Wiesel, Elie. The Gates of the Forest. Translated by Frances Frenaye. Schocken Books, 1982.
Ref. articles:
- Lazarus, Joyce B. “Expanding Time: The Art of Elie Wiesel in ‘The Gates of the Forest.’” Modern Language Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, 1994, pp. 39–46. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3195049.
- Idinopulos, Thomas A. “The Holocaust in The Stories Of Elie Wiesel.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 55, no. 2, 1972, pp. 200–215. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41177845.
In this novel, Wiesel uses multiple strategies to change the concept of time. He uses time as a structural principle to enhance his readers understanding of how radically the world was transformed by Auschwitz.
Wiesel believes that stories have the capacity to alter the course of history – just like four rabbis avert catastrophe in their communities by repeating the stories of ancestral rabbis – and their prayers. Even though their memory of the story changes each time, a story told “acquires a new temporal life of its own in each retelling…..” (p.39 Lazarus article).
The Gates of the Forrest appear to be in a dream-like world, restricted to a very narrow space – where time seems suspended for the ‘protagonist, Gregor:
He (Gregor) glanced at the luminous dial of his watch: ten past two. He knew the time even though he didn't know what day it was. It could have been Friday or Saturday; what did it matter? He was living in a time of war, outside time. (4)
Sometimes I watch the sun rise and set, but it no longer marks the passage of time. If the sun were to stop, it wouldn't surprise me. It has become a stranger to the earth-- It warms.out of habit or out of boredom. People don't interest it any longer.
In a conversation with Harry James Cargas, Elie Wiesel, said:
"We live seventy years or fifty years or forty years, yet we really live only a few hours or a few days. We collect a few meaningful hours and these form our lives. In the book I only take the substance. This is the real time. So what I do always happens within a ratio of time: twenty-four hours, usually one night."
Elie Wiesel, quoted in Harry James Cargas, In Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), 10
Gregor is a young Hungarian Jew hiding in the forest and towns in Eastern Europe. He struggles to find a meaningful life and to redefine his Jewish identity, haunted by memories of the Holocaust Characters in The Gates of the Forest are defined:
not by their personalities or deeds, but by their relations with others in the past, present, and future, and by the influence they exert on one another… By jumping with seeming illogic from Gregor's present, to his past and anticipated encounters with others, Wiesel suggests that the essence of a human being is not limited to his chronological existence, and that characters' lives extend far beyond their temporal existence. (P.3 of Lazarus article).
Throughout The Gates of the Forest, there is the weight of "l'univers concentrationnaire," defying understanding and altering characters' notions of reality, mankind, and God. To convey the irrationality and omnipresence of the event, Wiesel juxtaposes actions of his main characters with those of people involved directly or indirectly with the persecution of Jews. Seemingly unrelated events become connected when presented simultaneously, and the reader follows a temporal sequence that is both within and outside the main story . (P.41 of Lazarus article).
Traditional linear narrative sequences are interchanged with multiple narratives of characters who change or exchange their identities in the course of the novel.
When Gregor gives his Jewish name to Gavriel, a stranger he meets, he seems to fuse his identity with the other, and the story of these two characters becomes thereafter both a narrative of two friends and of one person, Gregor, who incorporates attributes of another into his own personality. Wiesel maintains the ambiguity of Gavriel's identity throughout the novel, creating the dreamlike effect of a character, Gregor, who may have two separate identities. Wiesel also portrays characters in The Gates of the Forest who live out inner and outer lives that contradict one another. The inhabitants of a Roumanian village all have secret lives through their relationship with Ileana. Gregor himself has two identities in the village: he is a Jew in hiding, and he is a mute Christian simpleton (the role he plays to disguise his true identity) (P.42 of Lazarus article).
Time is expanded in The Gates of the Forest to portray the interconnection of different lives; and time can also be condensed for particularly intense moments that transform a character's life.
Page 43of Lazarus article, quote:
Wiesel uses allegory to create an additional temporal dimension in The Gates of the Forest. In this case, he describes a modern recreation of the Biblical story of Jacob, in Genesis 28:10-32:33. There are two dramatic storylines between Gregor and his fellow hiding Jew Gavriel. There is a horizontal line which refers to ‘life in the everyday’ and then there is a vertical plane where the characters struggle in their relationship with God – in the era of Auschwitz. In this story,” God is ambiguously both present and absent. He does not identify himself, thus enigmatically escaping man’s grasp.” P.44 of Lazarus article
Wiesel, like the theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, 12 recognizes that it is not in eschatology but rather in history that the Jew is to seek the basis of his unity with other Jews, living and dead. The solidarity of Jewish people is based on the simplest and most courageous of human acts: the communication of one Jew to another that he is a Jew, and thus shares his identity. “P.210 Idinopulos.)
Wiesel interweaves Biblical tales, Hasidic masters and tales of the Holocaust throughout this novel and his others.
He has said:
there would be no continuity. "If we stop, we betray. When we die, we silence all the generations that would come after us.'"12 The multitemporal dimension of his novel is not a literary device achieved for its own sake, but a necessary means to pass on an historical legacy which Wiesel feels may soon become silenced as remaining Holocaust survivors die.
The Kaddish prayer recited by Gregor at the conclusion of The Gates of the Forest illustrates another way in which Wiesel shapes the temporal dimension in his novel. The Kaddish is simultaneously a glorification of God in the present and a link of solidarity between the living and all past ancestors and events. It operates paradoxically on many temporal levels at once, and in his recital of it, Gregor attempts a reconciliation both with the ghosts of his past who have prevented him from fully living, and with God, whom Gregor has previously rejected. (P.44 of Lazarus article)
Wiesel makes it clear that the past in The Gates of the Forrest is NOT a separate, temporal entity to be easily dismissed… He calls on us all to accept responsibility for other people’s wellbeing and NOT to be silent to the voices of the past, of history…. For Silence is acquiescence to evil.
Yet for Wiesel it is the present moment that man must assume existentially, not letting himself be seduced by the promises of ghosts of different names, not letting grief diminish life, and not waiting for a future Messiah. (p.45 of article) Gavriel says to Clara: "The Messiah isn't one man, Clara, he's all men" (P. 225 Gates of the Forrest). The Messiah, for Wiesel, is within each of us already, in each present moment.
In the last episode Gregor has an exchange with a Hasidic Rabbi in which the fundamental question of his life is posed. Gregor challenges the Rabbi to defend his belief in the righteousness of God in light of the slaughter of his people, Israel. The Rabbi, torn by the challenge, replies: So be it! ... He's guilty; do you think I don't know it? That I have no eyes to see, no ears to hear? That my heart doesn't revolt? That I have no desire to beat my head against the wall and shout like a madman, to give rein to my sorrow and disappointment? Yes, he is guilty. He has become the ally of evil, of death, of murder, but the problem is still not solved. I ask you a question and dare you answer: 'What is there left for us to do?' (P. 196 Gates)
Page 211 Idinopulos article quote:
What indeed is there left to do? This is the question which Gregor must face if he is to live with his memories and not be robbed of life because of them. Gregor has lost faith in the God of Israel as young Elie Wiesel himself in the memoir Night confesses that he lost faith in the God of his childhood. But the Rabbi leads Gregor to the truth that if he is not to put his faith in the God of Israel then he must not deny faith in the community of Israel.
Wiesel has said (Legends of Our Time. p. 222) that “the question which the Holocaust raises about man and his relation to God cannot be answered.” With the appearance of The Gates of the Forest it appears that Wiesel has at least discovered ways to live with the question.
[Gregor] recited [the Kaddish] slowly, concentrating on every sentence, every word, every syllable of praise. His voice trembled, timid, like that of the orphan suddenly made aware of the relationship between death and eternity, between eternity and the word.
Through Gregor, Wiesel expresses his acceptance of the Hasidic wisdom that men can survive the disasters of their lives through the experiences of other human beings, encountering meanings in whose depths one feels perhaps for the first time the presence of sacredness. In the recitation of the Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead, Wiesel finds it possible to live with the memory of his father's death at Buchenwald,* and he comes to know again that God is, and that it is possible to live without hating him. But the prayer is inseparable from the story; after telling the story so many times, the wound has healed, memories which once haunted have now begun to nurture the living (P.214 Idinopulos).
