Zachary T. Musgrave / ENGL 212 003 / 10 November 2007

 

            Elie Wiesel’s The Gates of the Forest is intense. I really can’t find another word to sum up the emotional impact and philosophical meaning of this novel, set in Eastern Europe during World War II. The main character, Gregor, is a young Jewish man tortured by war, doubt, and distrust: not so much due to what the Nazis and their many and varied imitators did to his friends and family, but due to the seeming absence of one omnipotent deity, hereafter known as God. The Gates of the Forest deals predominantly with Gregor’s sometimes-on sometimes-off relationship with God; certain emphasized themes include seeking refuge in religion to escape pain and suffering, questioning God’s caring or existence due to the travesties of a terrible time in world history, and the role of love and trust in developing a person’s total character and soul.

            The book starts off with Gregor hiding in a cave in the forest, hiding from the Hungarian army because they’ve deported all the Jews in his town’s ghetto and will shoot him if he is found. He is soon joined by the mysterious Gavriel, who is a bit of a paradox because he seems lost (he doesn’t even remember his own name so Gregor gives him his Jewish one) and yet secure and certain of his place in the world (Gavriel, unlike Gregor, is capable of laughing at what he sees as the irrationality and ludicrous nature of the war and genocide going on outside the cave). Soon enough, the Hungarians discover the two men’s hideout and Gavriel sacrifices himself to protect Gregor, who goes to his family’s maid’s house near the Rumanian border. But Gregor never forgets Gavriel or his philosophy and cherishes the possibility of meeting again. Gavriel even says, “If our paths have crossed, it must be that our meeting conceals some meaning. Let’s discover it and study it. If we find nothing, and our meeting seems to have no significance, then we must impose one upon it” (Wiesel 20). It is due to this apparent importance given to their meeting that for the rest of his life, Gregor searches in vain for the one whom he named Gavriel.

            Gregor hides for some time with his family’s maid, Maria, posing as her sister’s deaf-dumb son because his foreign accent would be very noticeable otherwise. Partly due to his supposed descent from Ileana, a woman whose charms were so great all the village’s men fell in love with her, the villagers grow to love him as one of their own and use him as a confessional, telling him all their most private secrets that they could never tell their priest. One villager says to him, while in the process of spilling his soul, “It is good to have you among us. You, at least, are happy. You don’t know what life’s about, and that’s fortunate” (Wiesel 73). In a sense, Gregor serves as a direct connection to God according to the peasants’ Christian beliefs – he represents a man without sin, without temptation, and so very fit to accept contrition. The villagers fully trust him partly because they can’t trust anyone else, but mostly because they want to escape their earthly pain and suffering through confessing to God.

            Gregor’s time is cut short in the village when he is forced to play Judas in a play put on for the entire village. He is beaten, stoned, and ridiculed on stage with the villagers inciting the other actors (their children) to exact retribution for the Jewish people’s supposed wrongs. Eventually Gregor speaks, telling them who he is and why they are wrong, almost as a sort of miracle that shows the villagers how unchristian they really are. But before they can continue stoning him, the rich mayor (Petruskanu) spirits him away to join the Partisans, Jewish freedom fighters living in the woods. While there, he meets his old friend Leib the Lion, who represents all that is strong, holy, and pure in the Jewish struggle against the Holocaust. He also meets Clara, Leib’s angry girlfriend, and inexplicably falls in love with her. Gregor’s soul is developed by this true love for Clara; he uses his love to become strong, and at a rather random moment he tells her so: “All of a sudden, without touching her, without even looking at her, he told her that he loved her” (Wiesel 185).

            Sadly, when trying to secure the release of a possible Gavriel from the local prison, Leib is captured and (probably) eventually executed. The rest of the Partisans cannot believe this, because Leib was their leader and pseudo-demigod. He could do anything. But in a way it was for the best, as Gavriel said, “…[that] separation contains as much of a mystery as meeting. In both cases a door opens: in meeting it opens on the future, in separation on the past. It’s the same door.” (Wiesel 50).

            It is around this time, while being questioned by the Partisans regarding Leib’s arrest, that Gregor once again questions God’s existence. He can’t imagine why God would allow Leib to forsake them and imagines God really doesn’t care about their survival or spiritual integrity. For a most of the novel Gregor said, “I don’t know what it is to be angry… I’m not afraid of anger” yet after Leib’s arrest he begins to feel it for the first time (Wiesel 13).

            Eventually, the war is over and Gregor randomly meets Clara in Paris. Though they both know she is still madly in love with Leib, Gregor still convinces her to marry him. Not surprisingly, their union is rocky at best and Gregor begins to revert to the state of being he occupied during the war. He becomes tired of life, saying “It’s a strange feeling, a weariness which is neither physical nor mental, which affects neither the body nor the brain but only the memory” (Wiesel 114).

            Somehow Gregor finds his Hasidic Jewish faith again, and in a long private debate with his rabbi expresses his life’s outlook, exclaiming “I have only one purpose: not to cause others to suffer. My dream is a modest one… I’m no longer intent upon measuring myself against fate and saving humanity” (Wiesel 196). He doesn’t feel he can really count on God because God doesn’t seem to care about him, even though he does hold love and does to some extent believe. In one last desperate attempt to reunite with Gavriel, Gregor latches on to a stranger who resembles his dead friend from the cave. The stranger forces Gregor to expel all his negative emotion in the retelling of his life’s story, and Gregor returns home feeling as if he finally understands how God operates in the world.

                        The Gates of the Forest is definitely an experience to read, and a cathartic one at that. Gregor’s emotional and spiritual rollercoaster ride symbolizes the mental struggle experienced by all people of Jewish descent in comprehending the Holocaust, and afterwards coming to terms with it and learning to live normally again. As one of the proverbs in the front of the book states so eloquently, “God made man because he loves stories” (Wiesel Preface). Elie Wiesel tells a good one.

Bibliography

 

Wiesel, Elie. The Gates of the Forest. New York: Schocken Books. 1982.