Phylacteries as Metaphor in Elie Wiesel's Le Testament d'un poète juif assassiné

The novels of the Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, were initially read as eloquent expressions of remembrance and witnessing to the massacred millions who perished in Hitler's Inferno. His fiction is likewise a profound expression of Jewishness and of the author's fundamental belief that post-Auschwitz Jewry must draw nearer to its authentic roots. To that end, Wiesel' s novel, Le Testament d'un poete juif assassine, represents the author's most compelling expression concerning Jewish identity. The novel is replete with the language, symbols and meta-structural techniques which elicit an exhortation to remain faithful to one's Jewishness. Moreover, Wiesel provides the reader a single, subtle metaphoric mise-en-abyme which gathers together all the signs and symbols of Jewishness: the protagonist's phylacteries. This paper will explore the importance of the phylacteries as metaphor as well as analyzing the manner in which they serve as a fil conducteur, linking the novel's various narrative levels and providing the structural cement and symbolic matrix to unify the text. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss2/10 Phylacteries as Metaphor in Elie Wiesel's Le Testament d'un pate juif assassins Simon P. Sibelman University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh The novels of the Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, were initially read as eloquent expressions of remembrance and witnessing to the massacred millions who perished in Hitler's inferno. Wiesel has himself stated, however, that his writing is an attempt to rediscover the boy he happened to be, the profoundly religious yeshiva boher (Jewish student of religious texts) whose God and world were rent asunder by the events of the Holocaust. Each novel is likewise replete with the language, symbols, and meta-structural techniques firmly placing his oeuvre in both the universal and Jewish traditions of lamentation literature. I would argue, moreover, that Wiesel' s novels and entire literary universe are also profound expressions of Jewishness and of the author's fundamental belief that post-Auschwitz Jewry must draw nearer to its authentic roots and affirm a personal commitment to Jewishness/Judaism and not simply to membership in the Jewish people. In his slim volume, On Jewish Learning, Franz Rosenzweig sought to define this notion of Jewishness in the following manner: what we mean by Judaism, the Jewishness of the Jewish human being, is nothing that can be grasped in a "religious literature" or even in a "religious life"; nor can it be "entered as one's creed" in the civil registry ofbirths, marriages and deaths.... It is only livedand perhaps not even that. One is it. (57-58) Jewishness could only be comprehended from within the Jewish condition and by actively living and directly practicing a Jewish life. One ought not infer from such an interpretation that Jewishness must of necessity be equated with a strict adherence to orthodox Judaism and the rigorous, 1 Sibelman: Phylacteries as Metaphor in Elie Wiesel's Le Testament d'un poete Published by New Prairie Press 268 STCL, Volume 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1994) logical minutiae of Divine and rabbinic laws governing all aspects of life. For Rosenzweig, and by extension I would propose for Wiesel as well, Jewishness is a recognition of one's moral and ethical responsibilities to all of God's creation. Moreover, Jewishness signifies an identification with the Jewish people, its history, culture, and traditions. As Wiesel has stated in Sages and Dreamers: Whoever does not accept Jewish history in its entirety is not Jewish; whoever wishes to identify with one period, one tradition, one burden, or one privilege cannot be Jewish. To accept Judaism means to accept oneself within the totality of Judaism . . . . And whoever is unwilling to accept all of it stays outside. (169-70) More precisely, Jewishness means being a witness to God's presence in this world and to His moral mission as evidenced in the richly variegated and frequently tragic history of Israel. This exhortation to remain faithful to one's Jewishness achieves its most complete and compelling treatment in Wiesel's 1980 novel, Le Testament d'un pate juif assassins. In this novel, Wiesel returns to the world of Soviet Jewry, first visited in the mid-1960s, that had provoked his journalistic study cum temoignage, Les fulls du silence (The Jews ofSilence). The novel attempts to present the struggle of these Jews for survival as a religious community and a "nationality" within the Soviet state. Wiesel also examines the betrayed hopes of those Jews who had placed such faith in the utopian socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution. His protagonist, Paltiel Kossover, represents one of those Jews. The scope of his life represents a broad image ofthe young idealistic Jewish radicals whose yearnings for justice and equality catapulted them into the revolutionary movements that raged across Europe from 1900 until the Second World War. More than a revolutionary, Paltiel is also represented as a Yiddish poet whose work found some considerable success in the USSR after the War. Wiesel established in this fictional characterization a composite figure for those twenty-four leading Jewish poets and intellectuals who were executed by the NKVD on Stalin's orders on the night of 12 August 1952. More than a mere symbol of those murdered poets, Paltiel symbolizes the difficulty for any Soviet Jew to maintain an authentic Jewish identity in a state that seeks, at best, to minimize one's existence. Paltiel's struggle is eventually transmitted in his testament, a unique confession written while in prison and destined for eyes other than those of his NKVD inquisitors. Paltiel's testament was meant for his son, Grisha. The document is the father's method of conveying the essence of his own failure in life to his only heir: 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 18, Iss. 2 [1994], Art. 10 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss2/10 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1354