The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations With Elie Wiesel - Hardcover

Reich, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1641601345 ISBN 13: 9781641601344

Verlag: Chicago Review Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world’s most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel’s life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago and Florida—and spoke with him often on the phone—to discuss the subject that linked them: Reich’s father, Robert Reich, and Wiesel were both liberated from the Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945.
What had started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune quickly evolved into a friendship and a partnership. Reich and Wiesel believed their colloquy represented a unique exchange between two generations deeply affected by a cataclysmic event. Wiesel said to Reich, “I’ve never done anything like this before,” and after reading the final book, asked him not to change a word.
Here Wiesel—at the end of his life—looks back on his ideas and writings on the Holocaust, synthesizing them in his conversations with Reich. The insights on life, ethics, and memory that Wiesel offers and Reich illuminates will not only help the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors understand their painful inheritance, but will benefit everyone, young or old.

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Howard Reich has written for the Chicago Tribune since 1978 and joined the staff in 1983. He is the author of five other books, including Prisoner of Her Past: A Son's Memoir. Reich has won an Emmy Award, and the Chicago Journalists Association named him Chicago Journalist of the Year in 2011.

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The Art of Inventing Hope

By Elie Wiesel

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2019 Howard Reich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-64160-134-4

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication Page, 
Preface, 
1 The Holocaust Returns, 
2 A Troubled Inheritance, 
3 A Burden and Privilege, 
4 We Are All Witnesses, 
5 The Untouchable Past, 
6 Why Do They Hate Us?, 
7 Where Did We Go Wrong?, 
8 The Scene of the Crimes, 
9 How Did Our Parents Stay Sane?, 
10 Listening to Silence, 
11 Moments of Grace, 
12 How Do We Speak of This?, 
13 The Art of Inventing Hope, 
14 On Faith, 
15 Can We Forgive?, 
16 How Shall We Regard Israel?, 
17 Further Thoughts on Night and Its Implications, 
18 The Magical Power of Memory, 
Afterword, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Holocaust Returns

It's the middle of the night, and I should be asleep, but I've gotten out of bed for a drink of water. I'm ten years old and living in our squat but, to us, luxurious ranch house in Skokie, Illinois. As I take a few steps out of my bedroom, which is just a few steps from every other room, I see exactly what I expect: my mother sitting on the floor in the darkened living room, her petite silhouette outlined by soft yellow light trickling in from the streetlamp outside. As always, she has lifted the window shade a couple inches above the sill, so she can peer out and watch the occasional car drive silently by.

She's always there when I get out of bed at night, when I feel ill and call out for help, whenever she's needed, really. She doesn't seem to sleep — certainly not in bed, as far as I can tell. Instead she keeps a nightly vigil in our living room and has done so for as long as I can remember. In fact, I figure all moms must spend each night in front of the living room window, guarding everyone else.

But this is not the only nocturnal ritual in our house. Often my father gets out of bed and proceeds directly to the breakfront in our dining room, opens the bottom cabinet door, lifts up a bottle of whiskey, twists out the cork, and draws a few swallows. Then he methodically recorks the fifth, puts it away, closes the cabinet door, and heads back to bed, saying not a word to my mother as he passes her. Or at least none that I can hear. Sometimes he does this two or three times a night. He'll have to get out of bed for good soon anyway, because long before sunrise, he'll need to drive to the bakery where he works in Chicago, and the alcohol helps him sleep. Or helps him try.

On weekends, though, he gets to sleep later in the morning, and often when he wakes up, he tells us about his dreams.

"I was killing Nazis good," he says, with an air of triumph. "I was shooting them down."

I know that my dad and mom have survived what they briefly told me was the Holocaust, that most of their relatives were executed for being Jews, that my parents had to start over here, in America, and that they feel lucky for that, as if they'd hit the jackpot. But that's about all I know. And, frankly, it's all I want to know. If machine-gunning Nazis in his dreams makes my dad happy, that's fine with me. Sounds like an Audie Murphy movie.

As I look back on it, though, those early years in Skokie — and a few in Chicago before that — were haunted by the Holocaust in ways I did not recognize or understand at the time. We were never supposed to take showers, for instance, though my parents didn't tell me why. Our Skokie house had a perfectly fine — if compact — working bathroom, but showers were categorically banned. My friends took showers, people on TV and in movies took showers, apparently everyone in America took showers, except us. Only baths. It wasn't until I was much older that I came to learn what showers signified for my mother and father.

When my father would talk to his survivor relatives on the telephone, the conversations often would devolve into screaming matches, someone inevitably smashing down the handset on the other party. Yet when we would go out on weekends, we would socialize exclusively with these same relatives who a few days earlier had been berating each other on the other end of the soon-to-be-slammed-down phone. If these relatives couldn't stand each other that much, I often wondered in my naïveté, why were they getting together all the time? These survivors, who had experienced the worst that humanity had to offer, clearly trusted no one, not even each other. And yet they apparently found some kind of solace in each other's company, even amid their raging battles.

When I misbehaved, my parents and aunts and uncles sent Holocaust references my way without shedding much light on the subject. "You wouldn't last ten minutes in the Holocaust," an aunt would say. "You should kiss the ground every day that you have a mother and a father — do you know what I would give to have my parents?" my dad would snarl. "He doesn't know how good he has it," my mother would echo. "When I was your age, I was sleeping in the snow. But he has a big mouth to his parents."

I didn't realize it then, but these people understandably were bursting with anger about what had happened to them and their families, their fury directed at anyone and everyone who happened to wander into their line of fire. Their passions poured forth at whomever was closest, and that, of course, was each other, and me. They had lost faith in virtually everyone, even blood relatives who had suffered through the same trials as them. I guess all of them had learned — under dire circumstances — what people are capable of, and they could not forget it.

Still, coming to Skokie in 1964 was the greatest event in my family's life to that point, and not necessarily because so many survivors had moved there. No one really knew that fact at that time, anyway. Not until the late 1970s would the survivors in Skokie rise up as a group to be heard when famously confronted by neo-Nazis who threatened to march there, causing a worldwide media sensation.

No, Skokie was magical to us because of how far we had come to reach this place of impeccably trimmed lawns and bright, spotless streets.

In 1947, two years after the war, my mother arrived in Chicago as a sixteen-year-old educated only to age eight and now left practically to fend for herself without knowing a syllable of English. My father came to Chicago in 1949 at age twenty-seven, having spent the first year after the war in Germany recuperating from typhus and the effects of years of deprivations and abuse. The two met on a blind date in Chicago and in 1953 got married, a pair of Holocaust survivors whose shared histories surely bonded them as nothing else could.

In the mid-1950s, they opened a bakery with my father's brother in Chicago's Germantown, Holocaust survivors choosing to run a business in the heart of the culture that had destroyed most of their families and decimated their people. That may seem odd, but, looking back on it, I suppose it made a strange kind of sense, from their point of view. My father and his brother, after all, had grown up in a family of bakers in Poland, and my father had trained as a baker in Germany after the war. Both spoke Deutsch fluently and knew how to bake German breads, pastries, and other delicacies just like the natives. How else were they to make a living in a strange country? And where else in Chicago could they better ply their trade than in Germantown?

What seemed a bit weird to me was that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Chicago Review Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1641601345
• ISBN 13: 9781641601344
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 177
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar