48 Friday, March 14, 1986
THE DETROIT. JEWISH NEWS
SILENCE.
Elie Wiesel is obsessed
with it.
He has his reasons. When
the Jews needed the world to
speak, the world was silent. A
silence that helped kill six
million Jews, forever silent.
Which is why Wiesel, one
of those Jews who survived,
is obsessed. "He is a driven
Irian," says Irving Abraham-
son. "He's always working,
he never stands still. He's
obsessed with the need to tell
the tale, to be a messenger
from the dead to the living."
And so Wiesel„ author,
teacher, memorialist of the
Holocaust, has spent the last
thirty years of his life fight-
ing silence. By talking, by
writing. ' Thirty years of
w
Elie Wiesel: Jews build words, not
statues.
.
Abrahamson: preserving and pro-
tecting Wiesel's words.
.A Chicago academic s
ten-year effort to
compile Elie Wiesel's
written and spoken
words has come to
fruition in a lthree
volume publication.
"Jews have never believed
in statues, we have never
believed in buildings," he has
noted.. "Judaism is words,
Jewish building is in words,
we build words. The only way
for us to communicate what
happened in the past is
through words, whether of
past glory or of past disaster.
Only words."
Words Abrahamson has
been collecting.
For the last decade, Abra-
hanison, a professor of
English at the City Colleges
of Chicago, has been tracking
down Wiesel's words. Every
article, every short story,
every poem, every book pre-
face, every book review,
every essay. Every public
wor,d, other than his .26
esel is ever
books, that Wiesel
written.
And not just eve word •
he's written but eve public
word he's tittered Every
speech, every lect e, every
interview, every ommen-
tary. Every word. I cluding
a one-act play and t o televi-
sion scripts.
That effort. has resulted in
Against Silence: • The Voice
4
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k . 4