A Mad Desire to Dance

Wow! "A Mad Desire To Dance" is an intellectual trip and a half. Five Stars. Easily the most profound novel I've ever read. Until reading this book, I hadn't realized that the madness of insanity begins literally from being habitually mad at something or someone or even at God. The only cure is forgiveness of one's self, than forgiveness of others and God for creating conditions that allow for a mad world to come into being seemingly unchecked. Opening to the goodness in others and oneself and becoming a social creature rather than reclusive begins and then completes the transformation.

When a Nobel Prize winning author publishes a new novel, it is necessary for serious readers of fine literature to sit up and take notice. Elie Wiesel-- author of more than fifty books-- has shared with the world, yet another truly wonderful and thought-provoking story titled, A Mad Desire to Dance. In this novel, Wiesel chronicles the tormented life of Doriel Waldman. Told in his own words and spanning through several decades of his life, across three continents, Doriel engrosses himself in a quest to pinpoint the cause of his "madness." Commissioning the help of a psychoanalyst to find the source of his self-proclaimed illness, we come to understand the psyche of the protagonist through the notes and the exchanges with his therapist, Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt. During the German occupation of Poland during World War II, the Waldmans, a Jewish family, were forced to hide in tight quarters in an old farmhouse, for which they had to pay a monthly rent. For fear of being seen, and, thus, given over to the Germans for deportation to a concentration camp, the Waldmans were not able to leave their confines during the day, and had to remain absolutely silent when the owners of the house had visitors. During this time in hiding, Doriel's older sister and younger brother tragically had their lives cut short by the violence and pestilence that accompanies all wars, thus rendering Doriel an only child. Leah, Doriel's mother, was infrequently present in the farmhouse during the war because of her commitment to the Resistance, which sought intelligence to use against the occupying Germans in underground warfare. Surviving the horrors of war, Doriel's life is forever changed when his parents are killed in a car accident shortly after the liberation. Left as an orphan, Doriel is generously taken in by an uncle who persuades him to come to Brooklyn and begin studying Holy Scripture. During this time, Doriel realizes his fear of women. Although, drawn to the beauty of women, upon the brink of becoming intimate with a woman, he almost consciously sabotages his relationships in order to remain a love-recluse. Accompanied by the guilt that he should have been with his parents on the day they died, Doriel feels like a prisoner in his own life. Armed with an existential outlook on love, Doriel uses Dostoyevsky as the bricks and Nietzsche as the mortar to build a protective fortress around himself where he hides from uncomfortable questions that threaten to root out his fears, thus frustrating Dr. Goldschmidt. From the very start, readers are given a glimpse of Doriel's "madness." On page one, the question is asked: "Is a madman who knows he's mad really mad?" thus setting up the premise of the novel. Doriel had many unanswered questions about the senselessness of the war, which ultimately morphed into the "madness" that tormented him. Beautifully written and morally gripping, A Mad Desire to Dance is truly a work of art. Reviewed by Joe Kopac

Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born Jewish Nobel Laureate writer, is known today as an activist who fights a crusade against crimes of hate, violence, and persecution. His best-known work, The Night Trilogy, retells the story of his life in the Nazi concentration camps and his journey through a faith devastated in an ingenious incorporation of Jewish mystic elements into his quasi-poetic, quasi-prosaic narrative. His latest novel, A Mad Desire to Dance (Knopf, 274 pages, $25.00), is the fictional counterpoint to his masterpiece, exploring the avenue of Holocaust literature through the character Doriel Waldman, a sixty-year-old Jewish New Yorker who seeks a psychoanalyst to battle his inner demons. Doriel seeks the help of the therapist Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt, herself a Jew born to Holocaust survivors who vowed never to speak of the horrors of Nazi Germany. During the Second World War, Doriel fled to a Polish town to hide with his father, his sister, and his brother. His mother was an agent for the Resistance movement, having infiltrated the German camp due to her blonde hair and her perfect command of Polish that allow her to pass as an Aryan woman. At the end of the war, his brother and sister have perished in the hands of the enemy, yet his parents survive. The irony of fate, however, rears its ugly head when his parents are killed en route to Israel in a car accident. Upon their death, Doriel is brought to the United States with his uncle Reb Avrohom, an ascetic Jew who oversees his growth in the Judaistic faith to ensure that his nephew doesn't stray too far from the tree. Doriel explores the pillars of faith and theology and contemplates questions of the eternal, venturing into the holy temples of Israel and houses of holy men, Jewish philosophers and poets in New York. His identity, however, has been shattered by his circumstance, prompting him to embark on a journey to recollect the pieces lost. Doriel is incredibly intelligent and cultured, yet he also grapples with intense anxiety, sexual frustrations and guilt, tracing his illness to an inner battle with a dybbuk, the inner demons of Eastern European Folklore. Ornery and cynical, he believes that he has descended into madness. "As far as I can read people's gazes, they see me as mad. And I've always felt I was. Mad about my parents first, then about God, study, truth, beauty and impossible love," Doriel tells the Jewish poet Yitzhok Goldfeld. Doriel battles with his fate and his self, wandering into the offices of prestigious psychoanalysts, all of who finally reject him as a hopeless case. Dr. Goldschmidt is his last resort, and as we later find out, an indirect and final solution to his quandaries. Throughout the novel, Dr. Goldschmidt attempts to analyze him through the lenses of Freudian theory. While Doriel proves to be her most interesting case, he is also the most difficult. Doriel continually makes references to several women in his life, women who have aroused a

A man of mysterious wealth and traumatic background is handed from one psychoanalyst to another. It is hoped that, because she shares culture with him, the new doctor can help the patient better. But the case of Doriel Waldman turns out to be more complicated and difficult than Thérèse Goldschmidt had realized it would be. Using Freudian theory, she attempts to understand and heal him, but her work is thwarted by his non-compliance: he insists he is just mad. In the hands of Elie Wiesel, Doriel's madness is not simply insanity. It is a dysfunction burdened with memory and fear, responsibility and uncertainty. A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE is not an easy book to read, but it is a rewarding one as Wiesel takes us from Polish forests to the dry heat of Jerusalem, from post-war France to religious Brooklyn neighborhoods. All the while, we, like Dr. Goldschmidt, are trying to understand the haunted and lonely Doriel who, in turn, is in search of the smile of a frightened child. It is also not an easy book to describe. In post-modernist terms, our primary narrator, Doriel, is unreliable. He thinks he is sick but also cultivates his illness. He realizes that the key to health is locked in his memories but does little to release them. It is in his relationships with women that Dr. Goldschmidt looks for answers. Doriel's life is peppered with strange and romantic encounters with women. Would an unconditional love affair free Doriel from the demons (actually the dybbuk) in his soul? Wiesel's latest seems to be about hope and love and how they can be redemptive forces in even the darkest lives, unless Doriel's version of the truth cannot be trusted at all. Filled with references to Jewish scripture, folklore and history, Doriel's story is often told in manic bursts. His mother was a Jewish Resistance agent during the war: her blond hair and flawless Polish allowing her to pass as Aryan. Doriel spent years in hiding with his father while his mother carried messages back and forth, occasionally coming to see them. His siblings were victims of anti-Semitic violence, and though his parents survived the war, they died before he was 13 --- but not before he learned more than he wanted to know of his mother's secret life. Adopted by his loving and patient uncle and whisked away to an Orthodox community in Brooklyn, Doriel wrestles with faith and identity. His past, and especially the memory of his parents, trouble him, and he seeks truths outside his deeply religious community. Yet, even as his search takes him in what he feels to be spiritually dangerous directions, the connections to Judaism remain essential to him. Doriel's ravings are paired with Dr. Goldschmidt's surprisingly personal case notes. She becomes obsessed with her odd and sad patient, and fears she is doing nothing to help him. A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE is complex and challenging, more about history, brutality and faith than mental illness. Wiesel's 50th book is a compelling whirlwind of stories within

In the late 1990s in New York, sixty year old Polish Jew Doriel Waldman knows his nightmarish childhood has left him depressed, lonely, and believing he is going insane. He reluctantly turns to psychoanalyst Dr. Therese Goldschmidt for help though he believes the shrink will do nothing to relieve him of his demons. His attitude towards the doctor is belligerent as he rants at her in anger about his youth and his solitary future. Doriel was born in 1936. He and his father hid from the Nazis during the occupation; his two sisters were less fortunate having been killed by the bastards and he assumes suffered much worse atrocities from these beasts. His mother was part of the Polish underground resistance; ironically, God played quite a trick on the Waldman male survivors when after the war ended she died in an accident. He further explains he feels guilty as a Jew in WW II Europe who cannot even claim being a Holocaust survivor even if he was a preadolescent at the time. Therese begins to connect with her angry recalcitrant patient as he begins to understand the traumas that have left him melancholy for five decades and a slight flicker of hope as he returns to his religion for solace but even there he finds the demon inside him. This intense look at survivors of traumas years after the events have occurred is an intense superb but extremely difficult tale to read. The audience learns what haunts Doriel (through Therese's notes) as his memories deleted the good times leaving behind an expanded bad. Fans of Elie Wiesel will appreciate this powerful character driven tale of the long term effects of a trauma on the soul of a survivor. Harriet Klausner