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All Rivers Run To The Sea
by Elie Wiesel
Knopf
reviewed by Ron Hogan
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reviewed by Ron Hogan
It could be argued, that Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel has been writing his memoirs for almost forty years. He is probably best known for Night, his recounting of the experiences that he went through in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But throughout his career as a journalist and novelist, he has reflected upon the Jewish experience throughout history. Whether writing plays in which contemporary Jews argue about the necessity of faith, recounting legends of Hasidic masters, or preparing a haggadah for the celebration of Passover, Wiesel constantly struggles to keep the memory of Judaism's cultural legacy alive -- because to preserve the memories is to preserve the legacy itself.
All Rivers Run to the Sea is the first book, however, that places the events of his life into a comprehensive perspective. Covering the years from his childhood in a Carpathian village to reporting of the Six Day War in 1967, Wiesel constantly grapples with his Jewish identity in the cultural, political, and religious senses. For example, we learn of his adolescent apprenticeship in the mystic traditions of Kabbalism, and of the nearly fatal rituals he performed hoping to hasten the arrival of the Messiah to thwart the Nazis. And he discusses the great crisis of faith that he experiences while attempting to reconcile the existence of God with the horrors of the Holocaust. In a brief but compelling digression on "God's Suffering," Wiesel proposes:
"The barbed wire kingdom will forever remain an immense question mark on the scale of both humanity and its Creator. Faced with unprecedented suffering and agony, He should have intervened, or at least expressed Himself. Which side was He on? Isn't He the Father of us all? It is in this capacity that He shatters our shell and moves us. How can we fail to pity a father who witnesses the massacre of his children by his other children? Is there a suffering more devastating, a remorse more bitter?"On the political front, there is the story of Wiesel's involvement with the Israeli undergound in the late '40s. Winding up in France after the war, he remained unsure of what he wanted to do for some time, until he stumbled across a Yiddish-language newspaper published by one of the many Jewish resistance movements. He contacted the editors of the paper and soon began working for them, translating Hebrew news stories from the Holy Land into Yiddish. When the nation of Israel was granted sovereignty in 1948, and the underground no longer had to remain hidden, Wiesel secured a job as a foreign correspondent for a prominent Israeli newspaper. The position brought him into close contact with many of Europe's prominent Jewish leaders (as well as with Israeli prime ministers when he covered their European visits), and with a number of unusual people who may or may not have been agents of the Mossad. He
presents these encounters in a clear, levelheaded tone -- one that accurately reflects the agitated state of his mind when dealing with potential espionage without being overly melodramatic.
Wiesel's concerns with the suffering of modern Jews is, of course, not overlooked. He does not repeat the stories that he has already presented in his earlier work, but he forces the reader to consider many difficult questions about the Holocaust. Why did the Allies, and many Jewish leaders, allow the Final Solution to continue? Why, after the war, did the Allies subject the camp survivors to conditions so appalling that President Truman was moved to remark that it seemed as if they were endorsing the German policies towards the Jews? And why did many of the Jews who did not go through the experiences of the camps shun those Jews who did? Wiesel also discusses his involvement in the cause of Soviet Jews who wished to practice their faith in an atheistic, communist country -- an involvement that led to trouble with the KGB during his second trip to the USSR.
Most importantly, however, the memoirs are filled with the honesty of human experience -- such as Wiesel's bumbling experiences with women throughout most of his years in France as he tries to reconcile his devout religious commitments with his physical appetites (and his passionate affair with a young American artist), or his slow and painful recovery from an automobile accident in New York City, which eventually leads to his decision to apply for American citizenship. There is also the inherent factor of sadness that comes in reflecting upon one's experience late in life. Many times Wiesel breaks away from the chronological flow of his memories to note the death, decades later, of a person that he has just described. Then, too, there are the ghosts of his parents and his younger sister, victims of the camps, ghosts that continue to haunt his dreams, fifty years later.
