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January 19, 1973

Nobel Committee

Swedish Academy of Literature
BUrhuset

S-11129 Stockholm SWEDEN

Gentlemen,

This letter is prompted by a communication I have received from
Mr. Meyer W. Weisgal concerning the candidacy of Elie Wiesel for the
Nobel Prize in literature.

My own experience as a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine
(1958) informs me, what Mr. Weisgal may not know, that I have no
standing with respect to the formal process of your deliberations.

I have received many similar requests that I have felt obliged to
disregard and even were I to forward my commendations I am sure they
could have little influence on your own expert evaluation of Wiesel's
work as literature. I am confident that this would, in any case, be
valued very highly in your own eyes. It is impossible for me to say

how you might compare its literary quality with other worthy contenders.

I do make a rare exception in attempting to address you about
Wiesel because his unique role in the relationship of literature to
history might readily be misunderstood. It is difficult to imagine
a writer whose works would better quaiffy with respect to "idealistic
tendency’ as prescribed in Alfred Nobel's testament. The misunderstanding
may emerge that Wiesel's historic role has been to ensure that the
holocaust would not be forgotten. But how could the work of any
contemporary writer be commensurate with such an enormous, monstrous,
historical fact! The real danger might have been that the holocaust
remain unforgettable but totally beyond human comprehension and to that
extent put out of mind as a matter outside the human experience. There
are grave tendencies through the years and today that continue to encourage
such a repression, in effect such a dehumanization of history.

For many many people Wiesel has played the role, and this is his
principal contribution, of making the holocaust more nearly real, more
nearly understandable and in that way beyond repression and forgetting.
In this sense Wiesel's work may be taken to be an ultimate exposition of
the very function of art and of literature.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr

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