Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is primarily known as a narrator of the horrors of the Holocaust. His works delve deeply into themes of memory, loss, and the search for humanity in the face of unimaginable suffering. Wiesel's prose, often drawn from his own harrowing experiences, serves as a powerful testimony and a call for peace and human dignity. His message resonates across generations, urging readers toward reflection and compassion.
The narrative poem explores profound themes of history, immortality, and the transformative power of song, set against the backdrop of a real event from World War II. Accompanied by stunning full-color illustrations from acclaimed artist Mark Podwal, the work captures the emotional depth and significance of the subject matter, inviting readers to reflect on the impact of war and memory through its poignant verses.
Three works deal with a concentration camp survivor, a hostage holder in Palestine, and a recovering accident victim.
A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
In this concluding volume of his poignant memoirs, Elie Wiesel, now a renowned writer at forty, resolves to advocate more vigorously for Holocaust survivors and the marginalized. He declares, "I will become militant. I will teach, share, bear witness." His words become his weapon as he embarks on a journey filled with unwavering battles. Wiesel engages with world leaders and travels to conflict-ridden regions to address pressing global issues. He defends persecuted Jews and dissidents in the Soviet Union, fights against apartheid in South Africa while supporting Mandela, and calls attention to atrocities in Cambodia and Bosnia. As an emissary for President Clinton, he visits refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia. He criticizes Ronald Reagan for his visit to Bitburg and supports Lech Walesa while challenging some of his views. Wiesel confronts Francois Mitterrand over misrepresentations of his past and battles Holocaust deniers. He joins young Austrians protesting against rising fascism and is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Throughout his journey, Wiesel remains deeply connected to Israel, reflecting on its leaders and internal conflicts. He recounts the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shares his emotional return to Auschwitz, and remembers his lost family and Yitzhak Rabin.
In Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters , Elie Wiesel re-enters, like an impassioned pilgrim, the universe of Hasidism.Souls on Fire is not a simple chronological history of Hasidism, nor is it a comprehensive book on its subject. Rather, Elie Wiesel has captured the essence of Hasidism through tales, legends, parables, sayings, and deeply personal reflections. His book is a testimony, not a study. Hasidism is revealed from within and not analyzed from the outside. "Listen attentively," Elie Wiesel's grandfather told him, "and above all, remember that true tales are meant to be transmitted—to keep them to oneself is to betray them." Wiesel does not merely tell us, but draws, with the hand of a master, the portraits of the leaders of the movement that created a revolution in the Jewish world. Souls on Fire is a loving, personal affirmation of Judaism, written with words and with silence. The author brings his profound knowledge of the Bible, the Talmud, Kabbala, and the Hasidic tale and song to this masterpiece, showing us that Elie Wiesel is perhaps our generation's most fervid "soul on fire."
Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination.Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: "Three rabbis--all erudite and pious men--decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried."Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.
The autobiography begins with Elie Wiesel's poignant childhood in a loving Jewish family in Sighet, Romania, before transitioning to the harrowing experiences of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It captures his spiritual struggles and eventual role as a voice for Holocaust victims and survivors, as well as his advocacy for the State of Israel and broader humanitarian issues. The volume is enriched with 16 pages of black-and-white photographs, providing a visual context to his powerful narrative.
Gregor—a teenaged boy, the lone survivor of his family—is hiding from the Germans in the forest. He hides in a cave, where he meets a mysterious stranger who saves his life. He hides in the village, posing as a deaf-mute peasant boy. He hides among the partisans of the Jewish resistance. But where, he asks, is God hiding? And where can one find redemption in a world that God has abandoned? In a story punctuated by friendship and fear, sacrifice and betrayal, Gregor's wartime wanderings take us deep into the ghost-filled inner world of the survivor.
On August 12, 1952, Russia's greatest Jewish writers were secretly executed by Stalin. In this remarkable blend of history and imagination, Paltiel Kossover meets the same fate but, unlike his real-life counterparts, he is permitted to leave a written testament. From a Jewish boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, Paltiel traveled down a road that embraced Communism, only to return to Russia and discover a Communist Party that had become his mortal enemy. Two decades later, Paltiel's son, Grisha, reads this precious record of his father's life and finds that it illuminates the shadowed planes of his own. Passionate and fierce, this story of a father's legacy to his son revisits some of the most dramatic events of our century, and confirms yet again Elie Wiesel's stature as "a writer of the highest moral imagination" ("San Francisco Chronicle").
