Elie Wiesel Biography and List of Works

Rumanian-born American writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. The basis for Wiesel's work is his own experience and personal testament of the destruction of Jews during World War II. A survivor of the horrors of the Holocaust, Wiesel has been considered "a messenger to mankind... The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author." (from the Nobel Peace citation) Central themes in Wiesel's fiction, memoirs, and essays are the struggle against evil, "man's inhumanity toward man", and silence versus verboseness.

"How can one work for the living without by that very act betraying those who are absent? The question remains open, and no new fact can change it. Of course, the mystery of good is no less disturbing than the mystery of evil. But one does not cancel out the other. Man alone is capable of uniting them by remembering."
(from A Beggar in Jerusalem, 1968)

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Hungary (now Romania), a centre for Hasidic Jewish learning, where Wiesel spent a happy childhood. He learned Yiddish from his mother and father, and studied biblical Hebrew in school. In 1944 all Jews from the town were moved to Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister were killed. Wiesel was sent to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before Buchenwald's liberation. Three children from the family survived, Wiesel was one of them.

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."

In April 1945, having miraculously survived, Wiesel was liberated by the U.S. Third Army. He was 16. After the war Wiesel settled in France, and studied literature, psychology, and philosophy at the Sorbonne. His faith in God was shattered but during the following years he rediscovered his Jewish tradition. From 1949 he started to write for the Franco-Jewish newspaper L'Arche. In 1952 he became a reporter for the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Ahronot. In 1956 he was sent to New York to cover the United Nations, and seven years later he was naturalized. In 1969 Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, a survivor of the German concentration camps. She translated Wiesel's books into English.

In his new home country, which he has shared with France and Israel, Wiesel gave thousands of lectures at college campuses. He taught at the City College of New York and at Boston University, where he was Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities and from 1988 professor of philosophy. In 1992 presidents Izetbegovic of Bosnia invited Wiesel and Milosevic of Serbia, to observe the war ravaged cities. Wiesel's honours include the Congressional Medal of Achievement he received from President Ronald Reagan in 1984. He received honorary doctorates from dozens of universities, and is Commander of the French Legion of Honour.

Although Wiesel yearned to be a writer after the war, he could not muster the courage to recount what he had witnessed in the concentration camps. He wrote a romantic spy novel under the pen name Elisha Carmeli and travelled in India. In France he was encouraged by the novelist François Mauriac to write about his experiences. This resulted in 1956 in the publication of Wiesel's first book, an 800-page work And the World Remained Silent, written originally in Yiddish. The semi-autobiographical story was published two years later abridged as La nuit (Night). It became an international best seller. However, Mauriac's own publisher had doubted its success - "No one's interested in the death camps anymore. It won't sell," was the verdict. Wiesel later stated, "not to transmit an experience is to betray it." L'aube (Dawn), the story of a survivor of the Nazi terror, who seeks to kill the enemies of the nascent Jewish state of Israel, was published in 1960. Le jour (1961, The Accident) centres on another survivor who must deal with the guilt of staying alive while his family perished at Auschwitz. The book formed a trilogy with Night and Dawn.

In his books Wiesel draws upon his early theological training and uses Hasidic tradition. One of the central conflicts in the novels, the doubt and belief in God, is embodied in the enigmatic character of Moshe the Madman. God's silence in spite of immense suffering and the despair and hope of humanity is a recurrent theme. In the second part of his memoirs, And the Sea Is Never Full (1999), Wiesel wrote: "The silence of Birkenau is a silence unlike any other. It contains the screams, the strangled prayers of thousands of human beings condemned to vanish into the darkness of nameless, endless ashes. Human silence at the core of inhumanity. Deadly silence at the core of death. Eternal silence under a moribund sky."

Most of Wiesel's novels take place either before or after the events of the Holocaust. "When I see that it becomes tolerable, I don't speak about it. That's why I have written so little about the Holocaust." Wiesel writes to testify, and to justify his own survival. La Ville de la chance (1962, The Town beyond the Wall) deals with the silence of non-Jews confronted by the Holocaust. Le mendiant de Jerusalem (1968, Beggar of Jerusalem) is about the Six-Day War. Le serment de Kolvillàg (1973, The Oath) centres on a small town somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, which only exists in the memory of its last survivor, Azriel. His burden is to perpetually recall the occasion when a Christian boy disappeared and Jews were accused of ritual murder. Moshe, a mystic, chooses to assume the guilt and the community takes the oath: whoever would survive must never speak of the town's last days and nights. "In the final stage of every equation, of every encounter, the key is responsibility. Whoever says "I" creates the "you." Such is the trap of every conscience. The "I" signifies both solitude and rejection of solitude. Words name things and then replace them. Whoever says tomorrow, denies it. Tomorrow exists only for him who does not seek it. And yesterday? Yesterday is Kolvillàg: a name to forget, a word already forgotten." Le Cinquième fils (1983, The Fifth Son) is an exploration of good and evil. The narrator is the stepchild of a survivor of the Holocaust, Reuven. He goes after an SS officer, who had murdered Reuven's son. Le Crépuscule, au loin (1987) asks the question, were the cultured henchmen of the Nazi era truly sane? And L'Oublié (1989, The Forgotten) is a story of a journalist who explores his own and his family's past. The central characters are Elhanon Rosenbaum, a New York psychotherapist and survivor of the Holocaust, who begins to suffer from Alzheimer's disease, and his son, Malkiell, who travels to Romania, where his father fought with the partisans.

"How can we imagine what is beyond imagination... How can we retell what escapes language?"

Wiesel other works include Célébration hasidique (1972), a collection of Hasidic tales, Célébration biblique (1975, Messenger of God), a collection of biblical stories, Silences et mémoire d'hommes (1989, Sages and Dreamers), and anthologies of essays dealing with collective and individual guilt, post-World-War-II Germany, the Klaus Barbie trial in France, the evils of racism, and the Jewish faith. A three-volume collection of his essays, entitled Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel (edited by Irving Abrahamson) was published in 1985. The Jews of Silence (1966) and The Testament (1981) deal with the oppression of Jews under Communism. Memoir in Two Voices (1966) is based on conversations between President Francois Mitterrand and the author. In the book Mitterand defends his collaboration with the anti-Semitic Vichy regime during World War II. From the 1990s Wiesel devoted much of his time to the publication of his own memoirs and to organizing and participating in a number of prestigious international conferences and events. The first part of his memoirs, All Rivers Run in to the Sea, appeared in 1995, and the second, And the Sea is Never Full, in 1999.

For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literatuire in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 4); Elie Wiesel: A Voice for Humanity by Ellen Norman Stern (1996); Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel by S.P. Sibelman (1995); Elie Wiesel by P.M. de Saint Cheron (1994); Elie Wiesel's Secretive Texts by C. Davis (1994); Elie Wiesel by Caroline Lazo (1994); In Dialogue and Dilemma with Elie Wiesel by David Patterson (1991); Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope, ed. by C. Rittner (1990); Elie Wiesel - Qui êtes-vous? by B.-F. Cohen (1987); Elie Wiesel: Messanger to All Humanity by R. M. Brown (1983): Elie Wiesel: Witness for Life by E.N. Stern (1982); Elie Wiesel by Ted L. Estess (1980); The Vision of the Void by M. Berenbaum (1979); Confronting the Holocaust, ed. by A.H. Rosenfeld and I. Greenberg (1978); The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination by L. Langer (1975)

UN DI VELT HOT GESHVIGN, (1956)