June Books

Those who know me well know that I love to spend time browsing used bookstores and thrift stores looking to build my library with inexpensive copies of great books. This past month I found several worthwhile books. Among them were two books which I also read this month -- Night by Elie Wiesel and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitzyn.

Both books deal with a similar topic.

Elie Wiesel's Night recounts his personal experiences as a Jew in Nazi Germany. Wiesel takes his reader along through the increasing persecution of the Jews from at first being merely second-class citizens to being rounded up into the ghettos, to being herded in boxcars like cattle, to the horrors of Auschwitz, and finally to the liberation by the Allies. It is a harrowing tale indeed.

In A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitzyn takes his reader into a single day in the life of a prisoner in one of Stalin's gulags. He recounts in great detail the life of a single prisoner from the pre-dawn reveille to the final banging of the rail again at night. The story is just a typical day in the life of typical zek (prisoner), and yet the story is anything but typical. In this story the reader is faced with all the creulty, insanity, and futility of Stalin's gulag.

In Night, the years of unimaginable creulty and destruction by the Nazis blurs into a single night, but in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a single day becomes the symbol of the entire 10 or 25 year sentence in the gulag.

I believe these two books are worthy reading for anyone. We need to remember and understand the past, which these books protray with vivid detail, so that the same idiocy does not overtake again in the future. "He who does not rememer the past is condemned to repeat it."

But as a pastor, I found these books especially interesting because there are spiritual themes that cannot be easily missed by the careful reader.

In Night, the reader encounters Wiesel's own crisis of faith. A very devout Hasidic Jew before the holocaust, Wiesel nonetheless has to battle the inner demons of doubt and feelings of abandonment. Who would not under such circumstances? Where is God in the midst of such human suffering? At one point while being forced to watch the hanging of a small boy with an angelic face, Wiesel answers the question, "Where is God? I'll tell you where he is, he is on those gallows." The answer makes the reader think that Wiesel has embraced the Death of God theology, i.e. that the idea of God is irrelevant to modern man. But Wiesel does not become an atheist; he does not reject his faith. He returns to prayer. It is Wiesel's faith that sustains him until his liberation. Where is God in the face of human suffering? The answer is that God is right there suffering alongside us. So identified is he with his people, that it is God's neck that is stretched from those gallows!

In A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ivan is not a particularly religious man. He believes in God but has been put off by the extravagence and immorality of his local Orthodox priest. Still he finds the life of Alyosha, a fellow-prisoner who is a Baptist, intriguing and somewhat attractive. Alyosha, unlike so many of the other prisoners, can be trusted, works without complaint, does not steal or cheat, and bears his imprisonment with quiet fortitude. It is amazing to me that this Baptist was protrayed in such a positive light, especially considering that the book was published with the official approval of the Communist party during the reign of Khrushcev. Alyosha the Baptist is not the hero of the book, but he clearly is the most moral and admirable character in the gulag. And what is it that makes the difference in Alyosha's life? What is that sets him so far apart from his fellow prisoners? It is his faith, and in particular his desire to be like Christ in his life. I am convinced that the more we live like Christ the more attractive our faith is to those around us. Alyosha is able to bear his imprisonment because he is confident it is God's will for his life. That is true faith!

I highly recommend both of these books, especially to my fellow pastors.