and their indispensable guidance.
Abstract
As the Jewish witness reports their traumatic experience to the world, language often represents more of an obstacle than a means. Throughout the works of Jewish authors Elie Wiesel (19282016) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924), narrators and fictional characters present the agony of communicating their incomprehensible experiences through language. To understand this theme, I provide an analysis of Naomi Seidman’s “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” in which Seidman theorizes that Elie Wiesel’s trauma was, in fact, miscommunicated and altered through its Christianized translation from Yiddish. I also compare Seidman’s “Scandal of Jewish Rage” and its surrounding discourse to Kafka’s short story, “Report to an Academy,” which I interpret as an allegory for the predicament of the Jewish witness author. By bringing together the literature of Kafka, Wiesel, Seidman, and Dara Horn, which ranges from pre-Holocaust to contemporary, I intend to show how authors throughout Jewish history have
underscored the pitfalls of translation, the rationalization of evil, and the existential anguish of Jewish witness storytelling.
Elie Wiesel and The Christianization of Jewish Rage
Since the late 1990s, Elie Wiesel’s Night has remained a staple of the secondary-school Holocaust curriculum (Donadio). The memoir is often praised among teachers for its emotional depth, despite its requirement of “limited classroom time” (Danks). The 144-page English edition of Wiesel’s Night that we read today, however, differs in crucial ways from its audacious source material, the 862-page Yiddish manuscript Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Naomi Seidman’s landmark work, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” is an exemplary source for understanding the key differences between the translations of Wiesel’s text. After comparing Wiesel’s original Yiddish Un di Welt with the contemporary Night, Seidman argues that many of Wiesel’s remarks of anger, resentment, and his theory of the “historical commandment to revenge” were intentionally stripped in the translation of his work (Seidman, 6).
An especially relevant example to support Seidman’s argument lies within the discrepancy between how the ending of Wiesel’s traumatic experience is portrayed. In his original Yiddish text, Wiesel closes the manuscript with a paragraph depicting his ghostly reflection in the mirror after surviving the Holocaust: “I saw the image of myself after my death. It was at that instant that the will to live was awakened. Without knowing why, I raised a balled-up fist and smashed the mirror, breaking the image that lived within it. And then - I fainted. From that moment on my health began to improve.” Wiesel ends the book with an unanswered question: “Was it worth breaking that mirror? Was it worth it?” (Seidman, 7) Like the initial French La Nuit of 1958, the most current 144-page English edition of Night translated by Marion Wiesel cuts all Un di Welt’s references to Wiesel’s balledup fist, his rage, and his unanswered question for the more conclusive ending of a defeat memorialized in eternity. In Night, the novel ends: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was
contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (Wiesel, 2006, 120). In this translation, Wiesel is redeemed through his passive memorialization - the reflection that has “never left” him that he lives to pass down for the benefit of future generations, rather than a reflection that he physically destroys in vengeance.
One of the most crucial linguistic elements to dissect in the English Night’s ending is his separation of the reflection in the mirror from the self by alternating the use of third and first-person perspectives to describe his self-image. In Night’s contemporary translation, Wiesel sees the eyes of an unfamiliar man when he looks in the mirror, “his eyes,” which have “never left me,” who is haunted by their reflection. Wiesel’s separation between the “corpse,” with “his eyes” and himself (“me”) through his alternating use of third and first-person pronouns metaphorically shatters the mirror by establishing a difference between his image as a victim and who he is as a survivor. In contrast, in Un di Welt,
Wiesel writes: “I saw the image of myself after my death” before smashing the mirror, directly connecting who he is and who he sees in the mirror with the reflexive first-person “I” to “myself.”
As opposed to the portrayal of this closing scene in the translated Night, Wiesel does not seek to divide who he was in the mirror and who he is through linguistics. Instead, he recognizes that who he is in the mirror is who he will continue to be if he doesn’t take physical action against it. Through her comparison of the two texts, Seidman argues that “there are 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.”
(Seidman, 8). Seidman’s cross-analysis effectively supports her argument, but her idea becomes more contentious for her conception of why Wiesel’s anger was intentionally stripped from Un di Welt. Wiesel was primarily persuaded to translate his story unto the world by the esteemed French novelist and devoted Catholic,
François Mauriac. Mauriac assisted with the manuscript’s initial translation into French, deciding to rename the book to the nowfamous Night and alter the content to “make it appealing to as wide an audience as possible” (Aderet). The Mauriac-assisted French translation of Night formed the basis for its contemporary English edition and the memoir’s adaptation into many other languages.
Naomi Seidman, various scholars, and Elie Wiesel himself have argued that throughout Un Di Velt’s translation, Mauriac made a continuous effort to invoke the image of Christ in the victims of the Holocaust. In the foreword of the English edition of Night that is still on secondary-school syllabuses across the world, Mauriac directly imposes Christ’s figure onto Wiesel in an account of what he supposes he “should have'' told Wiesel earlier in his life: “Did I speak of that other Jew, his brother, who may have resembled himthe Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world?” (Wiesel, 2006, xxi). During his lifetime, Wiesel himself was infuriated by Mauriac’s obsession with this comparison. In his 1978 biography A
Jew Today, Wiesel writes: “I objected to his standard concept of the Jew, whose pain he loved but whose pride and happiness he found disturbing.” In a moment of anguish, Wiesel finally snapped back at Mauriac: “‘There are Christians…who like Jews only on the cross’”(Wiesel, 1978, 16). Mauriac still held on to his view of Wiesel as a Christ figure, who could redeem the world through the retelling of his story and suffering “on the cross” of the Holocaust.
Using anecdotes regarding Elie Wiesel’s tense working relationship with Mauriac, Seidman argues that Mauriac’s view of Wiesel’s story as an allusion to Christ compelled the fundamental changes made in Un di Welt’s translation.
Let us reconsider the final lines of Wiesel’s narrative through Seidman’s lens of Un di Welt’s Christianization. In the Yiddish manuscript, Wiesel takes agency over his appearance through the cathartic destruction of his deformed reflection.
Wiesel’s revitalization through action, rather than memorialization, is entirely in accordance with his previously established views in
Un di Welt on the “historical commandment to revenge” and his unforgiving rage against the Nazis. However, his unforgiving command to seek vengeance would have no place in Mauriac’s scope of Christian theology. The current English version arguably strips Wiesel’s physical autonomy through his entirely passive memorialization of the detached eyes that have “never left” him (Wiesel, 2006, 120). He is thus presented “on the cross,” entirely passive as an eternalized figure in memory. In Yiddish, even after reclaiming his physical autonomy by smashing the mirror, Wiesel asks if it was worth it. Through its erasure of Wiesel’s unforgiving anger, Night arguably responds with a haunting “No.”
In People Love Dead Jews (2021), a quintessential contemporary reflection on the Christianization of Jewish life and literature, Dara Horn analyzes the expectation that has been imposed on Jewish literature to provide an unquestioning, “‘redemptive’” quality (Horn, 73). Horn contends that the popularity of modern Holocaust novels such as The Book Thief and
The Boy in Striped Pajamas can be attributed to their inclusion of more “‘uplifting’” messages (Horn, 80). She writes that contemporary readers insist “that Jewish suffering was only worth examining if it provided” a Christian redemption - “a service to mankind” (Horn, 80). Mauriac’s involvement in Night’s translation to Christianize and market Wiesel’s story for a mainstream, nonJewish audience is a tormenting early example of this phenomenon. Wiesel identified this sentiment early on: he argued that he, like many other Jewish authors, was only liked when he broke his silence to be publicly “on the cross,” living on to passively present his story for the redemption and service of society. This sentiment illustrates the trade-off between authentic rage and passive victimhood, which Wiesel made when he brought his story to the world.
What is More Frustrating Than Silence
After the torture and loss that Wiesel experienced throughout the Holocaust, he took a ten-year oath of silence as a preventative measure against the seemingly inevitable event that his work would be misinterpreted. In an unforgettable section of A Jew Today, Wiesel writes that he had to wait “long enough to unite the language of the man with the silence of the dead” (Wiesel, 1976, 15). Wiesel understood that as a survivor, his role was to testify. However, he was unsure whether his writing would evoke the truth more effectively if he were to “shout or whisper,” to “say it all or hold it all back.” (Wiesel, 1976, 15).
In “Telling the Untellable: Dialectic of Silence in JewishAmerican and Arab-American Holocaust Discourse,” Munir Ahmed Al-Aghberi describes the root of this anxious silence among Holocaust survivors: “Silence in the case of trauma tells about the mental and emotional failure to shape memory into something literally communicable” (Al-Aghberi, 64). “What is
more frustrating [than silence] is the condition when words fail to describe the horror of the Holocaust in the act of retrieving scenes from a wounded psyche” (Al-Aghberi, 65). Al-Aghberi captures the source of the Jewish author’s frustration - the choice between silence or speaking through words that fail to capture the traumatic atrocities retrieved in memory. Naomi Seidman, in connection with Al-Aghberi’s idea, would argue that Wiesel’s translated text did indeed fall to his greatest fear and the fear of many other Holocaust survivors in that they failed to accurately describe his horror and anguish. However, Seidman’s assertion that Elie Wiesel’s effort to create the most perfected, rageful representation of his experience was erased by Mauriac, has not gone entirely uncontested.
Alan Astro, a critic of Seidman’s work, argues that there is a key discrepancy between the argument at the core of Seidman’s “Scandal of Jewish Rage” and the commonly expressed idea that traumatic experiences can be entirely untranslatable. As described by Al-Aghberi, the primary anxiety of the Holocaust survivor is
that words can “fail to represent the horror” (Al-Aghberi, 65). In “Revisiting Wiesel’s Night in Yiddish, French, and English,” Astro argues that “Seidman’s argument, pushed to its limit” would go as far as “reproaching Wiesel for not having translated the untranslatable,” or failing to represent the unrepresentable (Astro, 133). Astro also notes that Seidman’s cynicism lends itself unsurprisingly easily to Holocaust deniers, who frequently “refer to Seidman’s article on their sites or even reproduce it in its entirety” as a means of portraying the Holocaust as textually inconsistent (Astro, 131). Hence, alongside Wiesel’s establishment of his “lack of framework” and Al-Aghberi’s description of how words can often falter, to take Seidman’s critiques of Wiesel’s translations as entirely uncontested and simply factual would be misrepresentative. Silence itself is heavy enough, but reproaching Wiesel for mistranslation could go against the basic condition of Jewish witnessing and all witnessing–namely, that traumatic experience and such visceral human anger can be untranslatable
and even inexpressible. However, Seidman’s insights into the Christianization of Wiesel’s story and the role of Mauriac remain relevant, as the existence of such an article and its surrounding discourse produces a very real manifestation of the fear that Elie Wiesel wrote about: that his words would be twisted or seen as twisted. Although they can be seen to be at odds with each other, Wiesel, Astro, Al-Aghberi and Seidman’s vivid descriptions of the fear that mistranslation will be the result of the breaking of silence are indicative of a psychological anxiety that reaches beyond Holocaust survivors. The fear of misinterpretation that preempts the breaking of silence has affected Jewish witness authors throughout history.
Franz Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” and the Cessation of Silence
Franz Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” a short story published in 1917, can be read as an exceptional allegory for the obstacles to the cessation of silence in Jewish witness authorship. The short story takes the form of a satirized scholarly lecture presented by a man named Red Peter. In his address to the “honored members” of an academic council, Red Peter claims to have transitioned across species from an ape into his current form as a human to escape his oppressive captivity over a five-year period (Kafka, 1983, 250). His transition begins through the mimicry of his human captors’ habits, such as smoking a pipe and drinking alcohol, which amuses them tremendously (Kafka, 1983, 256). One of the major transitional steps in Red Peter’s crossspecies mutation is his newfound use of human language. He recounts how his use of the human language developed from a nervous “‘Hallo!’”, which astonishes his captors, to the fully
articulated presentation of his life story to a council of esteemed scholars that is the “report” (Kafka, 1983, 257). His transition from silence to speaking the language of his captors instantly elevates his status and eventually grants him the full physical form and freedom of a human. However, he claims that he did not initiate his imitation of human traits to gain the unique freedom of humanity which he sees as repulsive, but rather for a simple “way out” of his captivity (Kafka, 1983, 253).
The short story is often read as an allegorical critique of European Jewry’s assimilation into Western society and embrace of Enlightenment values. I argue, moreover, that Red Peter’s account of his deanimalization from ape to academic in Franz Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” offers insights into the Jewish author’s internalized fear of mistranslation and misrepresentation in their path from silent suffering to the verbal announcement of the oppression they faced.
Kafka’s diaries and letters contain many references to his Judaism and Jewish experiences. During his early life, Kafka lived through two extremely violent pogroms by the Czech population (Sokel, 841). In his writing, he frequently recorded the animalizing effect that these atrocities had on him and his family. Throughout the second pogrom, which took place when Kafka was thirtyseven, he wrote to a non-Jewish lover: “Is it not evident that one should leave where one is hated so much? The heroism of staying under these conditions is that of cockroaches in the bathroom one cannot get rid of" (Sokel, 841). In this passage, Kafka directly aligns the violent antisemitism he faced and the desire for an escape with the key motif of metamorphosis and animalization. Red Peter mirrors Kafka’s personal view of his animalized oppressive condition as escapable, but adds what Kafka himself could not say: namely, that he would have to acculturate and adapt to leave where he is “hated so much,” but would never be truly free. Red Peter’s escape, thus, provides a deeply connected yet
infinitely more developed view to that of Kafka’s invincible cockroach. Although Red Peter knows that he must escape the cage, his transmutation through learning the language of his oppressors only sinks him to a lower mental state, which is represented as another form of oppression and hardship. Red Peter’s half-freedom through his use of the twisted language of his oppressors to describe his oppression only brings about more doubts and sorrow. Inside the cage, he is physically trapped, but outside, he is still mentally trapped by the anxiety that the language of his oppressors is insufficient.
The Untranslatable Memories of Kafka’s Ape
While discussing the isolation he experienced while imprisoned by his human captors, Red Peter reports: “Of course what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated” (Kafka, 1983, 253). Red Peter’s fear that his experience of brutal oppression he faced as an ape will be untranslatable into “human terms” draws direct parallels with Wiesel’s experience. Wiesel frequently described his trauma as a force which “transcends language” and would be “impossible to transmit” (Kakutani). Red Peter’s experience provides a parable, not only for the survivors of the Holocaust struggling to tell their stories, but for many modern Jewish writers who have struggled to write about the Jewish experience for a mainstream readership. However, for Kafka, to be truly free was not to write for the
mainstream, but for the self and those who would understand through Yiddish.
Kafka was a strong advocate for the spiritual benefits of Yiddish, despite the embarrassment that it symbolized for many Central European Jews at the time, which he was certainly aware of. In a speech given to a Jewish audience at the Jewish Town Hall in Prague, Kafka makes a striking case for Yiddish that’s nearly as imaginative as the worlds of his stories. He describes the transition to Yiddish as a spiritual metamorphosis: “you will come to feel the true unity of Yiddish, and so strongly that it will frighten you, yet it will not be out of fear of Yiddish but of yourselves” (Anderson, 1989, 266). Kafka also adds that the Yiddish language is essentially untranslatable in its emotions and beauty. He asserts in his speech that the intricacies and character of Yiddish are too important to be “torn to shreds” through translation and “straitjacketed” in the explanations of German (Anderson, 1989, 265266). To Kafka, the language of Yiddish represents an
untranslatable, liberating force in strong conflict with the assimilated self.
Red Peter’s metaphorical description of himself as physically restrained from “reach[ing] back to” the truth of his experience also directly aligns with Kafka’s experience of Yiddish as untranslatable and physically restrained within the “straitjacket” of German. Throughout Kafka’s writing, he uses various bodily gestures and transformations to underscore spiritual and psychological states and conditions. In “Report to an Academy,” the restraint of omnidirectional autonomy is deeply connected to the untranslatability of the Jewish author’s experience. As noted above, Red Peter reports: “although I cannot reach back to the truth of old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated” (Kafka, 1983, 253). The restraint of human language, similar to the “straitjacket” of German, prevents Red Peter from autonomously being able to “reach back to the truth” and express his traumatic experience in its entirety.
However, his indication that there is a possibility of reaching this truth through a direction that he has “indicated” provides a glimmer of hope that a different language or level of freedom would give him the omnidirectional autonomy to express himself within the scope of Kafka’s ideology. Outside of Kafka’s allegorical world, this would be Yiddish, as presented as a spiritually liberating force in his powerful speech. Thus, through the metaphor of Red Peter’s restrained physical directionality, Kafka portrays non-Jewish language as a horrifically tight restraint upon the truth of the untranslatable traumatic Jewish experience.
Human Directionality and Kafka’s Levels of Freedom
In Red Peter’s report, directionality forms a key role in understanding the ape’s central linguistic transformation and autonomy. While describing the sense of liberation he intended to gain from his species transition, Red Peter says: “No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion” (Kafka, 1983, 253-254). Here, a pivotal phrase is “I made no other demand” - implying that this new figurative directionality, “right or left, or in any direction,” would be granted not by himself, but by an external power from whom he would have to demand it. When describing human freedom, he uses the description of a trapeze artist who he sees while waiting to perform as an ape: “they swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air… ‘and that too is human freedom,’ I thought, ‘self-controlled movement.’ What a mockery of holy Mother nature!” (Kafka, 1983, 253). Unlike Red Peter, who must demand
his “to and fro” directionality, the trapeze artists are autonomously able to control their movements. Red Peter mocks their autonomy in “self-controlled movement” directly after describing his timid demand for directionality. Red Peter intentionally differentiates his timid demand for directionality, “right or left” from human autonomy which he rejects. Thus, he demonstrates that he has still not reached full self-controlled freedom despite his new form as a human. Although Red Peter has metamorphosed out of his ape form, he has not been lifted from the captivity of this falsified freedom–the “way out” through human language only continues to restrain his autonomous directionality.
Red Peter’s differentiation between his “way out” and true “freedom” also demonstrates that although he escaped from the cage and left behind his life as an ape, he is still deprived of true freedom within the new human language. Rabbi Dr. Nachum Amsel asserts that this separation between the different forms of freedom is embedded in biblical Hebrew. The lowest form of
freedom, which Red Peter would describe as his “way out,” is Chofesh, which is used in the Torah to describe the cessation of physical labor and torment, but not full spiritual freedom (Amsel, 3). In this state, Red Peter must demand directionality as the Israelites demand it of God, but does not decide it for himself.
Judaism's highest form of freedom is Cherut, which is an eternal, spiritual freedom and the sense of a path forward. On Passover, when the Israelites celebrate freedom from slavery, they experience Chofesh their labor has ceased, but they are still chained in spirit. After the 49 days between Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, when the Jews receive the revelation at Sinai and became a nation, they achieve Cherut, spiritual freedom.
Red Peter demonstrates the existence of a path towards autonomous spiritual freedom and truth as a survivor through his assurance that the “truth of old ape life” will reveal itself “somewhere in the direction I have indicated.” Red Peter, in the typical inconclusive archetype of Jewish storytelling, does not
break free from the tiring dialectic of misery that he expresses within the framing of “Report.” Instead, he uses his time in the report to appease his human audience by asserting that he does not desire a full sense of omnidirectionality. However, his indication that there is a direction from which he could provide the truth provides a glimmer of hope that Red Peter will be able to transmit his traumatic experience through a more accurate means. He has already begun this journey, in a sense, through his authorship; he states that he has “indicated” this direction for himself. He no longer timidly asks to be directed “right or left, or in any direction.” Thus, through Red Peter’s character, Kafka differentiates between the low form of freedom through a “way out” and the full path to accurate freedom of expression through unrestrained, self-directed language.
The Uniquely Bidirectional “Way Out”
To further understand the difference between the spiritual and physical stages of Red Peter’s metamorphosis, it is important to understand why Kafka would ascribe the condition of an unassimilated, oppressed Jew to the undeveloped creature of an ape. Even throughout realist Holocaust literature, the oppressed Jewish form is often portrayed through allegorical animalization. In Night, Wiesel frequently refers to humans as being warped into animals through the brutality of the Holocaust. One of the most famous literary examples of the prominent allegory of animalization is Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, in which the Jews are represented as mice while the Nazis take the form of powerful cats. Spiegelman’s animalistic representation of the oppressed Jew differs from Kafka’s ape because the animalization of his characters remains entirely consistent throughout the series. The Jewish characters are not transformed into their mousehood by the oppression of the Holocaust, nor are they transformed out of it
after escaping. Maus also intentionally depicts the German oppressor as permanently animalized into cats by their oppressive behavior. The animalization of the oppressor through their own oppression is also present in Kafka’s “Report,” but could be easily missed as a brief, unexpounded moment in the narrative. In Naama Harel’s “A Transspecies’ Report to an Academy,” Harel centers on the description of Red Peter’s captors as making grunting, animal noises. Red Peter describes that when they were off work, the humans “hardly spoke but only grunted to each other” (Kafka, 1983, 254). Through this, she notes that the linguistic metamorphosis from animal to human in “Report to an Academy” is “bidirectional.” (Harel, 70).
While in Maus, the oppressors and oppressed are permanently animalized, Harel’s analysis of “Report” adds a layer to the dialectic of the different levels of freedom presented in Kafka’s writing. Through his use of a bidirectional species change, as opposed to the consistent animalization of Maus or the
permanent transition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Harel asserts that in “Report,” Kafka “displaces here the human/animal binary and replaces it with a rainbow of species identities, a broad spectrum of manifestations and roles.” Thus, Kafka displays that there is not only one form of freedom, but rather a broad spectrum. Kafka asserts that Red Peter’s “way out” through language is a low level of freedom - it is, as Rabbi Amsel says, simply the cessation of torment but not the fully autonomous directional freedom he may gain in his indicated path to a higher level of freedom.
The Ascription of Purpose to Pain
Physically tormented by his captivity and mentally tormented by the half-freedom of the human language, Red Peter is met with the existential anxiety that while at his level of passive Chofesh - his “way out,”- his account of his survival will not do justice to the trauma he underwent as an ape. In spite of this anxiety, much like Wiesel, Red Peter still dares to break his silence. Both of these writers’ persistence through this obstacle begs the question of why they feel so compelled to tell their stories as witnesses and survivors. While on his level of superficial freedom, Red Peter ascribes a fittingly superficial justification for his story: “with an effort which up till now has never been repeated I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European. In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity” (Kafka, 1983, 258). This section of “Report” provides a basis for the often-expressed idea that the
short story is an allegory for a Westernized assimilation of the Jew. More importantly, however, it indicates that Red Peter has ascribed a meaning to his suffering, in that he has gained something from it. Despite the pain of his inability to express himself even at the “cultural level of an average European,” he still regards his status as an achievement. Red Peter speaks of his transition in deliberately superlative terms through his use of the phrase “with an effort which up till now has never been repeated,” showing pride in his unique accomplishment of assimilation into European culture from an entirely exterior animalized form.
Through his prideful assertion that there has been a positive outcome from his brutal suffering and wordlessness, Red Peter makes the grave mistake of attempting to impose a justification for his oppression. Red Peter’s boast that he has reached “the cultural level of an average European” represents the final step in his literary assimilation - the rationalization of evil. This key moment also draws direct comparisons to Seidman’s analysis of Mauriac’s
translation of Night as bearing a similarly antagonizing rationalization upon Wiesel’s suffering. Through his Christianized translation, Mauriac imposes the ultimate rationalization upon Wiesel’s traumatic experience - that his passive suffering was for the greater good of all humanity.
To understand why Red Peter and Mauriac’s rationalizations of evil are strictly against the code of Jewish tradition and ethics, I invoke a passage by the Jewish philosopher Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik.
“Judaism does not want man to rationalize evil or to theologize it away. It challenges him to defy evil and, in case of defeat, to give vent to his distress. Both rationalizing and theologizing harden the human heart and make it insensitive to disaster. Man, Judaism says, must act like a human being. He must cry, weep, despair, grieve and mourn as if he could change the cosmic laws by exhibiting these emotions. In times of distress and sorrow, these emotions are noble even though they express the human protest against iniquity in nature and also pose an unanswerable question concerning justice in the world. The Book of Job was not written in vain. Judaism does not tolerate hypocrisy and unnatural
behavior which is contrary to human sensitivity.” (Katz, 7)
Red Peter, unlike Wiesel, “stands over [him]self with a whip”; he forms an immensely tragic representation of the Jewish witness author and entirely internalizes his oppression (Kafka, 1983, 258).
In his state of lowly freedom or “chofesh,” which he calls the “way out,” Red Peter takes the role of rationalizing his experience upon himself and denies himself the right to emotionalize his report in the place of a superficial explanation. Red Peter’s breaking of silence does not defy or question evil. Although he has physically transformed into a man, he does not show any emotion, despair or grief - he intends to make an objective report and, therefore, does not “act like a human being,” as described by Rabbi Soloveitchik.
The unanswerability of Wiesel’s closing question of the Yiddish Un Di Welt, “Was it worth it?” gains a newfound relevance through the lens of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s argument for the “unanswerable question concerning justice in the world.” The
complete erasure of this question in Mauriac’s Christianized Night, furthermore, marks a vital infraction on the morals of Judaism as described by Rabbi Soloveitchik. Similarly, Red Peter flippantly answers the unanswerable question posed by his suffering through his imposition of a superficial meaning upon it. These two positions denote the root of the suffering of the Jewish author–to faithfully protect the unanswerable questions of their suffering from being answered.
Seidman and Kafka, however, also indicate the path for the Jewish witness to authentically transmit their experience with full autonomy over the narrative. The Jewish author must be free not only to be a human being but to truly “act like a human being:” to “cry, weep, despair, grieve and mourn as if [they] could change the cosmic laws by exhibiting these emotions.” Their emotional experience must not be obscured, altered, or rationalized but brought to the surface in its full truth. However, within their break of silence, Wiesel and Red Peter must both face a timelessly tragic
compromise. They can either retain the truth by maintaining full emotional freedom in their narrative, or abandon their grievances to become a passive Jewish victim whom the world will embrace.
Works Cited
Aderet, Ofer. “Elie Wiesel’s Wrenching Lost Version of ‘Night’ Was Scathing Indictment of God and Fellow Jews.” The Forward, 3 Aug, 2016, https://forward.com/culture/344169/elie-wieselswrenching-lost-version-of-night-was-scathing-indictmentof-god/. Accessed 25 Feb 2024.
Al-Aghberi, Munir Ahmed. “Telling the Untellable: Dialectic of Silence in Jewish-American and Arab-American Holocaust Discourse.” Journal of Language Teaching, Linguistics, and Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61-69, https://doi.org/10.17576/3l-2015-2101-06. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.
Amsel, Nachum. “Choices and Freedom.” Accessed April 7, 2024. https://www.academia.edu/63367309/CHOICES_AND_FR EEDOM.
Anderson, Mark. Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle. Schocken Books, 1989.
Astro, Alan. “Revisiting Wiesel’s Night in Yiddish, French, and English.” Partial Answers, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 127–53, https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2014.0012.
Danks, Carol. “Using the Literature of Elie Wiesel and Selected Poetry to Teach the Holocaust in the Secondary School History Classroom.” The Social Studies (Philadelphia, PA: 1934), vol. 87, no. 3, 1996, pp. 101–05, https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.1996.9958422.
Donadio, Rachel. “The Story of ‘Night.’” The New York Times, January 20, 2008, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Donad io-t.html.
Harel, Naama. “A Transspecies’ Report to an Academy.” Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier, University of Michigan Press, 2020, pp. 49–78. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11325807.6.
Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Norton, 2021.
Kafka, Franz, and Nahum N. (Nahum Norbert) Glatzer. Complete Stories. Centennial ed., Schocken Books, 1983.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Wiesel: No Answers, Only Questions.” The New York Times, April 7, 1981, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/07/books/wiesel-noanswers-only-questions.html.
Katz, Matthew Mordecai. “Jewish Death in Jewish Time: The
Ontological Shift Required to Understand Torah Judaism’s Indigenous Approach to Historical Trauma and Historical Memory.” Religions (Basel, Switzerland ), vol. 13, no. 12, 2022, pp. 1144-, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13121144.
Kelber, Werner H. Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory: Collected Essays of Werner H. Kelber, Society of
Biblical Literature, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docI D=3118296.
Seidman, Naomi. “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 1996, pp. 1–19.
Sokel, Walter H. “Kafka as a Jew.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 4, 1999, pp. 837–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057574. Accessed 26 Feb. 2024.
Spiegelman, Art., et al. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Penguin, 2003.
Wiesel, Elie, and Marion Wiesel. Night. Hill and Wang, 2006.
Wiesel, Elie. A Jew Today. Elirion Associates, 1978.