Customer Reviews

The Sonderberg Case

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is Wiesel's first novel in awhile. I love his writing. This is a story within a story. It is a story of a man's life & a story of a criminal case the man covered as a theater critic. The case evolves from a simple case of murder to a case involving false identities & the Holocaust. The narrator also has an identity he can't remember, since he was a Jewish child who was sent away to be saved during the Holocaust. He remembers parents lost but forgotten. He remembers being unwanted by the family of the girl who saved him. He loves his Grandfather, who came from the family who adopted him. Who nurtured him & who loves him & where do his own wife & children fit into his life? Wiesel takes all these questions & molds them into this short & very readable novel.

Noble Prize Winning author Elie Wiesel is an elegant writer and novelist. His prose is poetic and a joy to read. His stories are interesting, moving, passionate, suspenseful. He is the author of over fifty books, novels, plays, volumes of conversations, and a cantata. His eloquence and thought-provoking language is seen in this tale posed within the novel: "The story of the two drops of water in the ocean that look for each other in vain and meet only when solitude and nostalgia turn them into tears."

This novel describes the effect that a trial has upon a man and how it causes him to rethink his own life, especially the questions about his past that he hasn't answered. He, Yedidyah, a failed actor turned drama critic, is assigned to cover the murder trial of Werner Sonderberg who allegedly murdered his uncle. He and his editor think of trials as dramas, plays. But is it a drama for the defendant, he asks his editor. You tell me, the editor replies. Although Wiesel does not reveal it, his name Yedidyah is ironic, for while he is tormented by his past, Yedidyah in Hebrew means "beloved by God."

The trial opens with a shock. Asked to plead, Werner Sonderberg states, "Guilty and not guilty." The case seems simple, and the prosecutor is passionately certain that Werner is guilty. Both Werner and the murdered man are Germans. The murdered man, who is elderly, introduces himself to Werner as his uncle. The two get along well, at first. Werner even ignores his fiancée frequently to be with him. The two men decide to go to the mountains for a week's rest. While there, they go off on the third day for a walk in the mountains. A maid later testifies that she heard the two men arguing before the walk. Werner returns from the walk alone, checks out of the hotel, and travels home. A day later, his uncle's body is found at the bottom of a cliff. The prosecutor insists that Werner pushed him to his death.

Yedidyah's report of the trial is woven into his ruminations about his as-of yet not fully disclosed life. It includes the tales of two women: a German non-Jewish heroine who is tormented into insanity by fellow German town people because of her heroism, and Yedidyah's wife, who he almost leads into despair because of his obsession with Werner's trial. Who is Werner, who is his uncle, and who is Yedidyah? What happened on the mountain top? Are the lives of Yedidyah and Werner comparable or are they mirror images? The result of the interweaving of tales is a tapestry of art, a montage of striking colors of many hues, tragic depictions of several lives.

Will Yedidyah and Werner ever find meaning in their lives, fulfillment, solace, love? Can they accept the last wisdom of Yedidyah's "grandfather": "Yes, my child, life is a beginning; but everything in life is a new beginning. As long as you're alive, you're immortal because you're open to the life of the living" to the warm presence of others, to the world, to joy?

I hate to say anything against a person like Elie Wiesel, whom I infinitely respect, but I thought this book was just OK. It wasn't bad by any means and I'd still say it's worth reading, but it wasn't fabulously great either. The main premise is interesting: Yedidyah, a theatre critic living in New York, discovers he's not the person he thought he was; meanwhile a German citizen on trial in America pleads both guilty & not guilty to the murder of his uncle. The stories interlock and connect, giving us an interesting perspective in what at first glance seems like a black-and-white issue. The two premises are well-thought-out and make for a good parallel.

The book is a mere 178 pages, yet we don't get to either of these premises until perhaps 50 pages in. The first 50 pages are a somewhat rambling discussion of Yedidyah's life, the philosophies in which he finds comfort, and his relationship to his wife and children. I acknowledge that a book always requires exposition, but I feel that when the exposition takes up more than a quarter of the book, there's something wrong. While some of the information we learn about Yedidyah is interesting in its own right, we don't really need most of the back story. We just need to understand Yedidyah's relationship with his family (which can be laid out in only a few scenes), learn that he writes theatre reviews, and learn that he is chosen to write about the trial because the regular reporter is gone. That should take 10 or 20 pages at most. It doesn't need to take 50. Everything else, consequently, is crammed into only a few pages.

In spite of all that, the writing style is good and the scenes the author sets are always well-written. This is a short, intense book that can be devoured within a day or two. It's depressing, but you don't read it and lose faith in all humanity; it's about the Holocaust, but obliquely so. It's easy to read and gives a lot of food for thought, even if the story-telling itself could be better.

Wiesel's book details the experience of a theater-lover turned theater-critic who is forced into covering a trial because, well, if modern trials prove anything, it's that they're quite theatrical in their nature. The book takes place during the 1950s or 1960s during a time rife with trials bringing former Nazis to justice (think: the Eichmann Trial of 1961), but unlike what you might expect, the trial doesn't put a former Nazi on the stand. Rather, the defendant is accused of killing his German "uncle" on U.S. soil. The book is far less about the trial itself than it is about the reporter, Yedidyah, and his inner dialogue with his supposed grandfather and the people he thinks are his relatives who perished in the Holocaust. His inner dialogue ends up revealing some fascinating tidbits about the life he's led and what he thought he knew, and so as to not spoil it, I won't spoil it. The book ends with an awkward dialogue between Yedidyah and the accused many years after the trial takes place, and the accused comes clean about what really happened. It's not exactly what you would have suspected, or maybe it was more predictable than Wiesel would have wanted.

The book was difficult to put down, if only because you want to know exactly who Yedidyah really is and what exactly happened between the accused and his German "uncle," but the book often loses itself by switching back and forth between first and third person, which I found quite bothersome. Likewise, the inner dialogues that Yedidyah has are beyond what I would call stream-of-consciousness. In fact, they dabble in the completely random and out-of-nowhere stream of thought. He quotes French thinkers and great rabbis and the Talmud and the works of great authors long dead, and sometimes, it feels forced and confusing. However, perhaps that's just part of who Yedidyah is -- confused, profound, and brilliant. The book was translated from the original French, which makes me wonder whether something was lost in translation. Overall, it was an excellent read, if you can get past the jumps in the storyline, the out-of-the-blue quotes, and random thought narratives.

I read the reviews by S. Balmuth and Chaviva G., and I agree with their criticisms. As a novel, the work has the shortcomings that they describe. There are other shortcomings too. The story of Werner Sonderberg does not seem to me to be well integrated into the story of Yedidiyah Wasserman. The resolution of Sonderberg's story, or at least of his murder trial, leaves much to be desired. Surely the salient fact brought in at the end to resolve the trial could and should have been known at the beginning. It is a mistake in the plot. The relationship between Yedidyah and Alika was strained in ways and for reasons that weren't entirely convincing to me. Two intelligent, caring, and committed people could have better managed their difficulties. So we could wish for a novel that had all of the fine qualities of this one that also had more novelistic perfection, a more perfect plot.

Still, in spite of that, I agree with all of the other reviewers that the writing was very good. The philosophical depth was greater than we encounter in most novels. It was a book full of meaning, a book full of caring, a book full of love.

Wiesel doesn't just address important issues of the meaning of life, he addresses them in a personal but enlightening way. He and we cannot answer the big questions but we can clarify them and shed light on them and try to find our way through them in a thoughtful and principled way, and Wiesel does that and shows us one way to do it. It's not a way that will be meaningful to all readers. The problems that Wiesel and his people and his generation faced were starker and fiercer and more frightening than most of us ever encounter. Most of us, to our great fortune, have never faced them. Some of us will have trouble understanding what he is even talking about.

So be it. But for those for whom Wiesel's and his generation's experience are important and meaningful, and I count myself one of them, I think this is a fine little book.