What with the continued brouhaha about fiction vs. memoir and its extension to the debate about how to classify Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT — especially keeping in mind that what we read in English isn’t necessarily what he wrote in the first place — it seemed like a good idea to get further opinion from someone who’d devoted time and research to the Yiddish and English version of Wiesel’s work. That’s where Naomi Seidman, Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, comes in.
She takes the tack that NIGHT is a memoir, “with the understanding that there are no texts unmediated by memory, genre, language, audience, and so on.” And while there’s certainly a difference between James Frey’s work and Wiesel’s, Siedman is more interested on the effect of different languages and audiences on Wiesel’s text as seen in comparing NIGHT and Un di velt hot geshvign.
“These difference don’t indict the author (despite how my work has been appropriated) but rather Wiesel’s non-Jewish audience, which he (probably correctly) perceived as unprepared to hear the story of the Nazi genocide the way he told it in Yiddish-with rage against the world that kept silent. The changes in the ending (and they were minor) were in the direction of portraying the survivor as a silent, suffering, nearly Christ-like victim, whose anger is at God rather than the human perpetrators and bystanders.”
Seidman, though, is far more disturbed by how her analysis has been twisted, and how it has become “grist for the mill for those interested only in undermining the ‘truth-claims’ of a Holocaust survivor rather than exploring the context in which Holocaust survivors began to find a voice, and an audience, outside of Jewish languages.”