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PARTISAN REVIEW
victims. All Jews were not victims because many were more vic–
timized than others, including those who weren't sent to Auschwitz .
GT:
If
Sophie's Choice
is not a book about the Holocaust
a
la Wiesel ,
how then should we understand the role the Holocaust plays in it?
WS:
I think it is a book in which the Holocaust is overwhelmingly
present, but which is more than that- a metaphor for something
else . The metaphor lay in the title of the book - choice, Sophie's
choice. The metaphor lay in the epigraph I use in the book from
Malraux: "I seek that essential region of the soul where absolute
evil confronts brotherhood." What is absolute evil? Absolute evil ,
to my mind, as a metaphor, is, or can be, or must be , an act in
which a woman is forced to murder her own child, whether she be
Jewish, Gypsy, Pole, Russian, French, or whatever. This seized
me as being a metaphor for absolute evil as represented by Nazism.
That is what impelled me more than anything else to write about
the Holocaust. Not, God forbid, to write it from the vantage point
of Elie Wiesel, the point of view of the barracks , the tortures, the
beatings, the terrible deprivation.
GT:
Why not?
WS:
Because I didn't feel confident enough to write about it this
way . I don't claim, I never claimed and would never claim to be
an authority on Auschwitz or on the Holocaust. This only Elie
Wiesel can be in a sense because he was there. He can tell me
things that I am sure I have heard about; he can sear it on my
memory in a way that perhaps no one else can , but I'm not claim–
ing in my view of the Holocaust to have his vision of it. I have
another vision, another metaphor, and I'm offended by the idea
that somehow the metaphor of Sophie being forced to choose to
murder one of her children is not a perfectly valid use of the
Holocaust.
GT:
You also describe some of the horrors of the Holocaust and not
just the fact that she had to choose.
WS:
I do that too, but as you know I'm very, very careful never to
get too close to the thing. Aside from the feeling that I might have
been inauthentic, I didn't want to deal in what might be construed
as the pornography of violence; describing some Nazi thug taking
a club and beating some wretched poor Jewish woman to the
ground or something like that.
It
was not in my scheme .
GT:
You are haunted by the phenomenon of slavery . In the book,
you say: "I knew that in the fever of my mind and in the most un-
