Good afternoon. I trust you all continue to be safe and well. We are being careful when out on our several walks each day. We have not yet returned to a restaurant. I had my second on-campus meeting yesterday – i.e., the ‘values clarification re abortion’ session an Ob/Gyn faculty member and I have facilitated for the past decade with each year’s incoming Ob/Gyn interns. Otherwise, my medical/surgical ethics work remains virtual. I thought you would be interested in the e-mail response I sent last week to one of our department’s trauma surgeons with whom I am collaborating on several surgical ethics projects. She is in her late-30s and very thoughtful (her undergraduate program centered on a ‘great books’ curriculum). She called to discuss a manuscript we are revising for publication. Near the end of the conversation, she shifted the focus to her having read earlier in the week Elie Wiesel’s Night for the first time. She was gripped by Wiesel’s jarring narration of his teenager experience surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, but confused by the quite religious image of Wiesel she brought to reading Night based on her superficial awareness of him while she had been in medical school at Dartmouth and later in a public health master’s program at Harvard. We only had a very few minutes to discuss her questions. I sent her the e-mail message below the following morning. Doug/Dad
_______________________
Good morning. I appreciate very much your introducing into our phone conversation last night your response to reading Elie Wiesel’s Night this week. I apologize for slipping so quickly into my ‘professor’ archives! I have now refreshed/organized my recollections and want to share some highlights re Wiesel, Night, and my personal journey.
- I was raised (b. 1951) in a small West KY town where a narrow view of ‘the world’ was uncritically taken for granted. I never saw/read a newspaper with a national or international scope. My family – immediate and extended – was comfortable in fundamentalist/cultist Christianity. My public school education was politically cautious but rather solid re valuing education, creating for me an alternative to the fear/hostility toward critical thinking in my home and religious community. I was something of a sponge re school (especially math and history). But my primary aim/ambition focused on becoming a professional baseball player, which seemed a distinct possibility until a serious neck injury during a high school football game in my junior year. I graduated from high school with no clear direction, having only thought about the regional Murray State University because its Class B minor league level baseball program could have been a step toward a major league career. My parents sent me to a West TN junior college aligned with my family’s religious and social worldview. I explored the possibility of following the example of my three uncles who were West KY pastors. After these two years, I married my first wife (d. 1987) – also from a small West KY town -- whom I had known/admired since high school and who was something of a piano prodigy. We returned to West KY. I entered the regional university (studying history, sociology, literature/oral interpretation). She had her first MS symptoms. Resolving to be a ‘historian first’, my graduate studies (which fortuitously became something of a consortium involving St. Meinrad Monastery/Seminary, Southern Seminary, and Oxford University) centered on the history of ideas – political, scientific, philosophical, theological – that have been seminal/pivotal ideas in shaping western civilization. My wife’s courageous fight against unremitting MS was the existential crucible within which I tested these seminal/pivotal ideas. ‘Melting’ and ‘crumbling’ are the most descriptive analogies re the failure of the ideas I inherited and brought into this experience.
- It was in this context that I first engaged Night, as an assigned reading in a mid-1970s graduate seminar. I knew little about Wiesel at that time beyond this raw/unsentimental chronicle of horror. He was not yet recognized as a Holocaust survivor icon/legend in the US and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. After a decade of undergraduate and graduate studies, Night was among the few writings that remained on my ‘history of ideas’ list of credible modern sources (along with such sources as Camus’ The Plague, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Simone Weil’s essays/articles, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, . . .). I recall being disappointed to discover that Wiesel’s writings subsequent to Night did not build on Night or go in the direction I anticipated. I retained Night but not Wiesel. Some fifteen years ago, I discovered my most valued Holocaust survivor voice -- Primo Levi, his life and his novels. And I have spent considerable time with as many published or oral records of Holocaust survivor recollections as well as with biographies and memoirs of a wide/diverse range of individuals in Europe who came of age between WWI and WWII.
- Wiesel returned to my attention after my first trip with Dr. McRay to Israel/Palestine in 2004, when our global health education project was only an idea. I vividly remember being embarrassingly ignorant of the Middle East backstory and shocked by the ‘abused become abusers’ political/military actions of the State of Israel toward the Palestinians in/for which the US was complicit. As Dr. McRay and I developed/implemented our global health elective year after year, I found Wiesel either to be silent or to be an ‘Israel right or wrong but, right or wrong, Israel’ defender. In his later years, I was disappointed to see him align with Christian fundamentalist Zionist-supporting tele-evangelists such as John Hagee, support Israel prime minister Netanyahu, even have a private lunch with presidential candidate Trump. My bottom line assessment -- Wiesel was raised in, groped in the dark for, struggled against, reconciled with, and became co-dependent on his very Orthodox Jewish origins.
- Shortly after moving in 2007 to St. Louis, I learned of Hedy Epstein (1924-2016). Hedy’s home was Freiburg. She was rescued from the Nazis by ‘Kindertransport’. Almost all of her family perished in Auschwitz. She immigrated to the US in 1948. She lived in St. Louis for most of her adult years. I often went to hear Hedy speak. For several years, I stood each Tuesday Noon-1:00pm on Delmar Blvd at the west end of The Loop with Hedy and the ‘Women In Black’ chapter members in silent protest against Palestinian oppression. I had the privilege of speaking with her over coffee several times at the nearby Panera Bread cafe before or after the silent protests. I learned about her sustained activist efforts – local, national, international. I sought her guidance for what Dr. McRay and I were doing in the West Bank and in Gaza. Hedy was the Holocaust witness/activist I failed to find in Wiesel.
Do with these reflections whatever seems best for you. I am certainly available to discuss any of these matters with you at your request.
Doug
