Elie Wiesel

Romanian-born American writer and peace activist

• Born: September 30, 1928
• Birthplace: Sighet, Transylvania, Romania
• Died: July 2, 2016
• Place of death: New York, New York

Wiesel, a prize-winning novelist, dramatist, and religious philosopher, wrote about the Holocaust and its remembrance, the nature of God, and God’s terrible silence, all on behalf of the world’s victims. He became the conscience of modern times and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Early Life

Elie Wiesel (EHL-ee vee-ZEHL) was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, in an area that was part of Hungary during World War II but that became Romanian territory before and after the war. Wiesel’s father, Shlomo Wiesel, though a practicing member of the Jewish religious community, questioned traditional Judaism; a tolerant humanist, he emphasized the modern world at large and the need to be a part of it. Wiesel’s mother, Sarah Wiesel, had a lasting and possibly deeper influence. A devout woman steeped in Hasidism, she hoped that her only son would become a rabbi. To that end, Wiesel studied the Torah and the Talmud in a local yeshiva known for its ascetic mysticism and Kabbalist teachers. This sheltered, bookish existence was irrevocably shattered in the spring of 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary and rounded up all its Jewish people, including Wiesel, his parents, and three sisters.

The fifteen-year-old Wiesel, along with his father, was sent first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated by American troops on April 11, 1945. (His two elder sisters survived as well.) The horrors he witnessed there, the despair he felt, and the anger he directed at God were all to be incorporated in his literary and philosophical writings. Shortly after the war, the young adolescent went to a refugee home in France, where in two years he learned French by carefully reading the classics, especially Jean Racine, whose style he was later to adopt; indeed, French remained Wiesel’s preferred written language. In addition, he was developing a lifelong passion for philosophy (starting with Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx) and for philosophical fiction.

From 1948 to 1951, Wiesel studied philosophy, psychology, and literature at the Sorbonne, but, forced to work, he never finished his thesis on comparative asceticism. Instead, he began a career as a journalist, which allowed him to travel extensively; after immigrating to the United States in 1956, he became the United Nations correspondent of an Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot.

At the urging of the French Roman Catholic novelist François Mauriac, Wiesel agreed to bear witness to the six million Jews murdered in Europe’s concentration camps. From a massive work he wrote in Yiddish, Un di Velt hot geshvign (1956, and the world remained silent), Wiesel distilled a very brief but exceedingly powerful memoir of the Holocaust, published in French as La Nuit (1958; Night , 1960). Both a wrenching account of the presence of evil and a terrifying indictment of God’s injustice, this book received international acclaim. Wiesel had found his voice and his themes.

In 1955, Wiesel traveled to New York City. Following a traffic accident there in 1956, unable to travel, he was forced to stay past the expiration of his visa. The US government granted him citizenship to legalize his status.

Life’s Work

Following the success of Night, Wiesel wrote in rapid succession two short novels presenting the guilty anguish of those who survived the mass slaughter: L’Aube (1960; Dawn, 1961) and Le Jour (1961; The Accident, 1962). That every act is ambiguous and implies a loss of innocence and that “God commit[s] the most unforgivable crime; to kill without a reason” are central to the protagonists’ conduct and outlook. Little by little, however, Wiesel’s characters come to realize that friendship can help them live in the post-Holocaust world. This is especially true in La Ville de la chance (1962; The Town Beyond the Wall , 1964), where, despite society’s indifference to persecution and cruelty, loving and being a friend allow people to attain a kind of equilibrium. Questions about God, evil, and suffering, while they cannot be satisfactorily answered, must nevertheless be asked, since from the beginning such a dialogue has been established between God and creation. By rejoining his religious community, Wiesel seems to suggest further, in Les Portes de la forět (1964; The Gates of the Forest, 1966), that the survivor may finally create joy from despair.

At the same time that he was publishing his novels, Wiesel began writing eyewitness accounts and autobiographical pieces and stories of his life during the Hitler years. After a 1965 trip to the Soviet Union, he described in a series of articles originally published in Hebrew in Yediot Aharonot (collected and translated as The Jews of Silence, 1966) the plight of Soviet Jewry, as they tried to maintain their ethnic and religious identity in the face of often implacable anti-Semitism. His yeshiva and Sorbonne studies, along with more mature and in-depth readings of biblical texts and exegeses, were to form the basis of other nonfiction works, including several studies of Hasidism and Hasidic masters.

The prize-winning novel Le Mendiant de Jérusalem (1968; A Beggar in Jerusalem , 1970) marked a turning point for Wiesel. The novel shows how, through Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, a tormented people came of age; while celebrating this moment, the novel is both a memorial to the dead and an appeal on behalf of the world’s “beggars.” Although still haunted by the Holocaust, Wiesel could thereafter write about other human issues and problems faced by the next generation. For example, is madness, he asks in the first of several plays, an acceptable option for dealing with persecution (Zalmen: Ou, La Folie de Dieu, 1968; Zalmen: Or, The Madness of God, 1975)? Is silence a method for overcoming horror (Le Serment de Kolvillàg, 1973; The Oath, 1973)?

In 1969, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, who was to become his principal translator and with whom he would have one son. In the fall of 1972, he began his tenure at the City College of New York as Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies. This endowed chair gave him the opportunity to teach young students (he considers himself an educator first) the celebrations and paradoxes of Jewish theology and the meaning of modern Jewishness and to continue writing in diverse genres. He left this position in 1976 to become the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University. In 1982 he was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University, and from 1997 to 1999 he held the Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professorship of Judaic Studies at Barnard College.

During this period Wiesel also was involved in various social and political activities, from fighting against racism, war, fanaticism, apartheid, and violence to commemorating the Holocaust. In fact, some historians credit him with introducing “Holocaust” as the primary name for the Nazis’ death camps policy. (He was a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council until 1986, when he resigned in protest over US president Ronald Reagan’s controversial visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany.) For his humanitarian work and his concern for the oppressed everywhere, as well as for his literary achievements, he has received numerous honorary degrees, prizes, and awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal, the rank of Commandeur in the French Legion of Honor, and, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. It was bestowed both for his practical work in the cause of peace and for his message of “peace, atonement, and human dignity.” He used the money from the prize to establish the Elie Wiesel Foundation, which is dedicated to combat indifference and misinformation about the Holocaust through international dialogue and educational programs. Moreover, in 1992 he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996, in 2006 was awarded an honorary knighthood from the United Kingdom for his efforts in Holocaust education there, and in 2013 was awarded Israel's highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Distinction.

Meanwhile, Wiesel continued to publish plays, novels, and nonfiction at a prolific pace, producing more than forty books; in these he again weaves post-Holocaust despair and divine cruelty, but above all he denounces the world’s forgetfulness of and indifference to humankind’s inhumanity to humans. In 1995 he published the first volume of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea , which describes his childhood in Romania, internment in concentration camps, life in France following World War II, and life in the United States until 1969 and his marriage to Marion. The second volume, And the Sea Is Never Full , appeared in 1999 and takes up the story of his writing and activism into the late 1990s. In 1999 he also added children’s literature to his accomplishments with the publication of King Solomon and the Magic Ring.

Among Wiesel’s later novels is Les Juges (1999; The Judges , 2002), a moral fable set in Connecticut. Five travelers are stranded in the home of a man who is deluded with the belief that he is a judge and will sentence one of them to death during their brief stay. He terrorizes them with insinuating questions, and their responses reveal their essential character, a brutal process that summons up the dangers of unbridled state-sponsored interrogation. Le Temps des déracinés (2003; The Time of the Uprooted , 2005) concerns a Czech refugee from World War II who was raised in Hungary and moved to New York, working as a ghostwriter. In a complex plot he weaves his own memories with those of other displaced Jews among his friends to plumb the lasting effects of the Holocaust on their morality, ability to love, and faith.

Wiesel has continued his efforts at peace and reconciliation. He became a member of the Human Rights Foundation, and in 2004 the Romanian government invited him to head what came to be known as the Wiesel Commission to study the history of the Holocaust in Romania. In 2006, with American actor George Clooney, he testified before the United Nations Security Council, urging it to confront the humanitarian disaster wrought by Sudan’s civil war. In 2009 he visited Hungary—his first time there since World War II—and in 2012 spoke out against the nation for whitewashing events that happened there during the Holocaust. Controversially, however, Wiesel has also been a strong supporter of the Israeli government and its policies, including its treatment of Palestinians and conflict with Iran.

Wiesel has also been a popular lecturer—including his annual fall lecture series at Boston University and visiting lectures—often to the consternation of his critics. In 2007 he was attacked and nearly kidnapped by a Holocaust denier while staying in a hotel in San Francisco, California.

Significance

The Holocaust and its remembrance, the nature of God and the terrible silence of God: these themes recur throughout Wiesel’s novels, plays, personal recollections, and nonfiction. In trying to understand the mystery of theodicy, this modern humanist has encompassed much of Jewish lore, tradition, and memory. In addition, by asking but without answering the hard questions that have always plagued humans and by relating the Jews’ unique experience to the universal legacy of humanity, he has succeeded in creating the quintessential Everyman: “What I try to do is to speak for man, but as a Jew. I make no distinction and I certainly make no restriction.”

Wiesel has written with contempt against revisionist historians who deny the very existence of the Nazi extermination camps. He has passionately defended the conduct of the murdered and the survivors to his fellow Jews—those who expressed shame at the submissiveness of the victims and those who expressed skeptism of the survivors’ integrity. He has no less passionately criticized novelists and playwrights, television and film directors for trivializing the tragedy of six million martyrs, for whom he became the greatest memorialist.

Bibliography

Bartrop, Paul R., and Steven Leonard Jacobs. Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015. Print.

Beinart, Peter. "The Tragedy of Elie Wiesel." Haaretz. Haaretz Daily Newspaper, 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.

Berenbaum, Michael. The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1979. Print.

Cargas, Harry James. Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel. New York: Paulist, 1976. Print.

Cargas, Harry James. Responses to Elie Wiesel. New York: Persea, 1978. Print.

Dunham, Will, and Doina Chiacu. "Nobel Winner Elie Wiesel Lends Support to Netanyahu's US Speech." Reuters. Reuters, 12 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.

Dvorin, Tova. "Elie Wiesel Awarded Peres's Presidential Medal of Distinction." IsraelNationalNews.com. Arutz Sheva, 26 Nov. 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Estess, Ted L. Elie Wiesel. New York: Ungar, 1980. Print.

Horowitz, Rosemary, ed. Elie Wiesel and the Art of Story Telling. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Print.

Levy, Rachael. "A Conversation with Elie Wiesel." Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, 19 Oct. 2012. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Rocheleau, Matt. "Elie Wiesel Cancels Popular Fall Lecture Series at BU due to 'Health Reasons.'" Boston.com: Boston University. Boston Globe Media, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Rosenfeld, Alvin H., and Irving Greenberg, eds. Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

Roth, John K. A Consuming Fire: Encounters with Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust. Atlanta: John Knox, 1979. Print.

Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 1928–1969. New York: Knopf, 1995. Print.

Wiesel, Elie. And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, Vol. II, 1969–Present. New York: Knopf, 1999. Print.

Wiesel, Elie, and Richard D. Heffner. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. New York: Schocken, 2003. Print.