Night (Oprah's Book Club) - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.

Product Description

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.

Customer Reviews: Read 617 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Powerful is an understatement January 18, 2006
469 out of 549 found this review helpful

I recall when I first read 'Night', it was just after Elie Wiesel had given a lecture at my university. It was in the mid-1980s, and the lecture hall was standing-room-only. Wiesel's presentation moved us to tears, and moved us to anger, and moved me to want to follow up on his words by reading what he had written.

This is supposed to be fiction, but in a style that seems to be typical of many modern Israeli novelists, it is so close to the truth of the actual events that transpired in Wiesel's life that it might as well be treated as autobiographical. This is actually part of a trilogy - Night, Dawn, and The Accident - although each element stands alone with integrity.

How does one deal with survival after such atrocities as that at Birkenau and Auschwitz? How can one have faith in the world? How can one accept that a people so closely identified with a powerful God can ever accept that God again? Where is God in the midst of such things?

Wiesel himself as spent his life in search of such answers, but doesn't provide them here. Why then would one want to read such accounts as these? Wiesel was silent for many years, until he was brought into speech and writing as a witness to the events. Wiesel proclaims that there is in the world now a new commandment - 'Thou shalt not stand idly by' - when such things are happening, one must act. One must remember the past in all its personal aspects to both honour those who suffered and to forestall such things happening again (which, given the the depressing repetitive nature of history, is a difficult task).

This is the longest short book I've ever read. It is one that has stayed with me from the first page, and I've never been able to shake the images brought forward, the misery and suffering, the existence of evil and brutality, the sadness and desolation. We live in a culture that likes to gloss over pain and suffering, mask it with drugs and other things, and always end the story with a happy ending.

There is no happy ending here - even Wiesel's own survival is a questionable good here. How does one live after this? How does the world go on?

One thing is certain, we must never forget, and this book is part of that active remembering that we are called to do.

5 out of 5 stars

Incredible Journey Into the Dark Night of the Soul January 18, 2006
158 out of 195 found this review helpful

Elie Wiesel's narrative of his own one-year experience spent in a concentration camp has appropriately become a classic in the field. Read it to find meaning in a seeming meaningless life. Read "Night" if you are going through your own "dark night of the soul" and want to find an answer to the perennial question, "Where is God?" Read "Night" if you think deeply about life and how it often falls on us and crushes us. Don't read "Night" only if you have a queasy stomach or the need to think that this life is a bed of roses.

Wiesel discovered that, "God is there in the suffering." His explanation is anything but trite. Instead, it grapples candidly with the confusion that life can and does bring. Fortunately Wiesel's candor leads to hope--the confidence that behind the evils in this life there resides a good God working out plans in a mysterious, yet glorious, way. The inner depths and black darkness of "Night" call us not to squeamish forgetting but to stark remembering. For only in remembering will we insist, "Never again!"

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Spiritual Friends: A Methodology of Soul Care And Spiritual Direction, and Soul Physicians.

1 out of 5 stars

The Many Lies of Elie Wiesel April 20, 2006
33 out of 85 found this review helpful

As horrible as Wiesel's Auschwitz experiences at the hands of the bestial Germans supposedly were, when he was given the choice to either remain in the camp as the Soviets approached and thus be liberated, or to be evacuated to Buchenwald by said beasts, he inexplicably chose the latter. This despite the fact that he was supposedly hospitalized at the time with a foot injury and that his father, whom he would have had to bring along, was sick and would probably not survive the evacuation and who in fact died of dysentery shortly after arriving at Buchenwald.

A good review of Wiesel's career, including Night, can be found in a November 2004 article entitled 'Elie Wiesel And The Catholics', written by David O'Connell, who is professor of French at Georgia State University in Atlanta and which was published in the November, 2004 issue of Culture Wars magazine (culturewars.com/2004/Weisel.htm). The article includes an unflattering critique of Night, with the following quotes from various commentators:

"...you have Rabbi Kahane, the Jewish extremist, who is less dangerous than a man like Elie Wiesel, who says anything that comes to mind. . . You just have to read parts of Night to know that certain of his descriptions are not exact and that he is essentially a Shoah merchant. . . who has done harm, enormous harm, to historical truth."

and:

"Elie Wiesel's memoir is written by a man whose inner postures have gone so long unreviewed he cannot persuade us he is on a voyage of self-discovery, the first requirement of a testament. His book, I am sorry to say, gives being witness a bad name."

and:

"Is there any more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions."

The O'Connell article also quotes Wiesel's grotesquely exaggerated account of having been struck by a car in Manhattan:

"In the meantime, Wiesel moved to New York, where he continued to work as a correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. Shortly after his arrival, he was struck by a car near Times Square. Given to exaggeration by nature, he later claimed: "I flew an entire block. I was hit at 45th Street and the ambulance picked me up at 44th. It sounds crazy. But I was totally messed up."

One of the things the O'Connell article does not happen to mention in regard to Night, is a particularly revealing and criminal event, as described in the original Yiddish version of the book. This version was entitled 'And the World Forgot' (Un Di Velt Hot Geshvign), published in Buenos Aires in 1955 and which ran to 245 pages, considerably longer than both the subsequent French and English versions.
The event occurred shortly after the liberation of the Buchenwald camp and Wiesel described it as follows:

"Early the next day, Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes - and to rape German girls [un tsu vargvaldikn daytshe shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled."

Wiesel subsequently changed this description for the French version, to read:

"Le lendemain, quelques jeunes gens coururent ? Weimar ramasser des pommes de terre et des habits - et coucher avec des filles. Mais de vengeance, pas trace."

and the English version, to read:

"On the following morning, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes - and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign."

This important difference between the original Yiddish version and the subsequent French and English versions was first pointed out in an essay entitled 'Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage', written by Naomi Seidman, who is a professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California (vho.org/aaargh/fran/tiroirs/tiroirEW/WieselMauriac.html).
(As an aside, the "historical commandment of revenge" Wiesel refers to in the Yiddish version of events, "originates" and is "sanctioned in Jewish history and tradition", according to Seidman and other sources).

Wiesel has been recognized as a charlatan by those researchers who have bothered to look critically at his outrageous claims, much like his fellow authors Binjamin Wilkomirski, who wrote the completely fictional 'Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood', and Bernard Holstein, who penned the comical 'Stolen Soul', the difference being only that Wiesel apparently did spend time in a camp.

Potential readers of this book, as well as those who have already read it, should do themselves a favor and read the article by David O'Connell, the Naomi Seidman essay, as well as numerous other insightful references that can be found by Googling the internet, instead of simply accepting the mass-media's promotion of certain political agendas at face value.

The fact that common criminals such as Wiesel are rewarded with honorary degrees - not to mention a Nobel prize - is yet more testimony to the ubiquitous influence wielded by his co-tribalists in all facets of western society, an influence that is slowly but surely strangling said society, along with our centuries-old traditions of justice and freedom.

5 out of 5 stars

Unimaginable horror, unbelievable strength January 27, 2007
33 out of 33 found this review helpful

What impressed me most after "Night" was Elie Wiesel's ability to retain a pure heart. I can't imagine living through so much evil and still having the ability to love. "Night" tells of Wiesel's horrifying existence in the Nazi death camps and pays tribute to his overwhelming desire to survive. I cried through each page and can't imagine the strength it took to come out of that nightmare alive. To see what Elie Wiesel has done with his life since has been miraculous and life affirming.
This is not a book for the faint of heart as it is a real account of the horror endured by Wiesel and his family in the Nazi death camp. I thought I knew about the Holocaust but now I have a deeper understanding, something I was missing before. I applaud Elie Wiesel for his courage and perseverance and for sharing that with us in "Night."

5 out of 5 stars

If this excerpt moves you, then you'll like the book January 17, 2006
31 out of 49 found this review helpful

This is my favorite excerpt from the book:
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

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