GIDEON TELPAZ
261
WS:
I just recreated it more or less out of whole cloth, without really
ever having encountered a true Jewish Princess like her.
GT:
Do you think you might have in any way been influenced by
Jewish fellow writers who describe Jewish Princesses?
WS:
To some extent. Yes, Philip Roth. My friend Philip Roth.
GT:
In contrast to the sardonic tone you use toward Leslie, your em–
pathy for Sophie, who lives under the shadow of the death camps,
is conspicuous . In talking about the tragic love of Sophie and
Nathan , Wiesel comments, "She loved him and he loved her and
yet - it's complicated , I know: people such as Sophie and Nathan,
they can be found everywhere in the rubble of history."
WS:
I don't know what he's trying to get at there. I read that but I
don't know what his point is.
GT:
Later on he says , "Far from Birkenau, long after the war ,
Styron seems to be saying, one still dies there."
WS:
Well, that was true. Certainly that was an ancillary part of the
book. I certainly did not wish to disguise the fact that the power
and evil of Auschwitz was sufficient to reach out and kill Sophie
long after her departure. I always felt Nathan was simply an in–
strument.
GT:
A most powerful one.
WS:
One had to be, in order to destroy Sophie.
GT:
Did you form him after somebody you knew?
WS:
He's sort of an amalgam, drawn in exaggerated terms, of a lot
of Jewish friends I've had . People I've known ever since I came
North. I had a roommate who was a bit like Nathan, not nearly as
self-destructive , who was Jewish, when I first lived in New York.
A sculptor.
GT:
Is it correct to assume that once Sophie finds herself in America,
she has no choice but to gravitate to a place where Jews were
heavily concentrated , such as Brooklyn , and to an affair with a
Jew, in order to complete a tragic cycle of destiny?
WS:
That may be . There's some atonement she was making in her
relationship with Nathan .
GT:
They needed one another to destroy each other?
WS:
They were both seeking destruction .
GT:
Why was she seeking destruction? She had survived . She came
to a new world, started a new life . Was it the guilt of the survivor?
WS:
Partly, I think.
GT:
You brought her from , as you call it in one place, "her sojourn
in the bowels of hell," and in another place you call it "society of
