IN THE EARLY SIXTIES in New York, a young Jewish writer telephoned, asking for an appointment—just to talk, to get acquainted. Specifically, he wanted my advice about a manuscript. I must admit, this appeal left me perplexed. And flattered. It was the first time such a thing had happened. As a foreign correspondent for an Israeli daily at the United Nations, my world was diplomacy, journalism; the huge and enviable literary establishment was foreign to me. I knew virtually no one in it, and the others didn’t even know they didn’t know me.
The next day I received a visit from Daniel Stern and read the manuscript of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die.
We became friends. And our friendship, through the years, has deepened.
A talented novelist, a learned and inspired teacher, a passionate lover of music as well as of literature, a brilliant raconteur overflowing with imagination and humor: to listen to Daniel is to discover a companion, an ally.
He is interested in everything, his curiosity remains insatiable. He has tried most things in his life, and remembers them all. Manhattan and Los Angeles, Venice and Paris, Jerusalem and the Bronx: fascinated, the reader follows him, asking question after question. Haunted by the last half-century’s great dramas and hence by those of the present, Stern’s fictional universe is so familiar to us that it frequently echoes our own anxieties, our own nostalgias.
As for the novel which has just been republished, I loved it when it first appeared, I love it still. I believe it stands among the best of the genre. Yet it raises a problem. More exactly: it is not the novel, but the subject or the genre itself which becomes a pitfall. Explicitly: is this a work of fiction about what for lack of a better name we so inadequately call the tragedy of the Holocaust? And if it is, doesn’t such a book contradict everything some of us believe about the death-camp experience and its possibilities of transmission other than by memory?
These are not new questions. They trouble all of us who, without denying the novel’s intrinsic worth, seek to protect our loyalty to memory. If it is difficult to describe a night, a selection at Auschwitz, to imagine such things is impossible. A novel about Birkenau is either a novel or it is about Birkenau, but not both at once. Indeed I must repeat here what I have been saying for years: the more a novel on this subject is a “good novel,” the less it is the truth. By definition, Auschwitz denies art and places itself beyond language. To put it simply: it was less difficult for a prisoner there to imagine himself free than for a free man anywhere to imagine himself there. Hence the challenge no novelist can avoid if he takes the Holocaust as his theme: his endeavor is doomed to failure from the start.
And yet there is Daniel Stern.
His novel has been misunderstood, misinterpreted. It does not take place there, but here. Its problematics are not those of Belsen, but of the theater. In other words, the author is not telling an Auschwitz story; he knows that such a story remains beyond words. Just as Andre Schwartz-Bart’s powerful novel The Last of the Just deals in the main with the life leading up to the Holocaust, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die tells a story which unfolds afterwards.
Having survived, how do you live, how do you love, how do you make a home and a career, reinvent reasons to believe in art, in the necessity and the very possibility of recreating a vanished world in what seems to you no more than a stage-set? Here, too, people decide “who will live, who will die,” except that in these corridors and offices, it is a different life and different deaths that are involved.
What is the concern of this tale? An impossible romantic love? Ambitions too commonplace to last? Power, perhaps? Or how the past weighs on consciousness?
In such a novel, a great deal of history and the dramatic arts, politics and theology is discussed; there is a constant oscillation between entertainment and remorse; people meet, separate, drink and despair. The minor characters are numerous: wives, friends, employers. The author knows Chekhov to his fingertips: no part is supernumerary, no role is uncalled-for.
But the two central characters are Judah Kramer and Carl Walkowitz. They are living in a tale all their own, in a time which isolates them from the rest of society. Whether they argue or merely observe, whether they seek to do each other harm or simply to leap back into the abyss that had spewed them forth, they manage to make of their encounter a moving human dialogue in which all the tensions setting the survivors at odds with others, and with themselves, find a dark and decisive literary expression. As soon as they appear on the page, we realize they are there, alone or together, to remind us that the truth is elsewhere, always elsewhere.
I should say, then, that it is because this novel is not strictly speaking about the Holocaust that it is successful. And just as Jud cannot forget Walkowitz, you will not forget Jud.
And this is so because Daniel Stern carries within himself the burning memories of others.
ELIE WIESEL
translated from the French
by Richard Howard