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Elie Wiesel (; born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928) is a Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps. His diverse range of other writings offer powerful and poetic contributions to literature, theology, and a unique articulation of Jewish spirituality today.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
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Quotations
If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
US News & World Report (October 27, 1986)
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.
Accepting Nobel Peace Prize (December 10, 1986)
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.
Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine November 2000
For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine November 2000
Encyclopedia
Elie Wiesel (; born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928) is a Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps. His diverse range of other writings offer powerful and poetic contributions to literature, theology, and a unique articulation of Jewish spirituality today.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," noting that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps," as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace," Wiesel has delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.
Biography
His early life
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, a little town in Transylvania (now Sighetu Marmatiei), Maramures, Kingdom of Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. Sarah was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a celebrated Vishnitz Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped and were hungry in the early years of his life. It was Shlomo who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother faith (Fine 1982:4). Elie Wiesel had three sisters: Hilda and Beatrice (Bea), who were older than he, and Tzipora, who was the youngest in the family. Bea and Hilda also survived the war. They were reunited with Elie at a French orphanage, and eventually emigrated to North America; in Bea's case, to Montréal, Canada. Tzipora, Shlomo and Sarah did not survive the war.
World War II
In 1940 Romania lost the town of Sighet following the Second Vienna Award. In 1944 Elie, his family and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet. Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two, on Serpent Street. On May 16, 1944, the Hungarian authorities deported the Jewish community in Sighet to Auschwitz – Birkenau. While at Auschwitz, his inmate number, "A-7713", was tattooed onto his left arm. Wiesel was separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have died at Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for a year as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between three concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On January 29, 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald, Wiesel's father died from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and was later sent to the crematorium, only months before the camp was liberated by the American Third Army on April 11.
After the war
In 1948 he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
He taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish) L'arche. However, for ten years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. Like many survivors, Wiesel could not find the words to describe his experiences. However, a meeting with François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to write about his experiences.
Wiesel first wrote the 245-page memoir Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires. Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, and it was published as the 127-page autobiography La Nuit, and later translated into English as Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had trouble finding a publisher for his book, and initially it sold few copies.
In 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance, and published it in the U.S. in September that year as Night. It sold just 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, but attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with literary figures like Saul Bellow. "The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies," Wiesel said in an interview. "And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print." The 1979 book and play The Trial of God is said to have been based on Wiesel's real life Auschwitz experience of witnessing three Jews who, close to death, conduct a trial against God, finding him guilty.
"Night" has been translated into 30 languages. By 1997, the book was selling 300,000 copies annually in the United States alone. By March 2006, about six million copies were sold in the United States. On January 16, 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose the novel for her book club. One million extra paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed carrying the "Oprah's Book Club" logo, with a new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface by Wiesel. On February 13, 2006, Night was no. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction.
Life in the United States
In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York City, having become a U.S. citizen: due to injuries suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to stay in New York past his visa's expiration and was offered citizenship to resolve his status. In the U.S., Wiesel wrote over forty books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's writing is considered among the most important in Holocaust literature. Some historians credit Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning, but he does not feel that the word adequately describes the event and wishes it were used less frequently to describe significant occurrences as everyday tragedies (Wiesel:1999, 18).
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. He has received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996.
Wiesel also played a role in the initial success of The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski by endorsing it prior to revelations that the book was a hoax.
He is also the recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. Wiesel has published two volumes of his memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969 while the second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered 1969 to 1999.
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Wiesel is particularly fond of teaching and holds the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. From 1972 to 1976, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and member of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1982 he served as the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University. He also co-instructs Winter Term (January) courses at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. From 1997 to 1999 he was Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College.
Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel, the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, and the Kurds. He recently voiced support for intervention in Darfur, Sudan. He also led a commission organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania and the involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in atrocities against Jews and other groups, including the Roma. The Romanian government accepted the findings in the report and committed to implementing the commission's recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. The commission, formally called the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the Wiesel Commission in honor of his leadership.
Wiesel is the honorary chair of the Habonim Dror Camp Miriam Campership and Building Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.
On March 27, 2001, Wiesel appeared at the University of Florida for Jewish Awareness Month and was presented with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Florida by Dr. Charles Young.
In 2002, he inaugurated the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighet in his childhood home.
Recent years
In early 2006, Wiesel traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, a visit which was broadcast as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show on May 24, 2006. Wiesel said that this would most likely be his last trip there.
In September 2006, he appeared before the UN Security Council with actor George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
On November 30, 2006 Wiesel received an honorary knighthood in London in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.
On April 25, 2007, Wiesel was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters degree from the University of Vermont.
During the early 2007 selection process for the Kadima candidate for President of Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly offered Wiesel the nomination (and, as the ruling-party candidate and an apolitical figure, likely the Presidency), but Wiesel "was not very interested." Shimon Peres was chosen as the Kadima candidate (and later President) instead.
In 2007, Elie Wiesel was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Lifetime Achievement Award. On April 9, 2008, Wiesel was presented with an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters at the City College of New York.
In 2007 the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.
On September 29, 2008, the Rochester College President Rubel Shelly, on its 50th anniversary, bestowed Wiesel with a plaque conferring on him as an honorary visiting professor of humanities.
On November 17, 2008, he received an honorary doctorate from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
In 2009, Wiesel criticized the Vatican over its lifting of the excommunication of controversial bishop Richard Williamson, a member of the Society of Saint Pius X.
2007 Attack on Wiesel
On February 1, 2007, Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel by a twenty-two year old Holocaust denier named Eric Hunt who tried to drag Wiesel into a hotel room. Wiesel was not injured and Hunt fled the scene. Later, Hunt bragged about the incident on a Holocaust denial website. Approximately one month later, he was arrested and charged with multiple offenses.
Hunt was convicted on July 21, 2008, and he was sentenced to two years but was given credit for time served and good behavior and was released on probation and ordered to undergo psychological treatment. The jury convicted Hunt of three charges but dismissed the remaining charges of attempted kidnapping, stalking, and an additional count of false imprisonment, amid Hunt's withdrawal of his not guilty by reason of insanity plea. District Attorney Kamala Harris said: "Crimes motivated by hate are among the most reprehensible of offenses ... This defendant has been made to answer for an unwarranted and biased attack on a man who has dedicated his life to peace." At his sentencing hearing, Hunt apologized and insisted that he no longer denies the holocaust.
Bernard Madoff Scandal Losses
In December 2008, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a press release on their website stating that nearly all of the foundation's assets (approximately $15.2 million USD) have been lost through Bernard Madoff's investment firm. Wiesel also lost a considerable sum of his private funds which had been invested with Madoff.
Criticism
Criticism of Political Positions and Holocaust Memorialisation
In an editorial in The Nation, Christopher Hitchens critiqued Wiesel's past support for the Zionist Jewish militant group Irgun in the 1940s with his claimed neutrality on Middle East politics, his historical views on the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, and Wiesel's reaction to the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians.
In his book, The Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky cites a statement of Wiesel's as an example of "amazing" support in the American Jewish community for "harsh and ultimately self-destructive [Israeli] government policies."
I support Israel—period. I identify with Israel—period. I never attack, never criticize Israel when I am not in Israel.
Former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein has accused Wiesel of personally profiting from the Holocaust while downplaying the significance of other genocides in history for his own enrichment.
Aaron Zelman of JPFO has criticized Wiesel for favoring gun control policies that he believes enable genocides to occur.
Dispute with Simon Wiesenthal
Wiesel had a public dispute with the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal over Wiesenthal's efforts to bring parallel attention to the plight of the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
The Literary, Theological and Jewish Contributions of Elie Wiesel
The list of books by Elie Wiesel comprises a diverse range and creativity of fiction and non-fiction. Most famous is his memoir of Holocaust testimony "Night", that he wrote in the 1950s, before the present large amount of personal stories and scholarship on the Holocaust had yet been published. Its emotional vividness and devotional language place it within the background of Rabbinic and liturgical Jewish worship (In his first volume of memoirs "All Rivers Run to the Sea" he explains that the description in Night of the "death of his God" in response to the demise of a Jewish boy, was only metaphorical, and has been misinterpreted by others too literally. He explains that he has never rejected his adherence to Jewish belief). Night describes how the finished version of the book transcends literary categories, by focusing on theological meditation, as much as narrative events. The lyrical, artistic style of Wiesel's witness contrasts with the other famous Holocaust testimonies of Primo Levi, that reflect his scientific training in Chemistry, through their observant factual documentation and classification of the Nazi camps. Together with Anne Frank's Diary, these works have become the most famous Holocaust literature.
While the context of the Holocaust forms a philosophical and spiritual background to all of Wiesel's writings, most of his fiction and non-fiction does not directly address the issue. Much of the work of Elie Wiesel celebrates and transmits the life and thought of traditional Judaism, melding it with his own philosophical concerns. His writing memorializes the loss of the Old World, while documenting breaks in continuity with the New. Examples of his Biblical, Talmudic and Hasidic portraits include "Wise Men and their Tales" and "Souls on Fire", which offer unique, poetic, and personal transmissions of historical Judaic life and thought. His writing style is emotional and lyrical, and is often infused with his personal dialogue and existential argument with God, from within Jewish love and faithfulness to the "God of Israel". Elie Wiesel describes himself as having the soul of a Hasid, the Jewish mystical revival movement that began in 18th Century Eastern Europe, and he grew up amidst the Carpathian Mountains in the Hasidic tradition of Vishnitz. In "All Rivers Run to the Sea" and "A Jew Today", the fervor of his spiritual youth is evoked. His portraits of Hasidic Masters offer personal transmissions of traditional stories, that can be seen to follow on from the Neo-Hasidic depictions of Martin Buber, who first brought Hasidism to the attention of the Western World.
While the Jewish texts and dreams gave Wiesel a search for meaning, the Western writers and philosophers gave him another source of imagination and purpose. In his days in Paris after the war, he first encountered existential philosophy and Western literature. In his own teaching career in America, he holds a chair in the Humanities. Wiesel's fictional works range from novels and stage plays, to sketches and dialogues. His place in wider World and Jewish literature, can be contrasted with the creative reinventions of secular Yiddish literature and Hebrew literature, from Eastern Europe, and with American born Jewish writers of the 20th century. Like the Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, or the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, Wiesel is an Eastern European immigrant to America, concerned with the great traditions of Jewish life and thought of the Old World. This contrasts with American novelists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who are concerned with the Jewish position in the New World. The language of writing chosen by Wiesel, is not his Yiddish mothertongue, nor Hungarian or English, but his second cultural language of French, perhaps favoured for its emotional expressiveness. His books are translated into English by his wife Marion. Wiesel uses his love of the Jewish World of his youth, and the Holocaust kingdom of darkness, to articulate universal philosophical and spiritual meanings, that transcend some other Jewish literature. This contributes a unique voice to international literature, drawing on his Jewish heritage.
The philosophical implications and theological questions raised by Wiesel's dialogue with God, spring from a tradition within Judaism of devoted argument with God, exemplified from Moses to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. This also has historic implications for the host religion of Christianity. Works like "The Trial of God" and "Conversations with Elie Wiesel" bring out this vivid theological legacy of Wiesel, while books like "A Jew Today" articulate meanings of Jewish identity, drawn from Jewish thought and artistic imagination. Wiesel's lyrically expressed thought has vivid relevance in Jewish and non-Jewish thought on Theodicy (the theological response to suffering). In "All Rivers Run to the Sea", he relates his close friendship with a leading Hasidic leader after the War. In private conversation, the Rebbe asks him why he is angry with God. He replies that it is because he loved Him so much. The Rebbe answers that if one loves God, one accepts where one can't understand. Elie Wiesel agrees to accept this answer, if it is another question. The play "The Trial of God" is set in a medieval Jewish community after persecutions. The community put God on trial, for breaking His covenant, and find Him guilty. At the end, after the verdict is given, they announce "Now let us pray". In The first volume of Memoirs, a short chapter is entitled "God's suffering-A commentary". The words open with the extraordinary Jewish idea, quoted from the Midrash, that God suffers alongside man, within his exile.
Through the range of his writings, Wiesel addresses himself to themes of remembrance and sanctification. He questions the Divine, and accepts no final answers, but never abandons Him. In the spirit of Hasidism, he seeks to glorify man and the Jewish communities and individuals who populate his memories and imaginations. This receives its ultimate expression in his love of the shtetl's "madmen", that he sees as reflecting the dreamers of the Bible (reflecting the Talmudic statement that after the end of prophecy, it was given to young children and the mad). This can be contrasted with more critical voices, among other imaginative depictions, in Yiddish and Hebrew literature about the shtetl. Archetypal figures populate Wiesel's imagination: Sages and dreamers, madmen and the dispossesed. One book of his thoughts is entitled "From the Kingdom of Memory", as all of Wiesel's books are a response of life, against the death that he witnessed, reflecting the Jewish emphasis on life in this world (Deuteronomy says "I place before you the blessing and the cuse, life and death. Choose life!"). This Jewish kingdom of the imagination stands opposite to those who would oppress it. Love is contrasted with indifference, memory with forgetfulness.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.
US News & World Report (October 27, 1986)
Perhaps the best overall introduction to Wiesel's life and thought are the two volumes of recent memoirs, named after the verse from Ecclesiastes(1:7) "All Rivers Run to the Sea..", "..And the Sea is Never Full". These chronologically cover his life to date.
Books
ISBNs may be of reissues or reprints. Most are paperback.
- Un di velt hot geshvign (Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956) ISBN 0-374-52140-9; includes the following 3 books:
- Night (Hill and Wang 1958; 2006) ISBN 0-553-27253-5 (Personal account of the Holocaust)
- Dawn (Hill and Wang 1961; 2006) ISBN 0-553-22536-7
- Day, previously titled "The Accident" (Hill and Wang 1962; 2006) ISBN 0-553-58170-8
- The Town Beyond the Wall (Atheneum 1964)
- The Gates of the Forest (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966)
- The Jews of Silence (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966) ISBN 0-935613-01-3
- Legends of our Time (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1968)(Artistically depicted memories)
- A Beggar in Jerusalem (Random House 1970)(Novel)
- One Generation After (Random House 1970)
- Souls on Fire (Random House 1972) ISBN 0-671-44171-X (First book of portraits and legends of Hasidic Masters: many of the most famous)
- Night Trilogy (Hill and Wang 1972)
- The Oath (Random House 1973) ISBN 0-935613-11-0
- Ani Maamin (Random House 1973)
- Zalmen, or the Madness of God (Random House 1974)
- Messengers of God (Random House 1976) ISBN 0-671-54134-X (Biblical portraits)
- A Jew Today (Random House 1978) ISBN 0-935613-15-3 (Essays and imaginative works on Jewish identity)
- Four Hasidic Masters-and their struggle against melancholy (University of Notre Dame Press 1978)(Portraits of Hasidic Masters)
- Images from the Bible (The Overlook Press 1980)
- The Trial of God (Random House 1979)(Play)
- The Testament (Summit 1981)
- Five Biblical Portraits (University of Notre Dame Press 1981)(Biblical figures reinterpreted)
- Somewhere a Master (Further Hasidic portraits, after "Souls on Fire") (Summit 1982)
- The Golem (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Summit 1983) ISBN 0-671-49624-7 (Children's book on the Jewish legend)
- The Fifth Son (Summit 1985)
- Against Silence (Holocaust Library 1985)
- Twilight (Summit 1988)
- The Six Days of Destruction (co-author Albert Friedlander, illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Paulist Press 1988)
- A Journey of Faith (Donald I. Fine 1990)
- From the Kingdom of Memory (Summit 1990)(essays and depictions after "A Jew Today")
- Evil and Exile (University of Notre Dame Press 1990)
- Sages and Dreamers (Summit 1991)(Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic and Hasidic figures)
- The Forgotten (Summit 1992) ISBN 0-8052-1019-9
- A Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Simon and Schuster 1993) ISBN 0-671-73541-1 (Jewish liturgy)
- All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Vol. I, 1928-1969 (Knopf 1995) ISBN 0-8052-1028-8
- Memoir in Two Voices, with François Mitterrand (Arcade 1996)
- And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs Vol. II, 1969 (Knopf 1999) ISBN 0-8052-1029-6
- King Solomon and his Magic Ring (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Greenwillow 1999)
- Conversations with Elie Wiesel (Schocken 2001)
- The Judges (Knopf 2002)
- Wise Men and Their Tales (Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic and Hasidic figures) (Schocken 2003) ISBN 0-8052-4173-6
- The Time of the Uprooted (Knopf 2005)
Additionally, as Elie Wiesel has offered a unique and poetic articulation of traditional Jewish thought and identity today, other books sometimes carry introductions or reviews from him:
- A Vanished World Roman Vishniac, forward by Elie Wiesel (Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1986) ISBN-10 0374520232, ISBN-13 978-0374520236 (Classic photographs of Eastern European Jewish life from the 1930s)
Critical analysis and appreciation of Wiesel's position in the history of literature:
- Student Companion to Elie Wiesel (Student Companions to Classic Writers) Sanford Sternlicht (Greenwood Press, 2003) ISBN-10: 0313325308, ISBN-13: 978-0313325304 (Covers his personal and literary background, "Night", main novels, and one chapter on his most important non-fiction)
See also
- The Boys of Buchenwald – A documentary about the orphanage in which he stayed after the Holocaust
- God on Trial – A 2008 joint BBC / WGBH Boston dramatisation of his book The Trial of God, about a group of Auschwitz prisoners who place God on trial for breaching his contract with the Jewish people.
External links
- PBS special on Elie Wiesel
- from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
- on TeachingBooks.net
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