1 CHAPTER SIX Testifying, Writing, and Putting God in the Dock: Elie Wiesel and the Crisis of Traditional Theodicy 1 Federico Dal Bo The present chapter will address the works of Elie Wiesel in terms of the crisis of traditional theodicy before the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. Elie Wiesel never stopped questioning traditional metaphysics. Nor did he stop exploring new ways of testifying, writing, fictionalizing, and thinking of that which he would eventually call by many names—Holocaust, Tragedy, Destruction, and, latterly, the Event. Wiesel’s early life—he was deported at a young age to a concentration camp from which he barely survived—provided him with a sort of epistemological duty neither to indulge in classical theodicy nor to ever stop looking for theological answers. This required Wiesel to face the permanent intellectual challenge of negotiating between his Jewish Orthodox education and the traumatic experience of the emergence of evil. He never stopped asking himself what the better opportunity would be—testifying or writing? TESTIFYING OR WRITING? ON WIESEL’S AESTHETICS OF MEMORY Scholarship has generally gravitated toward Wiesel’s works from Night onward while neglecting his first, less accessible text—Un di Velt hot geschwign. Scholars have also tended 1 I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Colin Davis (Royal Holloway University of London) and Prof. Dr. Naomi Seidman (Graduate Theological Union) for reading a first draft of my article and for providing me with useful observations.