in general be seen as “the knowledgenclass’s” justification for maintainingnitself in a position of authority in thenmedia, the government and academe.nThis fact particularly annoys Green:nThus Kristol stands history on itsnhead with a vengeance—but not withoutnpurpose. What he has done, innsum, is to attribute the destructivenelement of capitalist development. . .nto an allegedly adversary class of intellectuals—antactic borrowed fromnDaniel Bell . . . This is the purposenof the new inegalitarians; to discreditnthe very source of egalitarianism itself.nIt must be very difficult, after all, tonhave a trick you have used for yearsnagainst your opponents suddenly turnednand used against yourself. DnThe Jewish Ideological MystiquenElie Wiesel: The Testament; SummitnBooks; New York.nby Will Morriseyn^olzhenitsyn speaks for the RussianLenin crushed but could not kill: thenRussia of czarism and the OrthodoxnChurch. He does not, cannot, speak fornthe old Russian underground. Solzhennitsyn’s master, Dostoyevsky, speaks of,nif not for, part of that underground,nthe part that dreamed of democracy,nor socialism. Neither can speak for thenother part of the underground, the onlyninternational nation: the Jews.nFor years some Jews allied themselvesnwith the secular underground. The enemynof my enemy is my friend, they werentaught, and enemies were never scarce.nStill, an unusually large number ofnJews not only allied themselves withnsocialism, particularly communism, butn—to use apt religious language—convertednto it. Why?nStalin took the precaution of murderingnanyone who could have answered.nElie Wiesel, one of the best Jewishnwriters alive (there are reasons why henwill not regard that designation as condescending),nundertakes to speak fornthe dead, to remember the RussiannJewishness that Stalin tried to dis-nMr. Morrisey is associate editor ofnInterpretation: A Journal of PoliticalnPhilosophy.n14nChronicles of Culturenmember.nThe Testament begins in Israel. Wiesel,nhimself a minor character in thennovel, watches Soviet Jews arrive atnLod Airport in July, 1972. From “thenrealm of silence and fear” they enter Israelnsilently and fearfully. But memory,nmemory of lovers, family, and (true)ncomrades fast overcomes silence andnfear. Soon they can laugh and weep,ntoast life, the future, peace—perhapsntheir first free expression of feeling inna lifetime of enforced guardedness.nWiesel sees a young man who doesnnot participate. He is a mute, the sonnof Paltiel Gerhsonovich Kossover, anpoet “liquidated” by Stalin some twentynyears before. Taken back to Wiesel’snapartment, he insists on staying awakenall night; it will transpire that he wantsnto write his father’s memoir, his Testament,nfrom memory.nSoviet communism, Judaism, traveln(or, as is said of Jews, wandering),nsilence, fear, memory, reunion, love,nfamily, friendship, laughter, life, thenfuture, peace, freedom, poetry: Wieselnpresents his themes in the briefnprologue. In Paltiel Kossover’s letternto his son, which follows the prologue,nwe learn the poet’s teachings on somenof these themes. “[T]he very essence ofnthe noble tradition of Judaism” consistsnof a kind of universal memory system,nthe Book of Creation wherein “all ournactions are inscribed.” Memory servesnCreation, life (and therefore the future)nnnbecause without it there is only oblivion.nAnd although Paltiel Kossover doesn”not know what life is” and will “dienwithout knowing,” he knows that communism,nin exacting selective amnesia,ndoes not serve life. “Don’t follow thenpath I took,” he tells his son, “it doesn’tnlead to truth.”nTruth, for a Jew, is to dwell amongnhis brothers. Link your destiny to thatnof your people; otherwise you willnsurely reach an impasse.n”I lived a Communist and I die a Jew”;nhaving lived, inadvertently, for death,nhe dies for life—a theme on whichnChristians have no monopoly.nThe remainder of the book exploresnthe subtleties of the themes, the gainingnof the teachings. Wiesel juxtaposesnshort chapters concerning Paltiel Kossover’snson—especially his recovery ofnhis father’s memoir—with sections ofnthe Testament, the story of a Jew wanderingnfrom his native city in Russia and thenfaith he learned there to Romania duringnthe First World War, Berlin in the 20’s,nParis in the 30’s, briefly to Palestinenand then to Spain during the civil war,nto Moscow during the Second WorldnWar and finally back to his native city,nthe prison there and to Jewishness.nAll Jews “were victims of fear” duringnPaltiel Kossover’s childhood innRussia. There was fear of stern teachers—anfear that led to knowledge, somenthing to love—and fear of Christiansnand their pogroms, which led neithernto knowledge nor to love. His mother’snsongs (the source of his poetic nature.”)nsoothed the fear of teachers, but thenonly immediate remedy for the fearnof death at Christian hands was silence:nthe Kossover family hid beneath thenfloor of the barn while murdering toughsnshrieked “Death to the Jews!” ThroughoutnThe Testament, silence means bothntorture and salvation—contrasting withnspeech, which means both the babblingnof false prophets and the poetry of truenones.nThe move to Romania brought nonreal uprooting, for “Jews remain Jewsn