My hours with Elie Wiesel

On a perfect early autumn night in October 1990, Elie Wiesel sat on stage in an auditorium at Winona State University, delivering an hourlong lecture, followed by a question-and-answer session. I stared in disbelief.

At that time, I was a newly hired fixed-term instructor in the English Department. The title had more heft than the payroll. And like others on the adjunct circuit, I was being paid to teach the usual surplus of 100-level composition classes. Unlike others in the same fix, though, I had but one goal: to succeed as a book author.

While listening that night to Wiesel's lecture and marveling at how deftly he fielded the varied questions thrown at him as he concluded that year's Lyceum Series presentation, I decided that I would not miss my chance to share with him.

Actually, we'd already shared quite a bit that day. He was my literary idol.

Word had gotten out that the new maverick instructor in the English Department was also a history geek. And the history of World War II was (and remains) my all-consuming obsession. On a small campus like Winona State, such monomania tends to make one known. But there was also something else.

One month earlier, in mid-September, I'd typed a letter on university stationery, and had sent it to the professor who'd led the quest to lure Wiesel to Winona State.

In that letter, I mentioned that I'd read most of Wiesel's books. Not just his "Night, Dawn, Day" trilogy, but also his novels, reportage and myriad nonfiction works. By 1990, he'd written more than 30 books.

They had a problem. The only book by Elie Wiesel that anyone he knew on the faculty had read was his ineffably harrowing Holocaust memoir "Night." Which was precisely the one book about which no one should make small talk. In any way.

On the other hand, after quizzing me briefly and ascertaining that I had a handle on Wiesel's canon (riveting essay collections like "Legends of Our Time" and "One Generation After"; biographical explorations about Bible characters and revelatory works about Hasidic masters; a play called "The Trial of God," and novels with titles both compelling and lapidary: "The Gates of the Forest" and "The Fifth Son" being my favorites), I was asked to be part of the welcome committee.

Our plan was to pick up Wiesel late in the afternoon at the local airport. After that, until he walked on stage and engaged with a standing-room-only audience and then allowed one hour for a low-key reception limited to 75 people, the powers that be needed someone versed in his books to pass the time with him. It was indelicate to have him surrounded by those whose only exposure to his work was the graphic, unutterably tragic "Night." Asking him about that narrative would be indecent. "Night" is a narrative graveyard for Wiesel's childhood family in wartime.

Things happened fast. I went along. And whenever the time was right, as the hours passed in anticipation of that evening's event, I quietly chimed in with appropriate inquiries about his postwar Paris years, how he oscillated from nonfiction to fiction and back again, and other issues. We hit it off in a natural way. I knew he had one child, a son, and I asked about him (he was then attending Yale). Inevitably, we spoke of the war.

Not the famous battles. I freely admitted to him that combat chronicles were of little interest to me. What had obsessed me for years was how civilian-soldiers (which the vast majority of GIs had been) somehow managed to accommodate the stresses of war. That preoccupied me as much as the mystery of how European civilians had lived in the shadows of the Nazis in so many occupied areas. Furthermore, I'd made a choice when completing a master's degree in English. He asked me to tell him more.

I knew I was no Stephen Crane, but I still made the effort. Wiesel asked me a few more questions. Unlike so many others (family, friends and, most of all, indifferent academic colleagues), he seemed to have no trouble understanding my fixation on aspects of World War II that were, and are, almost routinely ignored. The second D-Day in southern France on Aug. 15, 1944? A nod. The Liberation of Paris at the end of August 1944? Another nod. And the soulful behavior of the combat-hardened GIs who liberated the Nazi concentration camps — who dropped their weapons in order to function more like nurses? That's when I noticed his eyes glistening.

It was in the final pages of "Night" that I first read about the American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald and its subcamps, thus saving Wiesel's life. And in my classes, when I assigned "Night," to ensure that my students had to write about issues of substance, I always scheduled a screening of "To Bear Witness," the documentary film resulting from a conference organized in 1981, during which Wiesel reunited survivors and liberators. No wonder we got along.

He flew back to New York that night, taking my extra copy of a literary journal that had published an excerpt from that novel of mine. Titled "April 29, 1945," the brief chapter was my attempt to go beyond the camp liberation scene composed by Irwin Shaw in "The Young Lions." I offered it as a salute. I expected nothing.

Two weeks later, an envelope with Wiesel's return address at Boston University was in my mailbox at Winona State. It stunned me. Inside, one of his elliptical handwritten notes (there would be several in years to come) said:

"It was good meeting you at Winona. I hope our paths cross again — soon. I read the excerpt. Now I am looking forward to the novel itself. Be well. — Elie Wiesel."

Yet, when despair threatened to make me quit my writer's quest (case in point: I shelved that first novel), I had all my notes from Wiesel to fall back on. In one missive that's been my buoy for 25 years, he advised: "Just stay well. Your words will be received."

And he underlined "will."

Does anyone still use a fountain pen to send handwritten notes? I don't know.

But I do know that the restorative impact of Mr. Wiesel's affirmation was beyond category.