The Ethics of Elie Wiesel`s Storytelling as a New Theoretical Approach in Representing the Holocaust

Grounded on Giorgio Agamben's assertion that once the historical, technical and legal context of the Jewish genocide has been sufficiently clarified, we are facing a serious challenge when we really seek to understand it and becomes more thought-provoking when we try to represent it. The difference between what we know about the Holocaust and how this delicate issue should be represented is facing major challenges in the context of content abundance onboth Holocaust classical analyses or contemporary digital formats. Contemporary society is facing ethical and emotional limitation regarding Holocaust representation. What is the right way to represent the Holocaust after eight decades since the Holocaust took place is one of the relevant questions that arises in this context? How to live, what to do, and how do the consequences of my actions affect society after the Holocaust experience,are some of the questsof Elie Wiesel’s life.The paper will highlight how his storytelling provides some guidelines for shaping a possible good way of representing the Holocaust and what are its resources. It will also illustrate what are the ethical components of his storytellingthat constitute an example of ethical conduct and give some relevant suggestions on how to instrument them in order to place Holocaust representation on a progressive way of reflection.

Antisemitic or Bordering on Antisemitic? Grey Areas in Romanian Fake News Discourses in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.

Les larmes de la mémoire, un déchirement infini vu par les yeux d’Élie Wiesel

The aim of this article is to consider the perfect complementarity and the heterogeneous structure of two of Elie Wiesel’s works, which formulate a constant questioning on the fault of the uprooted man: L’Oublié, published by Éditions du Seuil in 1989 and Un désir fou de danser, a novel published by the same editions in 2006. In this works, the Romanian author Elie Wiesel gives his voice to characters constantly persecuted by demons from their past. Hyper lucid and attentive to the noise of his time, Wiesel celebrates, in his novels, a present loaded with memories so as not to abdicate before the sore Jewish memory that seems to haunt him. Madness, freedom, Judaic mysticism, an intimate understanding of Kabbalah, the memory of suffering are all themes that nourish Élie Wiesel and testify to his almost exclusive interest in the open wounds of Jewish history.

Yiddish, Treasure from a Vanished World. The Impossibility to Translate Yiddish Or the Cultural Limits of Translation

By welcoming the other in his language and thus opening the door to an unknown universe, the translation must take up the challenge of otherness which rests on the capacity, beyond words, to be received in a foreign culture. What happens, in this case, when the culture of the language in question is that of a world that one sought to annihilate in an unspeakable catastrophe? It is in the light of Yiddish that I will deploy the two axes of my reflection on what, beyond translation as a passage from one language and from one culture to another, can ultimately account for the impossibility of rendering the language of the other, of another world. In the case of Yiddish, it is important to consider the mental universe it represents, the Yiddishland and the yiddishkayt. It is to paint the portrait of this now disappeared world, which is not on any world map, that I will apply myself firstly. In a second step, it will be necessary to question the very impossibility of translating Yiddish. With Isaac Bashevis Singer, who “retranslates” his own texts from Yiddish into English, and makes this English translation the matrix of translations into other languages. What happens between the first Yiddish original and the second English original of Singer’s works? Why this need to correct the English versions of his Yiddish texts? These questions raise issues about what Yiddish and the universe it stages represent for Singer: a past world, impossible to render in any other language, the “other world” which has now disappeared? And with Elie Wiesel, whose mother tongue is Yiddish, but who chooses French as the “language of writing”. Wiesel’s “first” work, La nuit, will form the matrix of his novels, built like a fresco in which the works respond to each other, in a Midrashic “infinite reading”. However, at the start of those novels is a story written feverishly and published in Yiddish, … a di velt hot geshvign. This Yiddish text is a cry of revolt and a testimony that the French version will confine to silence, La nuit becoming the very expression of silence. Faced with the impossibility of translating Yiddish, of accounting for the world carried by Yiddish, Wiesel constructs a literary work that will tell a story strewn with clues of this destroyed culture. Could it be, in the last instance, the hidden treasure of Jewish tradition which, precisely out of loyalty to Judaism, cannot be translated? This world which belongs to the Jews and of which they are the only heirs, at the risk of this heritage being lost, for lack of transmission? This questioning could illustrate a reflection on the limits of translation in the light of its cultural and spiritual issues.

The Vienna Protocol

The "Vienna Protocol" was authored by Rabbi Joseph Polak, the Chief Justice of the Rabbinical Court of Massachusetts, with input from Prof. Michael Grodin of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University. The "Vienna Protocol" initially arose from a question posed by Prof. Susan Mackinnon of Washington University and her associate Andrew Yee with respect to the use of paintings from the Pernkopf Atlas of Human Anatomy, many of which are believed to be based on the dissection of victims of Nazi terror in Vienna. Questions about the use of these images and of how one deals, in Jewish tradition, with human remains of Nazi victims, have not been addressed. The "Vienna Protocol" is a unique and unprecedented religious and ethical analysis in the tradition of a Rabbinical "Responsum." While it was undertaken from a Jewish religious and ethical perspective, it is, in fact, a universal document that can be considered as a model for people of other faiths and beliefs. Image credit for the 1930s photo showing Nazi flags flying on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics: Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. Used with permission.

4. Shoah and memory

“Shoah and memory” looks at the Holocaust through the lens of Jewish literature worldwide, focusing on the differences between the works of Anne Frank (Diary of a Young Girl), Elie Wiesel (Night), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), and others, studying the reception each of these works received in Jewish and non-Jewish milieus. There is a connection between memory and testimonial literature, which can especially be seen in fiction as it intersects with the anti-Semitic trend known as “Holocaust denial." We have cases such as “invented” memoirs, for example, The Painted Bird by Jerzy Koziński. There are also a number of nonliterary Holocaust narratives such as the films Shoah and Schindler’s List and the graphic novel Maus.

Preventing Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Barbarism in the Present and in the Future through Art: Using the Example of the Play “The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Songs” by Peter Weiss

75 years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, but racism, nationalism and xenophobia (including anti-Semitism) are still widespread; in fact, due to an increasingly solipsistic policy of international leaders, hostility against those who don’t match race, religion, culture or sexual orientation is even experiencing a renaissance. Fake news start to replace facts. In Germany, politicians of the (democratically elected) right-wing party AfD (Alternative for Germany] publicly question the significance of the holocaust. According to the polls, around 33% of European youths have little or no knowledge about the attempted annihilation of Jews during World War II. In order to prevent the return of barbarism it is essential to remember and understand the characteristics that actually led to barbarism in the first place. Peter Weiss’ play Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen [The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Songs] written in 1965, takes a very thorough look at what Auschwitz was, how it had been made possible and how it survived in society even after the war. The following article examines the play and its context in literature and films on the Holocaust, paying particular attention to the possibility of explaining the, as Elie Wiesel has put it, “unexplainable” and converting it into a teaching experience for current generations.