Week 2-journal 1

Eli is a small boy that the narrator observed in the Jewish ghetto. Unlike other children, he went up to the gates and didn’t seem afraid like the other children. He managed to escape all the raids on the children. Eli had almost mystical powers to escape the fate of the other children. The narrator likens him to the prophet Elijah who comes every Passover and drinks a tear’s worth of wine from an offered glass of wine. Elijah is a protective figure that may show up in the form of a townsperson, beggar…child. By connecting the child Eli to the prophet Elijah, the narrator is connecting the events of his life with the Jew’s ancient enslavement to the Egyptians. The Egyptians were in the end punished by G-d for all that they had done to the Jews. Although Eli does not seem to represent a retributive figure, he does seem to represent what little hope there is for salvation from the horror they are experiencing.

The dying SS soldier tells the narrator that he became aware of the true horror of what he had done to the Jews when he saw the dead bodies of a father and son who had jumped from the burning building. The SS soldier mentions the dark eyes of the boy. The description of the dark eyes triggers an association for the narrator to Eli, the boy in the Ghetto. Eli and by extension Elijah made the SS soldier aware of what he was doing. If the spirit of Elijah confronted all the soldiers, perhaps the Jews would be humanized and saved. By attributing this conversion to an act of the prophet Elijah and by extension G-d, it suggests that what is happening to the Jews is being supervised by G-d (rather than him being absent as other prisoner’s contend). Why would G-d sit back and watch this happening to his people?! By attributing the SS man’s remorse to some kind of supernatural intervention, it takes away from the idea that pure human suffering could be understood on it’s own. The Jews cannot be pitied except through some kind of supernatural intervention. Why is plain human tragedy not enough to inspire remorse?