The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry by Elie Wiesel

Author:Elie Wiesel [Gilbert, Elie Wiesel; Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural, Soviet Union, Anthropology, History, Jewish, Social Science, Judaism, Jewish Authors, Religion, Persecutions, Jews, General, Travel
ISBN: 0805208267
Publisher: Schocken
Published: 1973-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

9

WHAT THEY EXPECT FROM US

The holidays were over, and the Jewish spirit had once more gone underground. The three generations who had come together for prayer and song once more went their separate ways. Everyone went home, back to work, back to the university; the side streets with their little synagogues took on their usual abandoned look. Only those above forty would appear for Sabbath services; the very old would come each morning. They would pray together, but the magic of the holidays, the public rejoicing, was gone.

It is hard to summarize one’s impressions of a trip that included so many powerful experiences, each of them a turning point in one’s own life. It is hard to balance them against one another, to draw a line, add them up, point to the total, and say, “Here is the problem; here is its solution.” He who has lived through the experience may laugh or cry, but he cannot define it rationally, cannot be content with a scientific or a literary interpretation, cannot build a theoretical system adequate to explain it. He may, if he has the strength left, voice a wordless scream.

In your first confrontation with the Jews of Russia you are forced to abandon whatever intellectual baggage you may have brought with you. Logic, you suddenly realize, will not help you here. You have your logic, they have theirs, and the distance between the two cannot be bridged by words. The more you see of them the surer you become that everything you have thought or known till now is worthless; here you must begin anew. This strange new world has customs and laws totally unfamiliar to you; language operates on a level you cannot hope to comprehend. You understand nothing they tell you, and when they explain, you believe nothing. You feel as though you have been propelled into a realm of the absurd; when you try to describe it, your description has the air of a harrowing scene from a Kafkaesque novel or nightmare.

But the nightmare is not yours. It’s theirs.

My summary, then, must be very personal and very short. The condition of the Jews in the Soviet Union is at once more grievous and more hopeful than I had imagined.

On the one hand, the Russian authorities do everything in their power to prevent Jews from conducting their internal affairs within a recognizable organizational framework, with its own self-esteem, its own culture and folklore, its own scale of values. But on the other hand, they do not make it possible for Jews to acculturate to non-Jewish society, a society that is prepared to accept Ukrainians, Uzbeks, and Tartars … but not Jews. The impression has been created that Jews are destined to be alien forever.

The Jewish reaction is natural. Since others try to prevent them from living either as Jews or as non-Jews, they decide, despite and even because of the difficulties involved, to preserve their Jewishness. This is the only way I can explain the mass gatherings of Jews in and around the synagogue on Jewish holidays.

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