Monday, August 13, 2018

Elie Wiesel and the Sea is Never full (or empty)

I don't understand why people who like Elie Wiesel and approve of his politics and his posturing would not concede that his writings have no literary value whatsoever.  The titles of his books are more like titles of bad B movies, and the narratives in all of them are like articles you read in the Atlantic (when it was under the editorship of the former Israeli military prison guard).  In the Sea is Never full (how profound), he tells a story: how the Palestinian poet Rashid Husain contacted Wiesel and assured him that he is not a dangerous Arab and not even a PLO and that he is "an Israeli". He met with Wiesel and showed him a list of Israeli repression, injustices, and censorship.  Wiesel said that he did not believe what he heard and that he contacted an Israeli Jewish journalist to verify (because Arabs are liars) and that the Israeli journalist verified what Husayn had told him. So Wiesel went to Golda Meir who basically told him to mind his own business. The irony is that Wiesel never ever criticized Israel.  So it works: what Meir ordered him to do.