 1982 Bantam Books edition, with the original 1960 English translation and cover adapted from the 1958 French edition | |
| Author | Elie Wiesel |
|---|---|
| Translator | Stella Rodway for Hill & Wang, 1960 Marion Wiesel for Hill & Wang/Oprah Book Club, 2006 |
| Language | Yiddish |
Publication date | 1956: Un di Velt Hot Geshvign(Yiddish), Buenos Aires: Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina, 245 pages. |
| First translation | 1958 (adapted from the above): La Nuit, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 178 pages.[1] |
Published in English | 1960: Night, New York: Hill & Wang; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 116 pages. |
| ISBN | 0-8090-7350-1 (Stella Rodway translation, New York, Hill & Wang, 1960) ISBN 0-553-27253-5 (Stella Rodway translation, New York: Bantam Books, 1982) ISBN 0-374-50001-0 (Marion Wiesel translation, New York: Hill & Wang/Oprah Book Club, 2006) |
| LC Class | D811 W4823 1960 (Hill & Wang, 1960) |
| Followed by | Dawn (1961), Day (1962) |
Night (1960) is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship, as his father declines 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."[2]
Wiesel was 16 when Buchenwald was liberated by the United States Armyin April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten too. He moved to Paris after the war and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent").[3] The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night.
Fifty years later the book had been translated into 30 languages, and now ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir. Wiesel has called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art.[4]
Night is the first in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust 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."[5](from Internet)
KBE
September 30, 1928
Sighet, Kingdom of Romania
Manhattan, New York, New York, U.S.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Congressional Gold Medal
Grand Officer of the Order of the Star of Romania
Legion of Honour
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE (/ˈɛli vɪˈzɛl/;[2] September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwaldconcentration camps.[3]
Along with writing, he was professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes, and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In his political activities he also campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa and Nicaragua and genocide in Sudan. He publicly condemned the Armenian genocide of a century ago and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He had been described as "the most important Jew in America" by the Los Angeles Times.[4]
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.[5]
(from Internet)