Challenging Turns

Elie Wiesel makes a number of challenging narrative and character turns in his novel, The Fifth Son.  Saying too much about this would reveal the plot.  But I can say that Weisel takes the narrative and moves it back and forth in time.  He builds up suspense, a sense of unwinding knowledge, and impending action, layer by layer.  There is also a surprising twist of character development toward the end that completely re-frames the novel.

Wiesel is rightly labeled a novelist who writes about the Holocaust.  This is his almost exclusive theme.  But The Fifth Son shows that he can take this theme and exploit it artistically in surprising ways. 

Tracing a Tradition

Laying out a religious tradition simply, but with enough detail to make the reading worthwhile is difficult.  H. Byron Earhart accomplishes this in his short book: Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity.  Earhart plots out the entire course of Japanese religious history, from prehistoric times to the post-world war period.

His overriding thesis is that Japanese religions, while diverse, strive for a certain level of harmony.  The same can be said, generally, about Chinese religions.  Certainly, the different religious traditions in Japan have had moments of friction, and there have been major cases of religious persecution.  But compared to the West, the incidents are few and far between.  

Earhart is a fine guide through the twists and turns on Japanese history.  The third edition was written thirty years ago, so this is a flaw with the work.  This book will not reflect current research, and will also fail to track Japanese religion in our time.

Night of the Kabbalah

It is difficult to approach Elie Wiesel’s night with a critique.  As memoir, it is unassailable.  At best, we can take it as a piece of literature and then base our analysis on that.  Night is, after all, marketed as a novel.   

I think the literary key to the novel is in the very beginning, where the young narrator studies Kabbalah with the mysterious Moshe the Beadle.  Moshe is a simple man, and hides great learning and mystical erudition.  The young narrator, who cries during prayer, gains the attention of Moshe, and at the tender age of 14, begins to study Jewish mysticism (traditionally, one should only begin such studies at 40).

Night becomes, in a sense, a commentary on how close we can get to God, when the world is so inherently (or seemingly) godless.  When Moshe is deported to the camps, only to arrive back after escaping, the Jews of Sighet will not believe his stories of atrocities.  The Jews of this corner of Hungary refuse to believe that their destruction is immanent.  God's knowledge of human fate is revealed only to be concealed.

The Kabbalah, with its promise of closeness to God, and the destruction of a people, are bizarrely wedded in Night.  Are we supposed to view this story as a punishment for trying to gain knowledge of God that no one should gain?    Is the story of Night a Kabbalistic allegory on the fate of human beings when they overstep their reach?  It is hard to reach a firm conclusion.  Weisel just leaves us with nagging questions.

Ultimately no one listens to Moshe the Beadle and pay with death.  But Night makes us all listen, and we are privy to great secrets of life.

Incomplete Pictures of Rebbe Nachman

This small book, The Empty Chair: Finding Hope and Joy, the Timeless Wisdom from a Hasidic Master contains short sayings by Rebbe Nachman.  We are meant to read them, and find inspiration in the words and maxims.

And many of Rebbe Nachman’s sayings are inspirational.  But the reader should know that this short book only contains part of the story.  Rebbe Nachman is a complex thinker.  He often says multiple, often contractor things about a subject.  And for every hopeful and joyful utterance, there is probably a negative one as well.  

There are many things about Rebbe Nachman that modern, secular people would find objectionable.  His attitude about masturbation in his book Rabbi Nachman’s Tikkun is unfortunate and medieval.  Of course, none of that is in this volume.  We are meant to feel good here, and not guilty.  

Defiance - Nechama Tec

Nechama Tec’s Defiance: The Bielski Partisans tells the fascinating story of the Bielski brothers, Byelorussian Jews who formed a partisan unit, and in the process saved over 1000 Jewish civilians.  It is the largest “rescue” of Jews by Jews during the Second World War.

Luckily, Tec has a fascinating story to recount.  It carries the weight of her choppy, often inelegant prose.  This is particularly the case in the first two chapters, where Tec inexplicably provides us with one or two sentence paragraphs.  Luckily, this ends after forty pages or so; the reader should stick to the text and not succumb to this bizarre structure.  Defiance tells a riveting story; even if the delivery is a bit choppy, this is still an important book.

The Last Days of Anne Frank

Picking up The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank by Willy Lindwer, I was afraid this would be a tacky piece of writing that simply showed the suffering of one person for our voyeuristic “pleasure.”  But Lindwer’s book is an important document in itself.  Indeed he is interviewing women who knew Anne Frank in Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belson, but as one reads, we discover that Anne Frank is only one piece in this story.  Lindwer presents (full?) interviews of six remarkable women who not only knew Anne Frank, but also have significant stories to tell themselves.  While it would be too much to say that Anne Frank becomes a bit player in their stories, it is not a stretch to claim that she becomes contextualized in a time and place and in the life of Dutch Jewish women. 

Anne Frank's Pantheism

The collection of Anne Frank stories and essays, Tales from the Secret Annex, are refreshingly simple and honest stories, with a glimmer of naivete and hope that shines through in the prose.  The stories like “Kathy” and the “Flower Girl” are particular stand-outs.  Very many writers learn a great deal about the simple wonder of creating a story by reading works like these.  There is a simple yet profound artifice here; there is much to learn about simple expression.

Most surprising for me is to read Anne Frank’s pantheistic leanings in many of the stories.  In “The Flower Girl” the main character’s hard life is mitigated by a few moments in the field, collecting flowers in the evening, while “alone with God and nature.”  In “The Fairy” we are told that the perfect cure for sadness is to “…take a walk through the big forest until you reach the moor.  Then, after a while in the heather, sit down and do nothing.  Only look at the blue sky and the trees, and you will gradually feel peaceful inside and realize that nothing is so hopelessly bad that something can’t be done to improve it --- even a little.”  In the story “Jackie” we read: “Anyone who looks at nature, which is the same as looking into oneself, long and deeply enough, will, like Jackie, be cured of all despair.”  In the short unfinished novel “Cady” the main character finds the full expression of her voice in nature, where she “discovered that she was a human being with feelings, thoughts, and opinions of her own, a being separate from others, a person in her own right.”

Here, God, nature, and the inner self are all treated as equals.  The only way to get at the real self, is to search for it in nature.  And since nature is equated with God and one’s inner self, the key to unlocking one is the other.