Holiness Elie Wiesel – The Rules of the Game

It begins in a world now gone, the borders of Ruthenia, Bukovina and Galicia, these countries lost names that were the glory of the Habsburg Empire in along with Judaism in Europe – and which nothing remains, 70 years later, as palaces in ruins, empty baroque churches and synagogues never raised

in this lost world, its depopulated. Jews and of his works, one of the last witnesses has died.

his name Elie Wiesel.

It has gone through many more years than the people removed from . his brothers

But this deletion, he had his second birth – their humble destinies shaped darkness and flames, he devoted his life to, trembling, the book of a resurrection.

Because that’s what I take from the life of the author of the Night and Celebration Hasidic .

He was able to attend the greatest of the great of this world.

It may have very early this immense glory, worldwide, as a lasting iconic than a Yehudi Menuhin.

what I remember, yes, it is that he never ceased to be what yehudi , that little Jew, this survivor whose heart beat, sudden too strong when he was going through customs at airports in New York or Paris.

and what I remember is that it is assigned a task, only one, not together adamant that task was, during his lifetime, with the only resource of its language, and again, not his mother tongue, the other, his orphanage language, language learned, at fifteen, in the relief Works deported children, this French language so foreign and that there was another violin, this task, therefore, was to become the living tomb, cenotaph, beggars Sighet ghetto Hassidim the clown clumsiness, or such neighbor Läger reciting before the silence of God, the kaddish for his own death – so many tiny lives, parties ash and smoke, turned up in dust or in memory without consistency, and he would do without him, no trace no one famous.

I do not know if Elie Wiesel was a ‘great’ writer.

I am convinced he was thinking, too, as my other friend, Benny Levy, a Jew of his kind had not come to the world to “do” of literature.

And his work has, indeed, neither the unreachable sublimity of that of Kafka, neither paradoxical overkill Proust nor, perhaps, the laconic Celan noting grace, their common country, that we are not meeting as books and men.

But it is one of the few to have – that is certain – says the unsayable camps

he shares with Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz. – there had it so many others? – The terrible privilege of seeing six million shadows lean against her tiny frame and thus find an almost imperceptible place in the great book of the dead in this world

And if it has one. another merit is to have made sure that in his work as later in the heads of those it will be able to inspire, the dark memory of this exception was that the Holocaust does not exclude, but requires the ardent solidarity with all the victims of all genocides.

I remember him in 1979 to the border of Cambodia where I meet for the first time, with its wick still such a wing then very dark, floating above her beautiful emaciated head: it is the first I’ve heard theorize on the dark imbecility proponents of victimhood competition already demanding that everyone chooses their dead – Jews or Khmers martyrs … such as genocide or another …

I see him again, seven years later, in Oslo where I accompanied receive the Nobel he so desired: I find the dark, suddenly; inexplicably anxious; and in his look which, sometimes, say joy, gaiety, moist Verlaine spark of the eternal child sparkling intelligence and malice or, sometimes, on the contrary, and a second to the next, the infinite sadness of one who has seen too much and never recovered to have witnessed the worst of what man can do to man, that is, clearly, sadness prevails; “Nobel” breath he … I’ll henceforth “a” Nobel … but there is a title that is worth, is not it … it’s Rebbe which means master … and I know I’m not a … I know I’m not, and never will be, the student of the Rebbe …

And François Mitterrand … the day of his latest encounter with the sphinx, the Machiavelli of the Elysee … icons speak to icons … the Sighet villagers, with the bourgeois des Charentes … They shared a lot … perhaps they are a little loved … He had the feeling to find, the more power, something the smoothness and the cassock of the language of the other Francois Mauriac, who had dubbed the camp and return with whom he feels to have worked well, at the time, to reduce the millennium misunderstanding between Jews and Christians. But there. It includes, in quick succession, the Prince Marist has quietly gone golfing the day his grognard Bérégovoy committed suicide and he continued, until the last day to see and protect the donor from Bousquet Jews … Has he been betrayed, he thinks so? Duped? Possesses ? What was it stuffing the turkey? He knew the court Jews. Here we have the sacred Jewish official. What does he recalled the chilling maxim Treaty Father: “do not worry about the power”? They knew that official Jew, always a lure and a trap …

The size of Elie Wiesel, in truth, was to be remained to the end, and in all circumstances, the one of those little Jews he thought they were the crown of humanity.

his vast greatness, nobility, were to have never forgotten the lesson of the Rebbe Wishnitz requiring him, even and especially when he had taken the beautiful coat of litterateur, never lose sight that was responsible for his brothers in caftan and fur hat who wanted to be beautiful as the Polish nobles who pogromisaient them.

and I do not think he spent a day of his long life of famous great intellectual and celebrated rookie honors and pomp, viewed annually by the Clinton, Bush and Obama others, without crashing , at least one hour before a page of Talmud or Zohar knowing he was going to, first, understand nothing, there use the powers of his mind and his body – but there was the price for the only real celebration.

So we had to Sighet when we thought the day would come the Messiah.

So when do we, today, we hear neither Cambodia nor Darfur or the massacres in Syria, or anywhere, the urgency to flush out your inner beast in man, will turn from the holy task of saving what can be memory , meaning and, therefore, hope.

this is the lesson of Elie Wiesel.

this is a fact that left the country and men books to address his brothers waiting to Manhattan and Paris, he became one of the consciences of a haunted time, more than ever, with crime and oblivion.