MESSENGERS OF GOD
by ELIE WIESEL 235 pages. Random House. $3.95.
The Jew, observes Elie Wiesel, "feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbor." Analyzing like a good modern, revering like a good Jew, Wiesel portrays in these essays the majestic figures of the Old Testament rather as if he were writing a memoir about beloved but salty grandfathers and great-uncles from the East Side. Certainly Moses and Cain and Abel and even Adam seem as pungently real to him as the Jews he knew as a child in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In returning to the first Diaspora, the first murder, the first exile, Author Wiesel appears at last to have found a meaning, if not an excuse for the Holocaust he has borne witness to so brilliantly and compulsively in haunted books like One Generation After and in plays like Zalmen, or the Madness of God.
Approaching his Old Testament archetypes the way they approached God, more or less as equals—at least in matters of conversation—Wiesel does not hesitate to judge their characters. When push comes to shove (and it often does in the Old Testament), he tends to like his piety muscular. He goes so far as to prefer Esau to Jacob, referring to Jacob (as well as Adam) as "a weakling." What he interprets as Job's bland "resignation" to God he calls "an insult to man." Job, he remarks, "should have continued to protest."
Adam ("singularly uninteresting") and Joseph ("not too appealing a human being") bore and offend him during their palmy days. Only after Adam's expulsion from Eden, only after Joseph's imprisonment do they qualify for his term of respect: "a tragic figure." Happiness, he concludes, is more corrosive than misery. "Work," "strive," "suffer," "begin again" are the verbs of history and the concepts that inspire Wiesel. In the honorable survival of those who have believed, he finds the examples he needs in order to behave and survive today. Messengers of God, finally, is as simple and direct as that.
The search for relentless relevance can go occasionally rhetorical, as in talk about "man's eternal quest for meaning, justice and truth." It can also turn a little too retroactive. Thus Abraham is labeled "the first angry young man" and Isaac becomes "the first survivor." But much may be forgiven an author who can look Adam in the eye and say, "Poor man: punished for nothing. And he wasn't even Jewish."
THE SPECTATOR BIRD
by WALLACE STEGNER 214 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.