WIESEL RETURNS TO JOY OF TEACHING

Author: By Richard Higgins, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, October 21, 1986
Page: 1
Section: METRO

Wiesel, who survived Nazi concentration camps to become a voice for its victims, was greeted by a burst of applause from 40 students as he strode into the seminar room yesterday morning in Boston University's School of Theology. He was applauded again at the close when he thanked his class for the joy of teaching. One student asked Wiesel when he was to meet with Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev this weekend so that class members could pray for him.

For two hours, the professor, historian, author and occasional pitcher taught his once-a-week seminar in "The Literature of Memory," which yesterday focused on the Shakespeare tragedy, Hamlet.

But a theme of Wiesel's life, the need to find a way of "redeeming the sins of the past by remembering them" emerged again and again through the academic discussion.

Wiesel spoke of Hamlet's "mission" to remember the killing of his father, the king of Elsinore.

It was a "mission of memory," Wiesel said in an interview, that evoked his own gradual "rebellion against silence" about the Holocaust.

If it hadn't been for Hamlet, who killed his father's murderer, Wiesel said, "his father's murder would have been nonexistent . . . It was his burden to remember. . . . The burden of that knowledge was suspended on Hamlet's lips thoughout the whole play."

Words were once suspended on Wiesel's lips, as well. It took him 10 years to write his first book about his experience in the Nazi death camps, "La Nuit," or "The Night," which was published in 1956.

Wiesel, 58, had his own burden to remember after being freed in 1945 from Buchenwald, after losing his mother, father and a sister in Nazi concentration camps. That burden was to become the literary conscience of the Holocaust.

But Wiesel's response was different than that of Hamlet, he said. Rather than becoming "an executioner for justice" of those who were responsible for the extermination of six million Jews during World War II, Wiesel has, through 26 books, "chosen the more sublime vengeance of memory."

Until that point, he had moved from despair to despair, he said.

But he learned that he had "to go deeper into that despair" to discover ''the major motivation of my life" -- and his voice as a survivor and chronicler.

"The danger, of course, is going into the abyss of madness and suicide, but I managed to find one further step level that allowed me to break out."

He found that in his desire to help and to write for others. "That is the only way," he said in his office, a pitcher of flowers from his students on his desk.

"If you want to break out of your despair simply for your own sake, I don't think it will work. You will continue to suffer in your solitude and loneliness. But if you want to do it for someone else, a child even, one other person, then somehow you can find your way out."

Wiesel, who lives in New York, commutes once a week to Boston University, where he has been one of the most popular and respected professors since he joined the faculty in 1976.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for teaching people "how not succumb to despair." Although he is viewed by some as a man preoccupied with a dispiriting theme of human cruelty, Wiesel is in fact a man who enjoys entertaining friends with songs and exchanging jokes.

He exudes a positive faith that the suffering peoples of the world -- Jews and non-Jews from Argentina to Cambodia to the Soviet Union -- will find a "a common language" of hope to prevail over evil.

In interviews, his students said they value his warmth and humor as much as they value his incisive mind.

He displayed a touch of that humor by begging students "not to judge too harshly" the pitch he tossed Sunday night to open the second game of the World Series and by telling the story of how he came to be in Shea Stadium.

The day after Wiesel won the Nobel, an aide to Peter Ueberroth, the baseball commissioner, asked Wiesel to be at his phone at a certain time the next day.

The next day, the aide called again to remind him. Finally the aide called to say that Ueberroth was ready.

"My son had appeared at my press conference in New York in a New York Yankees jacket, so I thought maybe he was calling to protest or something," Wiesel said. "Instead he told me, 'I want to bestow a great very important honor on you. Would you throw out the first ball in the World Series on Saturday?' "

Wiesel said he told Ueberroth that he could not because it was the Jewish Sabbath. Ueberroth came back with a counteroffer: Sunday. Again, Wiesel demurred, because it was Sukkoth, the Jewish holiday.

Finally, Wiesel said, Ueberroth called and said he had consulted with rabbis and was told it would be all right to throw out the ball after sundown and that the game could be delayed so he wouldn't have to travel before sundown.

"So he got me there," Wiesel said to laughter.

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