Arnon Grunberg
Words Without Borders

A Conversation with Elie Wiesel

Last week I met the writer and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Elie Wiesel for an interview in his office in Midtown Manhattan.
I have mixed feelings about giving interviews, and about being an interviewer myself.
For a little more than a year, I worked for a Dutch television program on art. I did interviews with all kinds of people, from Nancy Sinatra to A.M. Homes.
As for being interviewed myself, like most authors I have had some horrific experiences with radio stations in the U.S. “Hello Allen Grenschfield, what can you tell us about your work? I think your paintings are great.” But to be fair, I have to say that my best experiences in this genre were also with American radio stations.
Often I doubt if there is any other raison d’être for giving interviews aside from pleasing one's publisher, who in general will appreciate it when an author helps sell his work.
But despite these reservations, I decided not to pass on the opportunity to meet Mr. Wiesel.
Literature on the holocaust, and on the camps of the Soviet Union for that matter, is often deliberately placed outside the domain of literature.
It is easy to forget that many writers who survived the camps like Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Amèry and Varlam Sjamalov were more than victims and witnesses. They were important authors as well.
So Thursday at 10 in the morning I was waiting for Mr. Wiesel. I was next to a man whom I mistook for another journalist. He turned out to be Mr. Wiesel’s bodyguard. Mr. Wiesel needs a bodyguard since he was attacked last February by a holocaust denier.
Of the almost fifty books Mr. Wiesel has written, his most famous is probably Night.
I’d bought the English translation of it secondhand. Next to the sentence “I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted his absolute justice,” somebody has scribbled: “How is this possible?” A remark that made me smile.
As did Mr. Wiesel's statement during the interview that he would never publish a book that ends in despair.
Maybe at the end, despair is the big cultural difference between Europe and the U.S. Whereas in the U.S. despair often seems to be a taboo, in Europe I would say it’s more like a starting point.
Which also raises the question: what is left of the meaning of despair, when it is your starting point?


200520062007200820092010

JanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneAugustSeptemberOctoberNovemberDecember

6121930