I’ve been re-reading Eli Wiesel’s ground breaking, terrible, memoir, Night, this last week, along with a niece in 9th grade, who is reading it in her English class. My god! I think. Was I ready for such images in 9th grade —-of staggering at a run through the snow or be shot? Of babies being tossed into the flames? Of a starving son beating his father for food? I recall 10th grade as the first of what were to become my grown-up years. We heard of Americans of Japanese ancestry being taken from their homes, schools and businesses and held in concentration camps during WW II. Unheard of! No one in my family had ever mentioned such a thing. But it was true. Nor did the adults I knew want to hear about it. For me a life-lasting skepticism of claims of national of danger and of praise for our own goodness was set in motion. But Wiesel’s memories of his own year and a half long crawl towards death, would I have been ready to take this in? I hope the teacher is a profound and careful person.
The memoir, which began as a 900 page effort in Yiddish, published in 1955 in Buenos Aires, only received rejection slips in France, the U.S. and Great Britain, even after it had been drastically pared to just over 100 pages, at the behest of Wiesel’s new friend, the Catholic writer François Mauriac. As Wiesel says in a preface to the new edition, translated by his wife Marion Wiesel, there was, following the war
“…careless and patronizing indifference toward what is so inadequately called the Holocaust… The subject was considered morbid and interested no one. If a rabbi happened to mention the book in his sermon, there were always people ready to complain that it was senseless to “burden our children with the tragedies of the Jewish past.”
Finally, in 1958 an edition was published in France (more…)
