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• Title: Arthur A. Cohen's Debt to Elie Wiesel.
• Author : Studies in American Jewish Literature
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 195 KB

Description

In a 1990 review of 1980s American Jewish fiction, Alan Berger notes that the Holocaust refugee in Cynthia Ozick's short story "Levitation" is modeled on Elie Wiesel. "The refugee ... is clearly based on Wiesel himself," Berger writes (228). This refugee urges fellow guests at a Manhattan party to "Come to modern times ... Come to yesterday" (356). Both prophetic and mystical, the refugee, like Wiesel, stresses the link among historical times and the importance of apprehending the Holocaust. Berger's keen observation invites consideration of a parallel dynamic. A similar literary use of Wiesel's extraordinary life occurred a decade before "Levitation." In 1972, Arthur A. Cohen published In the Days of Simon Stern, a grand, philosophical novel in which the eponymous Messianic figure aims to protect Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel very likely served as a model for Simon Stern and for Simon's friend and the novel's narrator, Nathan Gaza. Cohen and Wiesel's short-lived but devoted friendship informed Cohen's daring fiction, a fiction that may in turn have encouraged "Levitation." In his own days, Arthur A. Cohen was a remarkable figure. Before his death in 1986 at the age of fifty-eight, Cohen had garnered abundant critical notice for his four books on Jewish theology, his five novels, his edited volumes on religious thought and on visual art, his catalogues for his Modern Art bookstore Ex Libris, and his many short stories and essays. Since his death, Cohen has received occasional scholarly attention, mostly for his book on Holocaust theology, The Tremendum, and for In the Days of Simon Stern, his strongest work of fiction. Michael Morgan and Steven Katz have discussed Cohen's writing on the Holocaust, which he saw as a historical discontinuity that proves both God's "infinitesimal uncontrol" and the urgent need to pursue Jewish theology. (1) And Alan Berger and Lillian S. Kremer have written about In the Days of Simon Stern with attention to its historical and theological underpinnings. In 1998, David Stern and Paul Mendes-Flohr published the splendid omnibus An Arthur A. Cohen Reader, which received particularly lengthy and appreciative reviews from Julian Levinson and Ilan Stavens. (2) Yet Cohen's books--which have been out of print since 1988--invite much more scholarly scrutiny. Cohen's writing can be daunting: the style is highly allusive and at times opaque, and his fiction and theology are equally metaphysical, more typical of pre-war Europe than post-war America. Despite its difficulty, this writing reflects the rigorous intellect and ambitious imagination of a man indeed rooted in his time and place.

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