Night (book)

1982 Bantam English edition; the cover is adapted from the original 1958 French edition design by Rasuardie
Author	Elie Wiesel
Original title	Un di Velt Hot Geshvign
Translator	Stella Rodway, McGibbon & Kee (1960); Marion Wiesel (2006)
Language	Yiddish
Subject(s)	The Holocaust
Genre(s)	Autobiography, memoir, novel
Publisher	Mark Turkov (1955)
Publication date	1955 in Yiddish in Argentina as Un di Velt Hot Geshvign; 1958 in French by Les Editions de Minuit as La Nuit
Published in English	September 1960 in the U.S. by Hill & Wang as Night
Pages	109 (1982 Bantam paperback)
ISBN	9780553272536
Followed by	Dawn, Day

Night is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father, Shlomo, in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, described as devastating in its simplicity, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the father-child relationship as Shlomo devolves to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night, everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."^[1]

He was 16 years old when Buchenwald was finally liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk below for fear of being beaten too. Having lost his faith in God and mankind, he vowed not to speak of his experience for ten years, to allow time, as he put it, to see clearly. In 1954 he wrote an 865-page manuscript in Yiddish, published as the 245-page Un di Velt Hot Geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent") in Buenos Aires in 1955, and in May that year the French novelist François Mauriac persuaded him to write it for a wider audience.

Even with Mauriac's help, finding a publisher was not easy—they said it was too morbid, nobody wanted to hear these stories—but 178 pages eventually appeared in France in 1958 as La Nuit, and in September 1960 a 116-page version was published in the United States as Night.^[2] Fifty years later it was held alongside Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl to be one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature.^[3] Unlike Levi's and Frank's work, it remains unclear how much of Wiesel's story is memoir. He has reacted angrily to the idea that any of it is fiction, calling it his deposition, but scholars have nevertheless had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. Ruth Franklin writes that the ruthless pruning of the text from Yiddish to French changed an angry, historical account into a work of art.^[3]

Night is the first book in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, and Day—reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust. The titles mark his transition from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."^[4]

Background

Sighet, north Transylvania

Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains in northern Transylvania, which was annexed by Hungary in 1940. With his father Shlomo, his mother Sarah, and his sisters—Hilda, Beatrice, and seven-year-old Tzipora—he lived in a close-knit community of between 10,000 and 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Night accurately reflects events in Hungary at the time. Ellen Fine writes that anti-Jewish legislation was enacted between 1938 and 1944, but the period Wiesel discusses at the beginning of the book, 1942 and 1943, was a fairly calm one for the Jews. That changed at midnight on March 18, 1944, with the invasion by Nazi Germany and the installation of Döme Sztójay's puppet government. Adolf Eichmann, commander of the Nazi's Sondereinsatzkommando (Special Action Unit), arrived in Hungary to oversee the deportation of its Jews to Auschwitz—450,000 Hungarian Jews were sent there between May 15 and July 7, 1944, around 12,000 every day, most of them gassed. ^[5]

As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe in May, June and the first half of July that year, Wiesel and his family were being deported, along with 15,000 Jews from Sighet and 18,000 from neighboring villages. Wiesel's mother and Tzipora were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and his father managed to stay together, surviving hard labor and a death march to Buchenwald, where Wiesel watched his father die just weeks before the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army arrived to liberate them.^[6]

Wiesel's story as told in Night

Moshe the Beadle

Elie Wiesel aged 15, late 1943 or early 1944

Night's narrator is Eliezer, a studious and deeply pious Orthodox Jewish teenager, who studies the Talmud by day, and at night runs to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple, part of his nightly religious tradition, but also a prediction, writes Fine, of the shadow about to be cast over Europe's Jews.^[7] To the disapproval of his father, Eliezer spends his time there discussing the Kabbalah and the mysteries of the universe with Moshe the Beadle, the synagogue's caretaker and the town's humblest resident, "awkward as a clown" but much loved. Moshe tells him that "man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him,"^[8] a theme that Night repeatedly turns to.

Toward the end of 1942, the Hungarian government rules that Jews unable to prove their citizenship will be expelled, and Moshe is crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. Somehow he manages to escape, miraculously saved by God, he believes, so that he might save the Jews of Sighet. He hurries back to the village to tell what he calls the story of his own death. He runs from one household to the next. "Jews, listen to me! It's all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!"^[9] The cattle train crossed the border into Poland, he tells them, where it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were transferred to lorries and driven to a forest in Galicia, near Kolomaye, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole and present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. Moshe tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen, making Moshe Night's first unheeded witness.^[10]

He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has! they said. Or even: Poor fellow. He's gone mad.

And as for Moshe, he wept.^[11]

Sighet ghettos

The main Sighet ghetto in May 1944 after the deportation of the Jews.^[12]

Over the next 18 months, restrictions on Jews gradually increase. No valuables are to be kept in Jewish homes. They are not allowed to visit restaurants, attend the synagogue, or leave home after six in the evening. They must wear the yellow star at all times. Eliezer's father makes light of it:

The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it ...

(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)^[13]

The SS decide to transfer the Jews to one of two ghettos, jointly run like a small town, each with its own council or Judenrat.

The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department—a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers ...

It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto—it was illusion.^[13]

In May 1944, the Judenrat is told the ghettos will be closed with immediate effect and the residents deported. They are not told their destination, only that they may each take a few personal belongings.^[14] The next day, Eliezer watches as the Hungarian police, wielding truncheons and rifle butts, round up his friends and neighbors, then march them through the streets. "It was from that moment that I began to hate them, and my hate is still the only link between us today."^[9]

And there was I, on the pavement, unable to make a move. Here came the Rabbi, his back bent, his face shaved ... His mere presence among the deportees added a touch of unreality to the scene. It was like a page torn from some story book ... One by one they passed in front of me, teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I once could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs.^[15]

Auschwitz

"Selection" of Jews from Hungary at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May/June 1944. To be sent to the left meant slave labor; to the right, the gas chamber.^[16]

Eliezer, his parents, and his sisters are crammed into a closed cattle wagon with 80 others, with no light, little to eat or drink, barely able to breathe. On their third night in the wagon, one woman, Madame Schächter, repeatedly becomes hysterical, screaming that she can see flames, until she is beaten into silence by the others—the book's second unheeded witness, believed only as they reach Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they see the flames and the chimneys for themselves.^[17] Men and women are separated on arrival. Eliezer and his father are sent to the left; his mother, Hilda, Beatrice, and Tzipora to the right. He learned years later that his mother and Tzipora were taken straight to the gas chamber.

For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother's hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair ... and I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever.^[18]

The remainder of Night describes Eliezer's desperate efforts not to be parted from his father, not even to lose sight of him; his grief and shame at witnessing his father's decline into helplessness; and as their relationship changes and the young man becomes the older man's caregiver, his resentment and guilt, because his father's existence threatens his own. The stronger Eliezer's need to survive, the weaker the bonds that tie him to other people. His loss of faith in human relationships is mirrored in his loss of faith in God. During the first night, as he and his father wait in line to be thrown into a firepit, he watches a lorry draw up and deliver its load of children into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead—Eliezer writes that in the long history of the Jews, he does not know whether people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves—Eliezer considers throwing himself against the electric fence. Just at that moment, he and his father are ordered to go to their barracks instead. But Eliezer is already destroyed. "[T]he student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me."^[19]

There follows a passage that Ellen Fine writes contains the main themes of Night—the death of God, children, innocence, and the défaite du moi, dissolution of the self, a recurring theme in Night and in Holocaust literature in general.^[20]

Members of the Sonderkommando—mainly Jewish inmates and Russian POWs forced to work around the gas chambers—burn corpses in Auschwitz, 1944.^[22]

With the loss of self goes Eliezer's sense of time.^[20]

I glanced at my father. How he had changed! ... The night was gone. So much had happened within such a few hours that I had lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses? And the ghetto? And the train? Was it only a week? One night—one single night?^[19]

God is not lost to Eliezer entirely. During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear, and weeps.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now?
And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.^[23]

Fine writes that this is the central event in Night, the religious sacrifice, Isaac bound to the altar, Jesus nailed to the cross, described by Alfred Kazin as the literal death of God.^[24] Afterwards the inmates celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, but Eliezer cannot take part.

Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? ... But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man.^[3]

Death march

Shlomo Wiesel

In or around August 1944, Eliezer and Shlomo are transferred from Birkenau to Auschwitz III, a work camp, their lives reduced to the avoidance of violence and the constant search for food. "Bread, soup—these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach."^[25] Their only joy is when the Americans bomb the camp. In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, the Germans decide to flee, taking 60,000 inmates to concentration camps in Germany on what became known as a death march, with anyone too weak to continue shot. Eliezer and Shlomo march to Gleiwitz to be put on a freight train to Buchenwald, a camp near Weimar, around 350 miles (563 km) from Auschwitz.

Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.

Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.^[26]

Resting in a shed after marching 50 miles (80 km), Rabbi Eliahou asks if anyone has seen his son. They had stuck together for three years, "always near each other, for suffering, for blows, for the ration of bread, for prayer," but the rabbi had lost sight of him in the crowd and is now scratching through the snow looking for his son's corpse. "I hadn't any strength left for running. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know."^[27] Wiesel does not tell the man that his son had indeed noticed his father limping, and had run faster, letting the distance between them grow.

And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done.^[28]

The inmates march to Gleiwitz, where they spend two days and nights locked inside cramped barracks without food, water, or heat, literally sleeping on top of one another, so that each morning the living wake with the dead underneath them. There is more marching to the train station and onto a cattle wagon with no roof, and no room to sit down until other inmates make space by throwing the dead onto the tracks. They travel for ten days and nights, with only the snow falling on them for water. Of the 100 Jews in Wiesel's wagon, 12 survive the journey.

I woke from my apathy just at the moment when two men came up to my father. I threw myself on top of his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hand, crying:
Father! Father! Wake up. They're trying to throw you out of the carriage ...
His body remained inert ...
I set to work to slap him as hard as I could. After a moment, my father's eyelids moved slightly over his glazed eyes. He was breathing weakly.
You see, I cried.
The two men moved away.^[29]

Buchenwald and liberation

The Germans are waiting with loudhailers and orders to head for a hot bath. Wiesel is desperate for the heat of the water, but his father sinks into the snow, unable to move. "I could have wept with rage ... I showed him the corpses all around him; they too had wanted to rest here ... I yelled against the wind ... I felt I was not arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death he had already chosen."^[30]

An alert sounds, the camp lights go out, and Eliezer, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he has a father, and goes in search of him. "But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." His father is in another block, sick with dysentery. The other men in his bunk, a Frenchman and a Pole, attack Shlomo because he can no longer go outside to relieve himself. Eliezer is unable to protect him. "Another wound to the heart, another hate, another reason for living lost." Begging for water one night from his bunk, where he has lain for a week, Shlomo is beaten on the head with a truncheon by an SS officer for making too much noise. Eliezer lies in the bunk above and does nothing for fear of being beaten, too. He hears his father make a rattling noise—"Eliezer"—but lies still. In the morning, January 29, 1945, he finds another man lying in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken Shlomo to the crematorium, possibly still alive.^[30]

His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond.

I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like—free at last!^[30]

Shlomo missed his freedom by only a few weeks. The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz 11 days earlier, and the Americans were making their way towards Buchenwald. Eliezer is transferred to the children's block where he stays with 600 others, dreaming of soup. On April 5, 1945, the inmates are told the camp is to be liquidated and they are to be moved—another death march. On April 11, with 20,000 inmates still inside, a Jewish resistance movement attacks the remaining SS officers and takes control. At six o'clock that evening, the first American tank arrives at the gates, and behind it the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army. Eliezer is free.^[31]

Writing and publishing

1954: Un di Velt Hot Geshvign

Wiesel at Buchenwald, second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, April 16, 1945

From Buchenwald, Wiesel wanted to go to Palestine, but was prevented by British immigration restrictions. Refusing to return to Sighet, he was sent instead to the Oeuvre au Secours aux Enfants (Children's Rescue Service) with 400 other orphans, first to Belgium, then to Normandy, where he learned that his two older sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, had survived. From 1947–1950, he studied the Talmud, philosophy, and literature at the Sorbonne, attending lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber. To supplement his $16-a week-stipend, he taught Hebrew, and worked as a translator for the militant Yiddish weekly Zion in Kamf, which eased him into a career in journalism.^[6] In 1948, at the age of 19, he was sent to Israel as a war correspondent by the French newspaper L'arche, and after the Sorbonne, he became chief foreign correspondent of the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

For ten years, he kept his story to himself, refusing even to discuss it. In 1979, he wrote: "So heavy was my anguish that I made a vow: not to speak, not to touch upon the essential for at least ten years. Long enough to see clearly. Long enough to learn to listen to the voices crying inside my own. Long enough to regain possession of my memory. Long enough to unite the language of man with the silence of the dead."^[32] It was in 1954, on board a ship to Brazil, where he had an assignment to cover Christian missionary activity in poor Jewish communities, that he started to write. "I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading. I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival ... My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation ... The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully, never participating in the ship's activities, constantly pounding away on my little portable, oblivious of my fellow passengers ..."^[33]

By the end of the journey, Wiesel had an 862-page manuscript that he called Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent).^[34] On the ship, he was introduced by friends to Mark Turkov, a publisher of Yiddish texts, and he gave Turkov the only copy of his precious manuscript.^[35] It was published as a 245-page volume the same year in Buenos Aires, the 117th book in a 176-volume series of Yiddish memoirs of Poland and the war, called Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry, Buenos Aires 1946–66).^[36] Whereas the other books in the series were testimonials to the victims, Ruth Wisse writes that Un di Velt Hot Geshvign stood out as a "highly selective and isolating literary narrative" influenced by Wiesel's reading of the French existentialists.^[3] The book attracted no literary interest and Wiesel continued with his journalism. In May 1955, he decided to interview the French prime minister, Pierre Mendes-France, and approached the novelist François Mauriac, a friend of Mendes-France, for an introduction. He writes: "The problem was that [Mauriac] was in love with Jesus. He was the most decent person I ever met in that field— as a writer, as a Catholic writer. Honest, sense of integrity, and he was in love with Jesus. He spoke only of Jesus. Whatever I would ask—Jesus. Finally, I said, 'What about Mendès-France?' He said that Mendès-France, like Jesus, was suffering ..."^[37]

When he said Jesus again I couldn't take it, and for the only time in my life I was discourteous, which I regret to this day. I said, "Mr. Mauriac," we called him Maître, "ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it." I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed. I closed my notebook and went to the elevator. He ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair, and I in mine, and he began weeping. I have rarely seen an old man weep like that, and I felt like such an idiot ... And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, "You know, maybe you should talk about it."^[37]

1960: Night

Wiesel translated Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, and sent Mauriac a French manuscript within a year. Even with Mauriac's connections, no publisher could be found. They said it was too morbid. "Nobody wants to hear these stories," they told Wiesel.^[37] But in 1958, Jerome Linden of Les Editions de Minuit agreed to release a 178-page French translation retitled La Nuit, dedicated to Shlomo, Sarah, and Tzipora, with a preface by Mauriac.^[34] The same difficulty was encountered finding an American publisher. According to Wiesel: "Some thought the book too slender (American readers seemed to prefer fatter volumes), others too depressing (American readers seemed to prefer optimistic books). Some felt that its subject was too little known, others that it was too well known."^[38]

In 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang—who Wiesel writes "believed in literature as others believe in God"^[38]—agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance, and published a 116-page English edition in the U.S. in September that year as Night, translated by Stella Rodway of McGibbon & Kee.^[39] Wiesel was at the time working as a United Nations correspondent for Israeli newspapers and for the Jewish Daily Forward in New York. It took three years to sell the first print run of 3,000 copies. The book sold 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, at $3 a copy, but it attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with literary figures like Saul Bellow.^[40] By 1997, it was selling 300,000 copies a year in the United States.^[41] On January 16, 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose Night for Oprah's Book Club; one million extra paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed carrying the book club's logo, with a new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface by Wiesel.^[42] By February 13, 2006, it was no. 1 in The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction, and by March 2006 had sold six million copies in the U.S. alone, and had been translated into 30 languages.^[3]

Reception

Memoir or novel

The house in Sighet where Wiesel was born, photographed in 2007

Plaques on Wiesel's former home in Sighet, July 2007

Scholars and reviewers have been unsure which literary genre Night belongs to. In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel explicitly says it is not a novel, calling it instead his deposition, and objects when someone implies it is fiction.^[3] He writes that he wants his readers to know that "the truth I present is unvarnished; I cannot do otherwise."^[43] Reviewers have nevertheless had difficulty reading Night as an eyewitness account. Gary Weissman writes that it defies all categories, though it has been called a novel, autobiography, autobiographical novel, non-fictional novel, semi-fictional memoir, fictional-autobiographical novel, fictionalized autobiographical memoir, and memoir-novel.^[41] Irving Abrahamson writes that it is the beginning of something new in literature.^[44]

Ruth Franklin argues that the book's impact stems from its exquisite construction. Its language is plain, but "every sentence feels weighted and deliberate, every episode carefully chosen and delineated ... One has the sense of merciless experience mercilessly distilled to its essence ..."^[3] She writes that the simplicity and power of the narrative have come at the cost of literal truth. The Yiddish version was an historical work, political and angry, blaming the Jewish concept of chosenness as the source of the Jews' troubles. Wiesel wrote in the 1956 Yiddish version: "In the beginning was belief, foolish belief, and faith, empty faith, and illusion, the terrible illusion. ... We believed in God, had faith in man, and lived with the illusion that in each one of us is a sacred spark from the fire of the shekinah, that each one carried in his eyes and in his soul the sign of God. This was the source—if not the cause—of all our misfortune."^[45]

In preparation for publication in France, Wiesel and his publisher pruned without mercy. Franklin writes that it was a work of art that emerged, rather than a faithful narrative.^[3] Naomi Seidman, professor of Jewish culture at the Graduate Theological Union, wrote a comparative analysis of the Yiddish and French texts for a 1996 article in Jewish Social Studies. She documented the transition from a historical account of events to an autobiographical novel, concluding that Night transforms the Holocaust into a religious event, the abdication of God, with the witness both priest and prophet. Wiesel himself has said that Auschwitz is as important as Mount Sinai—where in the Bible the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God.^[46]

Seidman concludes that there was not one Holocaust survivor in Night, but two—a Yiddish and a French—a view that Holocaust deniers have exploited to imply that Wiesel has not been truthful about some of the scenes,^[3] and which led to Seidman herself being accused of Holocaust revisionism. Seidman told The Jewish Daily Forward that, in re-writing rather than simply translating Un di Velt Hot Geshvign for publication in France, Wiesel replaced an angry survivor who regards "testimony as a refutation of what the Nazis did to the Jews," with one who is "haunted by death, whose primary complaint is directed against God, not the world, [or] the Nazis."^[47]

Seidman supports her thesis that the Yiddish and French versions are two books written for different audiences by comparing the parts of the text that survived the editing process, and pointing out what she sees as significant differences. For example, in the Yiddish, Wiesel writes that, after liberation, some of the camp survivors, the Jewish boys, run off to "fargvaldikn daytshe shikses" ("rape German shiksas"), whereas in the French, they are just young men who go "coucher avec les filles" ("to sleep with girls"). Seidman argues that the Yiddish version is for the Jewish readers, who want to hear about Jewish boys taking revenge by raping German non-Jews. For the rest of the world—the largely Christian readership—the anger is removed and they are simply young men sleeping with girls. Seidman writes that Wiesel, perhaps taking advice from Mauriac, a Roman Catholic, deliberately suppressed what his Jewish readership wanted to see: vengeance.^[46]

When the original version was written

There is confusion as to when the first version was written. Werner Kelber of Rice University writes that the origin of the text speaks directly to the question of whether Night really is a cri de coeur—spontaneous and heart-felt—as Wiesel has presented it.^[48] Wiesel implied that it was his May 1955 meeting with Mauriac that made him to break his vow of silence. In an interview in 1996, he said: "[Mauriac] took me to the elevator and embraced me. And that year, the tenth year, I began writing my narrative. After it was translated from Yiddish into French, I sent it to him ... That made me not publish, but write."^[37] However, as Naomi Seidman notes, and as Wiesel himself writes in All Rivers Run to the Sea,^[49] Mark Turkov, the publisher in Argentina, had been given the Yiddish manuscript in 1954—one year before Wiesel's meeting with Mauriac.^[46] In Rivers, Wiesel writes that the first version of Night was written on a boat en route to Brazil in 1954, and that he handed the original 862-page manuscript to Turkov on the boat. Although Turkov said he would return the manuscript, Wiesel writes that he did not see it again, but later in Rivers, he explains that he "cut down the original manuscript from 862 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition."^[34] Seidman writes that "[t]hese confusing and possibly contradictory reports on the various versions of Night have generated a chain of similarly confusing critical comments."^[46]

Truth and memory

Elie Wiesel, May 2010

Ruth Franklin writes that Night's "resuscitation" by Oprah Winfrey came at a difficult time for the genre of memoir, after a previous book-club author, James Frey, was found to have fabricated parts of his autobiography, A Million Little Pieces. She argues that Winfrey's endorsement of Wiesel's work was a canny move, perhaps designed to restore the book club's credibility with a book regarded as beyond criticism, and that Night has a useful lesson to teach about the complexities of memoir and memory. She writes that the story of how it came to be written reveals how many factors come into play in creating a memoir: "the obligation to remember and to testify, certainly, but also the artistic and even moral obligation to construct a credible persona and to craft a beautiful work ... truth in prose, it turns out, is not always the same thing as truth in life."^[3] Wiesel tells a story about a visit to a Rebbe, a Hasidic rabbi, he hadn't seen for 20 years. The Rebbe is upset to learn that Wiesel has become a writer, and wants to know what he writes. "Stories," Wiesel tells him, "... true stories."

About people you knew? "Yes, about people I might have known." About things that happened? "Yes, about things that happened or could have happened." But they did not? "No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end." The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: That means you are writing lies! I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred."^[50]

See also

• Dawn
• Day

Notes

All page references to Night refer to the April 1982 Bantam Books paperback edition, which reproduced the original English text published in September 1960 by Hill & Wang.

References

Further reading