I own a paperback copy of Elie Wiesel’s Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends. It sits on my library shelf next to many other books he authored. But this book is wrapped in order to protect the inscription on the first page; the cover is partly detached, and worn.
I first met Elie Wiesel when I was in my early twenties. I had just completed my M.A. on the American Jewish community’s post-war response to the Holocaust and started a new project: studying the work of Ferdinand Isserman, a Reform rabbi who had written about the condition of Jews in Eastern Europe during the 1930s.
Isserman published a number of detailed and passionate texts about the horrors Jews were facing in Germany and Poland. But when he was first presented with the reality of the Final Solution during the 1940s, Isserman did not write about the fate of Europe’s Jews. His sermons did not touch on what was happening; he published no pamphlets. Here was a rabbi who had publicly agitated about the persecution and oppression of Europe’s Jews; why had he found no words for the attempted genocide of his people? His silence was shocking.
That year, Wiesel was speaking in Chicago, the city of my youth, and my husband, Ralf, and I drove up from Missouri to hear his lecture. I do not know how it happened, but my father got an essay I’d written on Rabbi Isserman to Wiesel and arranged for us to meet.
Ralf and I went together and I discovered, to my surprise, that Wiesel had actually read my essay. We talked about the difference between faith and hope. At that point of his life, he told us, he could subscribe to the latter, but was not sure he possessed the former. We spoke about anger – even rage. Wiesel quietly admitted to both. After the Shoah, he said, he was only certain of hope. He signed my book: “For Ralf and Barbara, as always with hope – Elie Wiesel.”
Over the years, we corresponded a few times. But eventually, I stopped writing. I became a young mother. I left academe for a time, and began working as a journalist.
In 1997, when our young son, Erik, was five, Wiesel came to Charlotte. The Charlotte Observer asked me to cover his lecture and write an editorial piece for the Viewpoint page. After the lecture, the audience dispersed and Wiesel took questions from the press.
The lecture had been titled “Against Indifference.” As Wiesel has famously said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
I do not remember the exact shape of my question. I self-consciously avoided recalling our one-time meeting – it had happened well over a decade earlier, after all, and it seemed artificial to bring it up. My question did use both the words “hope” and “faith.” I asked whether one could lay claim to either, given humanity’s capacity for indifference.
Elie Wiesel looked straight at me. He quietly stated that hope was essential despite the Shoah. Then he added firmly, “and I am still angry.”
I was stunned. I had not used the word “angry.” I had not referred to that part of our conversation.
When I had the opportunity to speak to him for a few moments alone after the press conference, I discovered that I wasn’t imagining it; he had remembered the Chicago meeting. It was as if we were merely continuing our conversation.
Toward the end of our few minutes, I mentioned that Ralf and I had had a son. He wanted to see a picture of Erik. He asked questions about him. (And later, Erik wrote to Wiesel himself – and was answered.)
In recent years, I have not always inhabited the same political space as Elie Wiesel. I could not support his every statement about Israel. I tried to hear him and listen as best I could. Sometimes, it was difficult.
Wiesel’s books line my shelves. There is a depth and richness in them that cannot be gainsaid. They reflect traditions that are a visceral part of my own existence. They ask essential questions. They nourish me, remind me, and console me.
And so, as always, I hope. In part, I thank Elie Wiesel for that.
