I want today, as my outline suggests, to talk about Elie Wiesel. I want to talk about Sylvano Arieti, and I want to talk also about Primo Levi and this is, in a sense, a way of going forward and also referencing and talking about the earlier books we've read. I don't think I'll have many examples from Dry Tears, but I hope some of them will come to mind for you as I talk. But what I want to talk about is what a Bildungsroman, the coming of age story that I've talked about before, the story of initiation means as we read these texts. And in some ways, all of these texts have that personal point of view and that personal point of view comes forward in terms of the character in the book named Primo Levi. Or named Elie Wiesel, or named Sylvano Arieti, but also comes forward as the narrator, and often they are the same, although sometimes they split when the narrator talks about himself in the third person. But, the narrator and one of the things that happens is the narrator, Is somebody with whom, because many of these have a narrator who tells us he was in that situation. He's not a historian writing about something that happened to someone else. But he was in the situation, so it's personal, and he speaks in the I did this, and I did that. One of the effects of such narration is that the reader becomes I. Right. The reader, psychologically speaking, identifies with what is being narrated. It's happening to Murray, to Peter, to Rebecca, to Josh, to all of us as we read it. And we see this right away with Wiesel in his personal account when he talks about his friendship with Moshe the Beadle and Beadle is an institutional word for someone who takes care of a church. So I've called him [COUGH] Moshe the Shamas, the Yiddish word from the Hebrew word, someone who takes care of the synagogue. And Wiesel's personal relationship with Moshe the Shamist, extends from the fact that Moshe is going to initiate him into the mysteries of the Kabbalah. Which is the great mystical Jewish tradition, especially when he's 12 years old and his father has said, you have to have studied for 30 years before you really are allowed to study the Kabbalah. But Elie Wiesel is a pious kid and he wants to know, and Moshe the Shama says to him, why do you cry when you pray? And out of that discussion, you may remember that line right from the beginning. And I'm a great believer in at least knowing the beginning and the ending, because, like so much in life, beginnings matter, and that's why Peter and I dressed up for this class, so that you would take us seriously. We would all come and wear, well anyway, beginnings. So Moshe the Shamas teaches Elie Wiesel stuff about the mystical tradition why we cry. And Moshe and Elie Wiesel have these discussions about how life is about asking the right questions of God and that our experience and our suffering are about learning how to ask the right questions. And maybe not even expecting answers, but the right questions. And you'll remember in the narrated story, Moshe the Shamas goes away and then he comes back and he tells the people of his community of Seagat that Peter has talked about in Transylvania. What the Nazis are up to and no one believes him, including Elie Wiesel, who says, everybody thought Moshe the Shamas was crazy. Because nobody could imagine that the Germans, the Nazis, those members of the most advanced European civilization. And that meant the most advanced civilization to that time, could want to kill a whole people. No one believes him, and there's a line in there, I won't find it right now, where Elie Wiesel says, so I listened to Mosha the Shamas and I pity him. And of course, one of the things we know is that Elie Wiesel will have to experience personally what Moshe the Shamas is telling him. And that is exactly our problem, but in what way can we experience what they're telling us about, what these narrators are. And as Peter says, none of us, luckily, has had to experience these terrible situations that these characters are all in that these narrators are talking about. And it's in Primo Levi, forgive me for not capitalizing Levi. I finished this early this morning. For whatever reason, I didn't capitalize his last name. Here is Kein Varom. You'll remember he's in Auschwitz, he's thirsty. He grabs an icicle and it's knocked out of his hand. And he asks the guard, Warum? Why. And he's told, there is no why here.
