Elie Wiesel’s Apocalyptic Prophecies (Part 1/3)

The following is an article, based on two tapes of Elie Wiesel in Yiddish on WEVD, that Zach wrote in 2024 but was never published. Due to the length of the article, this is going to be serialized. This is part 1 of 3.

Elie Wiesel’s Apocalyptic Prophecies

“I suddenly get the feeling that the world is coming to an end. 

It’s readying itself for another Holocaust. Perhaps not a Holocaust of Jews. Probably not a Holocaust of Jews.

If there will be another Holocaust, it will be a Holocaust directed against all of humanity, maybe as punishment for the horrific crimes humanity has perpetrated against the Jewish people.”

When Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), a Holocaust survivor, the author of the Holocaust memoir Night, Forverts contributor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, gave this apocalyptic prediction in 1976, it was probably not intended for a broad audience. 

Wiesel made this pronouncement in Yiddish in the second of two interviews on the Forverts’ radio station WEVD, on the radio show “Interviews with Yiddish Personalities.” Simon Weber (1911-1987), the editor of the Forverts and the man who hired Wiesel as a freelance journalist when he first came to the United States in 1956, interviewed him.

This was at a point in history when Yiddish was no longer the spoken language of the masses of American Jews. Perhaps he felt that he could freely express some of his innermost thoughts, including his burning rage and desire for vengeance against a world that was silent during the Holocaust. It was also a time when the threat of war in the Middle East and the specter of nuclear annihilation were very real; the means for this apocalyptic vision were readily at hand. (Wiesel spoke about this in English in 1972).

The scholar Naomi Seidman noticed a dichotomy between the vengeance-minded Elie Wiesel in Yiddish and his solemn moral voice in non-Jewish languages, when she compared the English and French versions of Night with his Yiddish original Un di velt hot geshvign (And The World Remained Silent.) As an example, in Yiddish, Wiesel derides Jews after the Holocaust for their “frivolous dereliction of the obligation” to take their rightful revenge against Germans by committing a much weaker form of revenge: raping German women. In the French version, published in 1958, Jews look to go to the city and sleep with girls. 

According to Joseph Borger’s biography “Elie Wiesel, Confronting the Silence,” Seidman claims that a public-facing presentation of suffering without blaming “German murderers,” as Wiesel does in his dedication to his Yiddish book, erases Jewish rage. Yiddish literature scholar Ruth Wisse remembers Wiesel being pained by Seidman’s characterization, saying that it was important for Wiesel to be able to get his message out even if he had to adapt it to the world — otherwise how could he expect people to read it? How else could the world learn to take the Holocaust seriously?
  
But in these Yiddish interviews, recorded more than two decades after he published Night, he could still express his deepest fears, his disdain for his critics, his theories of history, his dreams for Jewish mass movements, his profound appreciation for his students at City College New York — and yes, his interest in vengeance.

Tapes of the interviews were digitized, transcribed and translated a few years ago. They shed light onto how Wiesel really thought about Israel, world Jewry and the future of Jews in the United States — which are as active issues now as they were nearly 50 years ago.

First steps in America

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet in 1928, a town in the Carpathian Mountains in what was then Hungary but is today Romania. He grew up learning Torah, Hasidic tales from his grandfather Reb Dovid Feyg and Hebrew literature. Wiesel would never fully get to live out his childhood, something that would haunt him into adulthood.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Polish-Jewish refugees began streaming in, talking about Nazi abuses and killings. They eventually occupied Hungary in 1944, and the residents of Sighet were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Young Elie and his father Shlomo were selected to stay in the labor sections of the camp and not be sent to the instant death of the furnace.

Wiesel, as he documented in Night, lived through no end of horrors. He and his father kept each other’s spirits going, but they were subjected to death marches and slave labor, and eventually his father fell victim to a concentration camp guard striking him dead. When Wiesel was rescued by American liberators, he could barely recognize himself in the mirror. “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me,” he wrote.

General Charles de Gaulle extended an offer for orphans like him to live in Paris, which Wiesel accepted. At an orphanage, he returned to some of the religious practices that he had lost, and met his two older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, who survived. (His younger sister Tzipora perished along with his mother Sarah.) He later learned French, studied at the Sorbonne and then took on a job at the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun’s “Zion in Kampf” newspaper in 1948, where he was offered work translating Hebrew articles into Yiddish. Wiesel then took up work in Hebrew with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and published Night in Yiddish while on assignment in South America.

“It was at a Purim party at a Yiddish writer’s house,” Weber recalled in one of the interviews, “when Elie Wiesel had just arrived from Europe to New York to be a correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth.” Simon Weber brought him into the Forverts as a freelance writer, which he worked at in addition to his work at the Israeli paper and freelance work at the more obscure Yiddish newspaper, Der Amerikaner. Weber was the third-ranking employee at that time, in charge of the newsroom, behind editor-in-chief Hillel Rogoff and his assistant Lazer Fogelman.

Wiesel expressed his gratitude in turn, saying that he was living in conditions of “near-hunger” before being picked up by the Forverts. According to Weber’s daughter, Lillian Weber Silver, this was no exaggeration. “Not only did my father hire him and keep him from near starvation, but I met him, and I knew him because they brought him to our home, our apartment in Brooklyn,” she said. “My mother, I think she saw him as a waif. He was so thin and drawn. He was always thin for his whole life, but especially when he first came to this country.”

Wiesel would go on to write two serialized books in Yiddish in the paper, later translated into English as “Dawn,” a fictional story about a Holocaust survivor in Mandatory Palestine, and “Day,” an autobiographical story about being injured by a taxicab in New York. He serialized Night in the paper as well. Night, Dawn and Day would be the only books Wiesel would write in Yiddish. 

His next 54 books would mostly be written in French, despite Wiesel’s life in the United States and his capable English. His wife Marion translated all of his French books to English. Wiesel kept up his French for the rest of his life as a symbol of his loyalty to the country that accepted him after he left his displaced persons camp.

Weber complained about this in one of the interviews, repeatedly asking Wiesel to come back to journalism and come back to Yiddish. History scholar David Fishman said that he contributed there until the Algemeiner was founded in 1972, where he joined its advisory board and wrote for them. Between Weber and Wiesel, “there could have been a little bit of bad blood.”

At least during the interviews, there seemed to be no obvious outward resentment, but Weber blurted out some odd statements. One example: Weber commented about how much further Wiesel had progressed in his career than him, and also that he was delighted that Wiesel didn’t resent him despite the fact that he did Wiesel a favor by bringing him in. “Despite the fact that I did him a favor back then, we’ve stayed friends, which I say because there’s this kind of hatefulness out there that we see with people, where they say that ‘he didn’t do me any favor and he’s my enemy.’”

Later on, they stopped talking to each other. Silver remembered her father telling her in 1986, when Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize, why he no longer spoke to Wiesel: “He became too big for me. He liked to namedrop.”  
This wouldn’t be Wiesel’s only conflict with the Forverts over the years. Weber was close with Nobel Literature Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who feuded with Wiesel the entire time they knew each other. Singer charged that what Wiesel wrote was not, in fact, literature, a claim which Wiesel took serious offense to.

(to be continued)