A Mad Desire to Dance

A Mad Desire to Dance By Elie Wiesel Knopf 2009, $25, pp. 288

“Listen to me for a few more minutes,” implores Doriel, the main character of Elie Wiesel’s new novel. “I have one very recent last story I need to tell you.”

Tales in A Mad Desire to Dance just pour out of the author like the Talmudic ma’ayan hamitgaber, the wellspring that never runs dry. Like Doriel, Wiesel always seems to have one more story “I need to tell you.” His latest work is filled with familiar themes like the bride possessed by an evil dybbuk and the madman who demands that the Messiah come without delay. And there are new ones, like the story of Beinish, the yeshiva boy gone bad, and Ayala, the desperately flirtatious girl on a Paris-to-New York flight, and Rivka, whose vow of silence almost costs her her life.

In his 50th book, at the age of 80, Wiesel proves again that he is a master storyteller who can weave a complex tapestry of plots into an intricately poignant human portrait.

It is intimidating to pass judgment on Wiesel, particularly in the pages of the magazine he co-founded more than 30 years ago. It is also impossible to be a contemporary Jewish writer without owing a debt to a man who did so much to legitimize contemporary Jewish letters. Wiesel has also helped a generation of writers find their voice—and an audience.

Still, I must honestly say that I was totally confounded by the opening pages of A Mad Desire to Dance. The first 50 pages are the ravings of a madman. The reader feels locked in a psychiatrist’s office with Doriel, an angry and frightened Holocaust survivor who wonders if knowing that he is mad makes him anything less of a madman. Doriel’s dreams are all nightmares, one scarier than the next; little that is sensible about the character emerges, even as Doriel warns the reader at the outset of the novel, “Since I’m eager to tell you everything, you should know that I’ll be telling this story without any concern for chronology.”

My first association with that statement was to Rashi’s famous comment, “There is no earlier or later in the Torah,” meaning one cannot expect that scripture is presented in a logical or chronological order. Was Wiesel letting us know that he is imitating the Torah?

Perhaps. Because if one sticks with scripture, or this novel, patience is rewarded and secrets are revealed. After the tumultuous early pages of A Mad Desire to Dance, a new character enters, psychiatrist Thérèse Goldschmidt, who reassembles the facts of Doriel’s life and begins to make sense of it.

As might be expected, Doriel falls in love with the psychiatrist, and there is enough counter-transference going on that she becomes obsessed with him. Her observations and emotions are made explicit in sections of the novel labeled “Excerpts” from her notes. It is an effective device because it preserves the flow of Doriel’s narrative while giving the episodes context and meaning.

Doriel’s main problem, we learn, is not his madness but his fear of intimacy; he has remained single well into his 60s. From what we can tell, he never had a serious relationship with a woman, although his stories indicate he had many opportunities. Dr. Goldschmidt helps him trace his fear of intimacy to his mother, a blonde Jew who passed as a Pole during the war and was able to move freely while helping to organize the resistance to the Nazis. While she enjoyed freedom and even adventure, Doriel and his father lived the war years in hiding, humiliation and fear. Both his sister and brother died when their Jewishness was uncovered.

Doriel’s mother, we learn, loved another man, a fellow member of the resistance, during this period. Even amid the horrors of the Nazi occupation, Doriel sensed the tension between his parents over her affair and was ultimately unable to form relationships of his own.

But while Dr. Goldschmidt is unlocking Doriel’s mysteries, she finds that her relationship with him is putting stress on her own marriage. She breaks off her treatment of Doriel, saying that she can do nothing to help him. “God is my witness. I tried everything and risked everything,” she tells Doriel. “I admit defeat.”

The book’s ending proves her wrong. She has helped him more than she knows. Doriel finds happiness just when he—and we—least expect it, but the reader is nevertheless left wondering: Is Doriel’s happiness real or just another fantasy of a madman? While the answer is, deliberately, never made entirely clear, Wiesel once again seems to suggest that it is possible to believe in happy endings in the face of tragedy. In many ways, that is the story Wiesel longs to tell and we long to hear.

Ari L. Goldman is on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of The Search for God at Harvard.