I’m always looking for hope so the title of Howard Reich’s book, The Art of Inventing Hope (2019), was a natural for me. The added bonus in the second part of the title was that this book comes from conversations with one of the world’s most revered holocaust survivors, Elie Wiesel.
Reich’s book is about the children of holocaust survivors and the burden of responsibility they shoulder for hearing their parents’ stories of inhumanity and brutality. It is also about making sure that those stories are not lost. Reich discerned through his interactions with Wiesel that children of survivors, himself included, have an important responsibility to remember what happened, how it happened, and guard against such atrocities ever taking place again.
Howard Reich has been an arts reviewer for the Chicago Tribune and grew up in Skokie, Illinois, a community literally blocks away from my current home. Both Reich’s parents were survivors but he knew little of their story because neither wanted to revisit the horror of their experience; they had come to America and to Skokie after WWII to begin again and they didn’t want their children to be captive to the story of their survival. Fate resulted in Reich being asked to interview Elie Wiesel at Symphony Center in Chicago, which led to a series of long meetings that drove Reich deeper into his own family’s story and created a lasting relationship between the two men.
Although Skokie was a growing suburb in the 1950s that welcomed Jewish families and provided synagogues for worship, Reich was told to not reveal that he was Jewish unless he knew he was absolutely safe in doing so. Regardless of the secrecy about being Jewish, Skokie became one of the most prominent areas in the U.S.A. for Jewish immigrants to settle. Skokie drew national attention when neo-Nazi Frank Collin threatened to stage a Nazi march in its streets, an issue that terrified the Jewish residents in the community. Ultimately the question of the neo-Nazi march turned into one of contested First Amendment (U.S. Constitutions) rights. While Jewish citizens support open speech and journalism as a general matter of principle, Skokie village attorney Harvey Schwartz captured the sentiments of many who experienced the threat of active neo-Nazi presence by saying, “What I realized at that moment was that what we were facing had nothing to do with the First Amendment. When someone wants to come marching into your town, with the announced intention to kill you, there was hardly anything left to discuss” (p. 6).
“If you are a child of a survivor, the story is always there with you, whether you recognize it or not, acknowledge it or not, discuss it or not” (p. 19). The shadow of the holocaust changed the survivors so dramatically that their world view, their habits, and relationships are all influenced in ways that cause their children to be almost as traumatized as the survivors themselves. It is this burden that calls the children of survivors to probe more deeply and to learn so that they can tell the stories that their parents dared not tell. Instead of living from the emptiness of lost grandparents and aunts/uncles to Hitler’s genocide, Wiesel contended that the next generation, the children of survivors, have to turn their parents’ tragedies into something positive – a love of humanity not to be wasted but to be used in “helping others, understanding others, living with others” (p. 46). This is one of the primary ways that hope in the future is invented, regardless of the atrocities that still take place around the world today.
Reich shared many stories of his interactions with Wiesel, including numerous quotes that stand as a testament to hope. Indeed, Wiesel and other survivors overcame unjustified and vicious bigotry by answering barbarity with civility, renouncing revenge in favor of advocating for fairness and justice for all. In the United Nations’ special session on January 24, 2005, marking sixty years since the Nazi death camps, Wiesel said “The Jewish witness speaks of his people’s suffering as a warning” (p. 108), which calls for an active pessimism “Not to give up. Because of genocide, you must do more, you must work harder.”
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