Sylvie Weil’s unusual work is an interminable search of a resolution to life’s meaning, recalling the prototype of the wandering Jew of medieval lore
August 8, 2025 13:14
You wonder what He’s thinking of, Him up above,” Old Joe had said.
“First He allows Auschwitz, and now this. This was 34 years ago.” So, in a world where truth is stranger than fiction, read the first lines of Sylvie Weil’s unusual memoir – which begins by considering the nature of evil.
Moreover, it does so through the mind of a transient soul seeking an earthly mother to accommodate and accompany him on his journey into and throughout his life. Alas, the woman he selects to harbour him until birth loses the pregnancy too early for Isaac to survive. His response, on being stillborn two months premature, was to ask: “…was I not an exile too? I’d found myself exiled from a place where I’d been happy and at peace for months before being attacked, suffocated and, in the end, not pushed out but forcibly removed.’’
Having lost life’s journey on earth, Isaac migrates as a soul in interminable search of a resolution to life’s meaning. His quest involves considerable wanderings, recalling the prototype of the wandering Jew of medieval lore. His soul travels back and forth in time and place, eternally engaged in recovering that lost foetal shelter, triumphing over mortality to explore his mission on earth, historically and geographically, accumulating new homes and languages – including a “magnificent collection of Haggadahs in Ladino, French, Russian, Spanish and other languages”.
Isaac’s quest extends even beyond relatively familiar diasporas, exploring fresh destinations as far away as Japan
Isaac’s quest extends even beyond relatively familiar diasporas, exploring fresh destinations as far away as Japan. He heads for Kyoto, where he selects Mitsuko Fujiwara, a “woman of good family with a very affectionate nature”, who courteously introduces him to a tea ceremony, and within whom he hopes to settle until birth. Then, and with characteristic chutzpah, he reminds himself: “since I’m an exile, let’s hit the road!” Yet again fate intervenes and the story-within-a-story turns back on itself as Isaac heads for the Chasidic neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
New York was where the author was born in 1942, the family having fled the Nazi Occupation of France. And Isaac’s surname Gedalia was the name of Sylvie Weil’s grandfather who was Ukrainian until “a little breeze of antisemitism” – involving a major pogrom – forced his family to flee westwards. For Isaac, who is presented as the author’s unborn child, the quest remains for a birth mother inside whom he can prepare for this world after generations of wars and flights, exiles and diasporas.
In a book so crammed with oneiric travellers’ tales it is tempting to occasionally observe where authorial family history and principal character connect.
Weil has written a deeply affecting memoir of loss and grief, in which Auschwitz was but one culmination.
The Wanderings of Isaac André Gedalia
by Sylvie Weil, translated by Ros Schwartz
IP Books