Elie Wiesel. Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 432, including 16 pages of photographs. ISBN 0-679-43916-1. Paperback $15.00.

As with all his works, Wiesel’s Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea translates the personal into the universal. The personal is what his memoirs are about, and the universal, indicated by the subtitle of this engaging work, is what preoccupies Wiesel always. Let us begin with the personal.
In perfect storytelling style, Wiesel frames his memoirs with two revealing dream states. He begins with the first: “Last night I saw my father in a dream.” Of course, this is no ordinary dream (if dreams can indeed be ordinary), but a dream that relates volumes about Wiesel’s life and its ever-present themes: for during World War II it was with his father that, as a young Jewish boy, he endured the horrific life of the concentration camp. When the women were separated from the men, Wiesel’s mother and his three sisters were sent elsewhere.

The second dream state describes his wedding day in the Old City of Jerusalem, and brings his memoirs to a close. Contrary to what might be expected of a happy groom, Wiesel retreats in tears to a silent reverie. Silent, so as not to disturb the other guests at the wedding festival. And a reverie, so as to somehow include his parents and baby sister, all now absent, because they were murdered in the Nazi death ovens.

Between these two dream states, between seeing his father in a dream and a silent reverie where he desperately tries to include his full family in his wedding, between this framing that is characteristic of so much of his storytelling, Wiesel tells of his childhood in Sighet, where, surrounded by his family, he immersed himself in Jewish tradition, but also began experimenting with more mystic lines of thought. He tells of the cursed day, March 19, 1944, when his childhood ceased, as an unspeakable darkness fell upon the Jewish community. He tells of traveling in cattle cars, of the separation of families and the exploitation of humans by other humans, of his father’s faithful vigil for his son, and of being driven away from his father’s side as he lay dying. Wiesel describes long periods of loneliness after he left the death camp, and describes finally being reunited with his two older sisters. He recounts being on his own and of being homeless, without even a country. For a time he stayed in Paris, choosing journalism for his career, and tells of his travels to Jerusalem, New York, and many other places. He tells of writing, of making friends, and of years of poverty as he tried to establish himself, both in his professional career and in his personal life. Wiesel has met with some of the world’s most prominent dignitaries; and he has always sought to nurture freedom, despite the fact that life’s joys—at least for him—are always touched with a deep sadness, rooted in his childhood experience in the death camp with his dying father.

It is his father who troubles his dreams: the father, to whom he became yoked in the death camp; the father, who was closest to him through the darkest chapter of his life’s story, but who eventually died and left him alone; the father, whom he never felt he quite knew. There is also another “Being” who troubles his waking thoughts; that Being, who, through the teachings of his faith, he calls “God.” So troubled is he as he tries to square his faith with the human condition and come to terms with the past, that Wiesel, of necessity, must translate his life’s story into universal themes.

Evident in the quote he uses as the subtitle of his Memoirs, these universal themes take the form of a question: How could God, during the Holocaust, remain silent and watch the senseless death of six million human beings? How, indeed?

The background for this question is formulated in the words, “All rivers run to the sea,” a quote taken from Ecclesiastes. Like the Hebrew sage who wrote Ecclesiastes (or, as it is written in the Hebrew, “Koheleth,” often translated as “The Preacher,” and used as a proper name), Wiesel’s keen observations on life leave him baffled. Like Koheleth, he observes that, “All rivers run to the sea — yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Like Koheleth also, he makes a wide investigation of life, as he leads the reader from the misery he experienced as a young Jewish boy, caught in the wake of the Nazi terror, to the honors he has experienced in his mature life, such the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize (only one among many awards). And, like Koheleth, he still remains baffled, for the specter of death is never far from him.

The fuller quote from Ecclesiastes appears on the flyleaf of the book, but not as a pessimistic reminder that life always ends with death. Rather, the quote appears as a question to be pondered by those inclined to think upon life’s many contradictions. Those contradictions are best expressed by Wiesel’s primary question: How could God, in all His mercy, allow the Holocaust? Steeped in the Jewish tradition, Wiesel makes it clear that he will never renounce his “faith in God”; but he makes clear also that he “will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God” (italics mine). Between his faith, on the one hand, and his rebellion, on the other, Wiesel finds no satisfying answer.

What he does find is that pious, storytelling wisdom, characteristic of the Hasidim, that makes his Memoirs read like a novel. Not at all light reading, nor ever intended for the uninitiated, Wiesel’s memoirs display the craft of a superb storyteller who, with unvarnished truthfulness, humility, and an awful awareness, is able to translate a personal story into a universal language. Wiesel’s work is intended for those of us who, like Wiesel himself and Koheleth before him, have made a wide investigation of life’s contradictions, and who have repeatedly come back puzzled about humanity’s inhumanity. Wiesel speaks to those of us who dare to look deeply into history’s darkest hours in search of a little light; or to those of us who — again like Wiesel — in a dream-like reverie, when emotions of sadness and joy surprisingly mingle, allow Thought, ever ready (as Buber would say) with its many questions, to “hurtle down deep pathways, wander through invisible cemeteries, both seeking and fleeing solitude and receiving stories already told and those . . . yet to be told.” What other wonderful stories might yet come from his prolific pen!

Lois J. Parker
Counseling and Testing Center, UNR