GIDEON TELPAZ
253
WS:
The contradiction lies in his own work. He counsels silence but
he's been writing incessantly about it. How can a man, who has
spent his life writing about something, deny to other people the
right to deal with it? Especially, I might add, when it can never be
proven that just because a person has experienced something it
makes him a better artistic witness. On the crudest level of
recapitulation of art and experience, I'm talking about writing
novels based on real events. The best novel about combat and the
horror, the bloody horror, of the American Civil War, was
The
Red Badge
of
Courage,
written by a young man who never saw a
war. It remains, to my mind, the single greatest fictional work
about the Civil War. It was a totally imagined, or almost totally
imagined, recreation of the horror of war.
GT:
What Wiesel claims is that there's nothing that can be compared
to the Holocaust. It's the greatest mystery of all times.
WS:
Given my understanding of it, as a most appalling and truly
desolating cataclysm, what still prevents someone who has not ex–
perienced it from trying to deal with it on his own terms? That
brings me to the second point I felt Wiesel was making. He said or
implied, to universalize the Holocaust is to trivialize it, because it
was a singularly Jewish experience which no one else had any
right to be drawn into.
GT:
Should
Sophie's Choice
be regarded at all as a book about the
Holocaust?
WS:
It may not be about the Holocaust in the traditional sense as
Elie Wiesel comprehends it. I can't accept his contention that to
universalize it is to trivialize or to falsify it; I think he also used the
word "dejudify ." My book is , I believe, one long testimony to the
agony of Jewish suffering. There is no place in the story where I
try to minimize it.
GT:
You make a point of telling the reader through Wanda, a
member of the Polish underground, that everyone was a victim,
and that the Jews, although "the victims of victims," as she refer–
red to them, were not the only ones to suffer.
WS:
That was not in the movie, it was in the book certainly, and I
would, on a purely pragmatic level, say that. Maybe this is worth
"dejudifying." We do know that a large number of non-Jews
perished at Auschwitz. This is indisputable.
GT:
He says not all victims were Jewish but all Jews were victims.
WS:
Well, that's true-up to a point. Many Jews were victims. All
Jews were potential victims. All European Jews were potential
