The Oath by Elie Wiesel

First published:Le Serment de Kolvillag, 1973 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Parable

Time of work: The early twentieth century to the early 1970’s

Locale: Kolvillag, a village in central Europe

Principal Characters:

• Azriel, the only survivor of the Kolvillag pogrom
• Moshe, a mystic, Azriel’s mentor
• Shmuel, Azriel’s father, the keeper of the Pinkas (the history of Kolvillag)
• The young Man, a would-be suicide to whom Azriel tells his story

The Novel

In “The Old Man and the Child,” the first of the three parts of The Oath, Azriel begins telling a young man a little about Kolvillag, his native village, somewhere in central Europe between the Dniepr River and the Carpathian Mountains. Kolvillag had been ruled by several nations but no longer exists. “I am Kolvillag,” says Azriel, “and I am going mad.” His madness results from an oath not to tell the secret of his village.

The young man learns that Azriel is highly regarded for his extensive learning by a wide variety of people: “He made them understand what was happening to them; it was always more serious or simpler than they had imagined.” Because Azriel cannot tell his friend more about Kolvillag, he talks instead about his life after leaving there, about wandering through Europe during the years between the two world wars, and about Rachel, the only woman who has ever mattered to him.

The young man is tormented by memories of his mother, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who lost her first husband and son in the Holocaust. Because the young man has been contemplating suicide, Azriel decides to break his oath of fifty years: “I’ll transmit my experience to him and he, in turn, will be compelled to do the same.... He must stay alive until he has transmitted his message.” This message is contained in the Pinkas, the history of Kolvillag kept over many generations, the last chronicler being Shmuel, Azriel’s father, the official registrar of the community.

The events leading to the destruction of Kolvillag are described in part two of The Oath, “The Child and the Madman.” The trouble begins when Yancsi, a Christian youth and bully, disappears and is presumed killed. The Gentiles of Kolvillag assume that Jews are responsible, but the Jews consider the thought of ritual murder in the twentieth century ridiculous. The Prefect of the village at first promises to keep the Jews safe but later says that a pogrom is inevitable.

The Oath then becomes the story of Azriel’s friend and mentor, Moshe, who volunteers to be the scapegoat. Moshe is a religious scholar and mystic who claims to be able to read minds but chooses to live in isolation. He is satisfied to be thought a madman and to teach all that he knows to Azriel. The rabbis argue that Moshe’s offer of self-sacrifice is pointless and is a rejection of God, but he goes to the police anyway and is savagely beaten. Davidov, the leader of the Jewish community, seeks help from the attorney Stefan Braun, a Jew who does not live as a Jew. Braun declines to help because, as he tells his son, “The era of crusades and pogroms is gone. Ours is dominated by humanism, liberalism.”

Moshe’s sacrificial offer is rejected by the Christian authorities, who are convinced, however, more than before that Jews are behind Yancsi’s death. Addressing his fellow Jews at the synagogue, Moshe makes them swear an oath that whoever survives will not reveal what is about to happen since knowledge of previous atrocities has not stopped the pogroms over the centuries.

The ensuing slaughter is described in graphic detail in the final section, “The Madman and the Book.” Shmuel passes the Pinkas on to Azriel, asking his son to be their witness. Before escaping, Azriel sees the Christians, driven mad by blood lust, turn against one another. He also sees Yancsi, who has returned in time to die. Azriel is the only survivor of Kolvillag. The Oath ends with the young man assuming the memory of Kolvillag.

The Characters

Azriel’s motivations are complex. By giving him the Pinkas, Shmuel hands his son the values of memory, tradition, language, and community. Azriel increasingly respects these values as he grows older, but he is burdened by his duty to Kolvillag, saying that the oath “ties me to a destiny that is not mine.” He has become more a symbol than a human being: “My life does not belong to me.... All I can call my own is a forbidden city I must rebuild each day, only to watch it end in horror each night.”

Moshe chooses silence and death, and, in abiding by Moshe’s oath, Azriel is living a form of death even as Kolvillag lives in him. In deciding to break the oath, he gives life to the suicidal young man and preserves the memory of his village. Azriel says that he is afraid only of indifference, and his story releases the young man from indifference to life: “Azriel knocked down the walls I had erected around myself.... By allowing me to enter his life, he gave meaning to mine.”

Azriel may be the protagonist of The Oath, but the story is dominated by the mysterious and unpredictable Moshe, who responds to the indifference of man and God with silence and to sympathy with laughter. According to Moshe, God understands silence; man does not. Silence bypasses man for a direct relationship with God. For the Jews of Kolvillag, Moshe personifies “the combined virtues of the sage, the prince and the visionary.”

Moshe is the opposite of his friend Shmuel, because he is concerned with eternity rather than history. He longs to transcend the world rather than transform it (as Azriel wants to do during a brief period as a revolutionary). Moshe is most significant for his effect on others, especially Azriel: “Thanks to him, like him, I fell under the spell of the inaccessible.... I aspired to trace new paths. I hoped to influence destiny.” Through the oath, Moshe creates Azriel’s destiny.

Critical Context

Elie Wiesel was born and reared in an Orthodox Jewish community in a village in Transylvania. In 1944, he and his family were deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Although Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, his father, mother, and younger sister did not. Liberated in 1945, he chose to go to France. In 1958, he published a memoir of the Holocaust, La Nuit (1958; Night, 1960), sometimes described as a novella, although Wiesel himself has said that it is not a work of fiction. Since that time, Wiesel has published more than two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, all of which directly or indirectly reflect on the Holocaust. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wiesel’s preoccupation with the Holocaust and its meaning for humanity gives his work an exceptional intensity and unity. The theme of silence, for example, so central to The Oath, is prominent throughout Wiesel’s work. In particular, his earlier novel La Ville de la chance (1962; The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964) should be read with The Oath. Both books, while acknowledging the claims of silence, ultimately affirm the responsibility to speak.

Also noteworthy in The Oath is the role of Moshe, a recurring character in Wiesel’s works. Mystic and madman, he represents an essential dimension of human experience—one which needs to be balanced by rational discourse but which, if repressed, will resurface in a destructive form.

Bibliography

Berenbaum, Michael. The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel, 1979.

Brown, Robert McAfee. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity, 1983.

Estess, Ted L. Elie Wiesel, 1980.

Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel, 1982.