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Introduction
A survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and the winner
of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel is one of the most
acclaimed authors of Holocaust literature and an eloquent
spokesperson for contemporary Judaism. Throughout his career
he has delineated the horror of the concentration camps
and has explored the apparent indifference of God, ultimately
reaffirming his life and faith. His lyrical, impressionistic
novels, written primarily in French, frequently juxtapose
past and present to examine the effect of the Holocaust
on Jews, both as individuals and as a people. Although Wiesel
focuses strongly on the experience of Jews, his work also
speaks for all persecuted people, and, by extension, for
humanity itself.
Biographical Information
Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, a well-known center
of Jewish cultural life in the region of Transylvania. His
parents encouraged his interest in the Hebrew and Yiddish
languages as well as in the teachings of the Hasidic masters
and the traditions of the Torah, Talmud, and Kabbala. In
the spring of 1944, Nazi forces deported Wiesel, then fifteen
years old, and his family to the Birkenau concentration
camp. Separated from his mother and sisters upon arrival,
he was then sent with his father to Auschwitz. When Soviet
troops neared the concentration camp in 1945, the inmates
were forced to march to Buchenwald; Wiesel's father died
of dysentery and starvation soon thereafter. Upon being
liberated in April of that year, Wiesel learned that his
mother and younger sister had perished in the gas chambers.
His older sisters, however, had survived, and years later
they and Wiesel were reunited. Following his release, Wiesel
hoped to leave for the then-British state of Palestine,
but immigration restrictions proved insurmountable, and
he was placed on a train with other Jewish orphans bound
for Belgium. The train was rerouted to France at the insistence
of General Charles de Gaulle. Living at first in Normandy,
Wiesel eventually moved to Paris, where he studied literature
at the Sorbonne. He later became a journalist for the French-Jewish
periodical Arche and was sent to cover the formation
of the Israeli state. In 1952 he left Arche to
work for Yediot Ahronot, a newspaper in Tel Aviv,
Israel. Two years later he was assigned to interview Françcois
Mauriac, the well-known Roman Catholic novelist and Nobel
Laureate, who persuaded Wiesel to break his vow of silence
concerning his concentration camp experience and to bear
witness for those who had died. The resulting eight-hundred-page
memoir, Un di velt hot geshvign (1956), was transformed
over two years into the much shorter text of La Nuit
(Night), which has become regarded as one of the most powerful
works in Holocaust literature. In 1956 Wiesel traveled to
New York City as Yediot Ahronot's United Nations
correspondent and was struck by a taxicab. Compelled by
his long convalescence to remain in the United States, Wiesel
applied for and received U.S. citizenship when his French
travel papers expired. In 1969 he married Marion Erster
Rose, a fellow Holocaust survivor who is now the primary
English translator of his works. With the success of his
writings, Wiesel has emerged as an important moral voice
on issues concerning religion, human rights, and the Middle
East. He now serves as chairman of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Council and is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities
at Boston University.
Courtesy of Contemporary Literary Criticism
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