Jeremiah II

By Mayo Mohs

A JEW TODAY

by Elie Wiesel Random House; 208 pages; $10

Elie Wiesel: once again that bitter voice of remembrance. It is like having Jeremiah or Amos in town, denouncing people for their sins. Just about everyone is stung in these pages: American Jews for not shouting loud enough when they knew what was happening in Hitler's concentration camps; European Christians for standing idly by or keeping silent against the encircling terror. Even God is indicted. The tone echoes an ancient Jewish tradition, epitomized in the fiercely mystical Hasidic teachers whose stories Wiesel tells so well, men taking issue with the Master when the universe is out of joint. And Wiesel's eyes saw a universe contorted out of all proportion when he was confined in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

In his books and in the essays, letters and diary excerpts that make up this new volume, the Holocaust haunts every word. Wiesel's special accomplishment is that he has assigned himself the excruciating role of witness to the century's great crime without losing his hold on sanity and compassion.

The author is at his best in a section titled "Legends of Today." The parables are brief, ironic and heartbreaking. Here is one prisoner refusing the demand of a German officer to revile Jehovah. "Curse your God!" the officer screams, promising him an easy job if he does so. "God is God," the man prays. "God alone is God." "God" is on the man's lips as he dies. "I was there," testifies the martyr's son. "You see, my father . . . my father was a hero ... But he was not a believer." There are other more pitiful tales: the family that can hide only one child safely, and must choose which one. Or a girl in a schoolroom, asking if there is no excuse, no mitigating evidence, for the Jewish Kapos in the camps: "Is there nothing, nothing at all to be said on behalf of my father?"

The diary excerpts reveal the breadth of Wiesel's concern. He mourns the death of Biafra and the extermination of an Indian tribe in Paraguay, confessing that his own indifference has made him an accomplice. He recognizes South Africa's enduring loyalty to Israel, but scorns apartheid and sides with the rebels of Soweto. In a selection of letters, though, he is less successful. One, to a young Palestinian Arab, expresses empathy, but then proceeds to lecture the young Arab on Jewish suffering and Arab terror, never mentioning the sometimes disproportionate Israeli reprisals.

Wiesel's hottest outrage is reserved for the so-called scholarship of revisionists who call the Holocaust a myth, or in the words of Northwestern Professor Arthur Butz, "the hoax of the century." Replies Wiesel: "Where has a people disap peared? Where are they hiding?" In fury, he asks why academics have not boycot ted Butz and why students have not walked out on his classes.

In fact, there seems little danger that such revisionists will be taken seriously. If they have any useful function it is to spark Wiesel into passages that recall Isaac Bashevis Singer's definition of Jews as "a people who can't sleep themselves and let nobody else sleep." While Elie Wiesel lives and writes, there will be no rest for the wicked, the uncaring or any one else.

--Mayo Mohs

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