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A Mad Desire to Dance

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Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born Jewish Nobel Laureate writer, is known today as an activist who fights a crusade against crimes of hate, violence, and persecution. His best-known work, The Night Trilogy, retells the story of his life in the Nazi concentration camps and his journey through a faith devastated in an ingenious incorporation of Jewish mystic elements into his quasi-poetic, quasi-prosaic narrative. His latest novel, A Mad Desire to Dance (Knopf, 274 pages, $25.00), is the fictional counterpoint to his masterpiece, exploring the avenue of Holocaust literature through the character Doriel Waldman, a sixty-year-old Jewish New Yorker who seeks a psychoanalyst to battle his inner demons.

Doriel seeks the help of the therapist Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt, herself a Jew born to Holocaust survivors who vowed never to speak of the horrors of Nazi Germany. During the Second World War, Doriel fled to a Polish town to hide with his father, his sister, and his brother. His mother was an agent for the Resistance movement, having infiltrated the German camp due to her blonde hair and her perfect command of Polish that allow her to pass as an Aryan woman.

At the end of the war, his brother and sister have perished in the hands of the enemy, yet his parents survive. The irony of fate, however, rears its ugly head when his parents are killed en route to Israel in a car accident. Upon their death, Doriel is brought to the United States with his uncle Reb Avrohom, an ascetic Jew who oversees his growth in the Judaistic faith to ensure that his nephew doesn't stray too far from the tree. Doriel explores the pillars of faith and theology and contemplates questions of the eternal, venturing into the holy temples of Israel and houses of holy men, Jewish philosophers and poets in New York. His identity, however, has been shattered by his circumstance, prompting him to embark on a journey to recollect the pieces lost.

Doriel is incredibly intelligent and cultured, yet he also grapples with intense anxiety, sexual frustrations and guilt, tracing his illness to an inner battle with a dybbuk, the inner demons of Eastern European Folklore. Ornery and cynical, he believes that he has descended into madness. "As far as I can read people's gazes, they see me as mad. And I've always felt I was. Mad about my parents first, then about God, study, truth, beauty and impossible love," Doriel tells the Jewish poet Yitzhok Goldfeld. Doriel battles with his fate and his self, wandering into the offices of prestigious psychoanalysts, all of who finally reject him as a hopeless case. Dr. Goldschmidt is his last resort, and as we later find out, an indirect and final solution to his quandaries.

Throughout the novel, Dr. Goldschmidt attempts to analyze him through the lenses of Freudian theory. While Doriel proves to be her most interesting case, he is also the most difficult. Doriel continually makes references to several women in his life, women who have aroused a foreign desire in him. All of them are Jewish. All of them have mesmerizing eyes and smiles so arresting that a man of lesser resolve would have succumbed to their allure, yet he yields little of himself to a life of the unknown. Doriel is intrepid in his approach to explicating the nature of the suffering Jew, yet he recoils in fear and disgust when his family, and in particular, his mother, enters the picture. Goldschmidt continues to build case after case supporting the strength of her theories, yet when she realizes that her efforts to engage in her brand of psychology are in vain, she admits defeat and acknowledges that it is Doriel himself who holds the key to vanquishing his dybbuk; that only he himself holds the answer that will award him a reprieve from a life devoid of love and emptiness.

Readers familiar with Wiesel's work will encounter several themes that resound strongly in the majority of his books. Questions that grapple the nature of good and evil, those that challenge the nature and benevolence of God, and those that assess the foundations of morality, faith, and theology abound to give his writing a richness of the profoundly philosophical and theological sort.

Although the prose is not difficult to read, the thematic tapestry of this novel is quite difficult to digest at the onset. The dialogue can be sometimes perplexing, subject to a sort of literary wordplay and semantic jargon that makes his characters at once interesting and bewildering. Yet, his narrative is sweeping and captivating. Wiesel injects a hodgepodge of Talmudic, Kabbalistic, Zionist and Hasidic elements into his writing, along with a jumble of references to rabbinic and Jewish culture that he has advocated in the bulk of his oeuvre. These only serve to reveal an understanding of a truth that is poignant and at the same time thought provoking in a novel that deconstructs identity through the eyes of a wanderer and reconstructs a variant of it in the end that instills in him a mad desire to dance.

A man of mysterious wealth and traumatic background is handed from one psychoanalyst to another. It is hoped that, because she shares culture with him, the new doctor can help the patient better. But the case of Doriel Waldman turns out to be more complicated and difficult than Thérèse Goldschmidt had realized it would be. Using Freudian theory, she attempts to understand and heal him, but her work is thwarted by his non-compliance: he insists he is just mad.

In the hands of Elie Wiesel, Doriel's madness is not simply insanity. It is a dysfunction burdened with memory and fear, responsibility and uncertainty. A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE is not an easy book to read, but it is a rewarding one as Wiesel takes us from Polish forests to the dry heat of Jerusalem, from post-war France to religious Brooklyn neighborhoods. All the while, we, like Dr. Goldschmidt, are trying to understand the haunted and lonely Doriel who, in turn, is in search of the smile of a frightened child.

It is also not an easy book to describe. In post-modernist terms, our primary narrator, Doriel, is unreliable. He thinks he is sick but also cultivates his illness. He realizes that the key to health is locked in his memories but does little to release them. It is in his relationships with women that Dr. Goldschmidt looks for answers. Doriel's life is peppered with strange and romantic encounters with women. Would an unconditional love affair free Doriel from the demons (actually the dybbuk) in his soul? Wiesel's latest seems to be about hope and love and how they can be redemptive forces in even the darkest lives, unless Doriel's version of the truth cannot be trusted at all.

Filled with references to Jewish scripture, folklore and history, Doriel's story is often told in manic bursts. His mother was a Jewish Resistance agent during the war: her blond hair and flawless Polish allowing her to pass as Aryan. Doriel spent years in hiding with his father while his mother carried messages back and forth, occasionally coming to see them. His siblings were victims of anti-Semitic violence, and though his parents survived the war, they died before he was 13 --- but not before he learned more than he wanted to know of his mother's secret life.

Adopted by his loving and patient uncle and whisked away to an Orthodox community in Brooklyn, Doriel wrestles with faith and identity. His past, and especially the memory of his parents, trouble him, and he seeks truths outside his deeply religious community. Yet, even as his search takes him in what he feels to be spiritually dangerous directions, the connections to Judaism remain essential to him.

Doriel's ravings are paired with Dr. Goldschmidt's surprisingly personal case notes. She becomes obsessed with her odd and sad patient, and fears she is doing nothing to help him.

A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE is complex and challenging, more about history, brutality and faith than mental illness. Wiesel's 50th book is a compelling whirlwind of stories within stories, truths and half-truths, poetry and mythology. It is sure to amaze and perhaps even frustrate readers and is yet another important contribution by Wiesel not only to contemporary Jewish literature but to world literature as well.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

In the late 1990s in New York, sixty year old Polish Jew Doriel Waldman knows his nightmarish childhood has left him depressed, lonely, and believing he is going insane. He reluctantly turns to psychoanalyst Dr. Therese Goldschmidt for help though he believes the shrink will do nothing to relieve him of his demons. His attitude towards the doctor is belligerent as he rants at her in anger about his youth and his solitary future.

Doriel was born in 1936. He and his father hid from the Nazis during the occupation; his two sisters were less fortunate having been killed by the bastards and he assumes suffered much worse atrocities from these beasts. His mother was part of the Polish underground resistance; ironically, God played quite a trick on the Waldman male survivors when after the war ended she died in an accident. He further explains he feels guilty as a Jew in WW II Europe who cannot even claim being a Holocaust survivor even if he was a preadolescent at the time. Therese begins to connect with her angry recalcitrant patient as he begins to understand the traumas that have left him melancholy for five decades and a slight flicker of hope as he returns to his religion for solace but even there he finds the demon inside him.

This intense look at survivors of traumas years after the events have occurred is an intense superb but extremely difficult tale to read. The audience learns what haunts Doriel (through Therese's notes) as his memories deleted the good times leaving behind an expanded bad. Fans of Elie Wiesel will appreciate this powerful character driven tale of the long term effects of a trauma on the soul of a survivor.

Harriet Klausner

Wow! "A Mad Desire To Dance" is an intellectual trip and a half. Five Stars. Easily the most profound novel I've ever read. Until reading this book, I hadn't realized that the madness of insanity begins literally from being habitually mad at something or someone or even at God. The only cure is forgiveness of one's self, than forgiveness of others and God for creating conditions that allow for a mad world to come into being seemingly unchecked. Opening to the goodness in others and oneself and becoming a social creature rather than reclusive begins and then completes the transformation.

This is a very different novel, which isn't bad. It took the first four chapters for me to get into the rhythm of the writing. Often when reading a novel one identifies with a particular character or writing style. Not so this time. If you have read other Elie Wiesel books you will find this to be quite different, yet interesting.

I would recommend this to someone capable of keeping themself from becoming a part of the storyline.

As a rule, I always finish a book once I start it, even if it is terrible. This book has proven to be the exception to that rule. It is a pompous, rambling, incoherent, boring piece of self-indulgent tripe that only someone with the stature of Elie Wiesel could get published. Of course, because it was written by Elie Wiesel, all the reviews lavish praise on it. After all, who would dare to criticize a novel by Elie Wiesel, and one that deals with Holocaust victims no less? Don't believe the reviews. This book is absolutely awful. Literary Fiction at its very self-satisfied worst.