Definition of Memoir
A memoir is a piece of autobiographical writing, usually shorter in
nature than a comprehensive autobiography. The memoir, especially as it
is being used in publishing today, often tries to capture certain highlights
or meaningful moments in one's past, often including a contemplation of
the meaning of that event at the time of the writing of the memoir.
Night is a memoir. It focuses on an experience, a horrific period of time which Wiesel, a
young journalist at the time, was compelled to write and record. Although he had
resolved to be silent about the horrors in his life, the young journalist's self-imposed
silence came to an end in the mid-1950s, after he met and interviewed the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Francois Mauriac. Deeply moved upon learning of Wiesel's tragic
youth, Mauriac urged him to speak out and tell the world of his experiences, to "bear
witness" for the millions of men, women, and children whom death, and not despair, had
silenced.
The memoir may be more emotional and concerned with capturing particular scenes, or a
series of events, rather than documenting every fact of a person's life (Zuwiyya, N. 2000).
For example, Homer Hickam, Jr. has written several memoirs about his life, including
October Sky (formerly Rocket Boys) and The Coalwood Way. Both cover his high school
days in Coalwood, West Virginia. They are full length books, but the scope of time is
brief compared to Hickam's entire life and all the events of his life.
Characteristics of the Memoir Form
1. Focus on a brief period of time or series of related events
2. Narrative structure, including many of the usual elements of storytelling such as
setting, plot development, imagery, conflict, characterization, foreshadowing and
flashback, and irony and symbolism
3. The writer's contemplation of the meaning of these events in retrospect
4. A fictional quality even though the story is true
5. Higher emotional level
6. More personal reconstruction of the events and their impact
7. Therapeutic experience for the memoirist, especially when the memoir is of the
crisis or survival type of memoir
Memoirs gained much negative publicity after an incident with an alleged memoir was
featured on as an Oprah book club selection (not this book).
Mr. Wiesel said he had not read Mr. Frey's book and could not comment on the
controversy. He acknowledged that some people and institutions, including on occasion
The New York Times, have referred to Night as a novel, "mainly because of its literary
style."
"But it is not a novel at all," he said. "I know the difference," he added, noting that
"Night" is the first of his 47 books, several of which are novels. "I make a distinction
between what I lived through and what I imagined others to have lived through."
As it is a memoir, he said, "My experiences in the book - A to Z - must be true." He
continued: "All the people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone
mentions it as a novel."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/books/16cnd-oprah.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-bio.html
About the Memoir
Setting: Concentration camps throughout Germany, during World War II. Auschwitz,
Birkenau, and Buna.
Background Information:
During World War II, Hitler formed many concentration camps throughout Germany and
Poland. In these camps the people imprisoned, mainly of Jewish or Gypsy descent, were
tortured, starved, put through horrific conditions, killed, and worked to death.
Major individuals:
Eliezer - The narrator of Night and the stand-in for the memoir’s author, Elie Wiesel.
Night traces Eliezer’s psychological journey, as the Holocaust robs him of his faith in
God and exposes him to the deepest inhumanity of which man is capable. Despite many
tests of his humanity, however, Eliezer maintains his devotion to his father. It is
important to note that we learn Eliezer’s last name only in passing, and that it is never
repeated. His story—which parallels Wiesel’s own biography—is intensely personal, but
it is also representative of the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Jewish teenagers.
Chlomo - Even though he is the only character other than Eliezer who is present
throughout the memoir, Eliezer’s father is named only once, at the end of Night. Chlomo
is respected by the entire Jewish community of Sighet, and by his son as well. He and
Eliezer desperately try to remain together throughout their concentration camp ordeal.
Moshe the Beadle - Eliezer’s teacher of Jewish mysticism, Moshe is a poor Jew who
lives in Sighet. He is deported before the rest of the Sighet Jews but escapes and returns
to tell the town what the Nazis are doing to the Jews. Tragically, the community takes
Moshe for a lunatic.
Moshe the Beadle - Eliezer’s teacher of Jewish mysticism, Moshe is a poor Jew who
lives in Sighet. He is deported before the rest of the Sighet Jews but escapes and returns
to tell the town what the Nazis are doing to the Jews. Tragically, the community takes
Moshe for a lunatic.
Akiba Drumer - A Jewish Holocaust victim who gradually loses his faith in God as a
result of his experiences in the concentration camp.
Madame Schächter - A Jewish woman from Sighet who is deported in the same cattle
car as Eliezer. Madame Schächter is taken for a madwoman when, every night, she
screams that she sees furnaces in the distance. She proves to be a prophetess, however, as
the trains soon arrive at the crematoria of Auschwitz.
Juliek - A young musician whom Eliezer meets in Auschwitz. Juliek reappears late in
the memoir, when Eliezer hears him playing the violin after the death march to Gleiwitz.
Tibi and Yosi - Two brothers with whom Eliezer becomes friendly in Buna. Tibi and
Yosi are Zionists. Along with Eliezer, they make a plan to move to Palestine after the
war.
Dr. Josef Mengele - When he arrives at Auschwitz, Eliezer encounters the historically
infamous Dr. Mengele. Mengele was the cruel doctor who presided over the selection of
arrivals at Auschwitz/Birkenau. Known as the “Angel of Death,” Mengele’s words
sentenced countless prisoners to death in the gas chambers. He also directed horrific
experiments on human subjects at the camp.
Idek - Eliezer’s Kapo (a prisoner conscripted by the Nazis to police other prisoners) at
the electrical equipment warehouse in Buna. Despite the fact that they also faced the
cruelty of the Nazis, many Kapos were as cruel to the prisoners as the Germans. During
moments of insane rage, Idek beats Eliezer.
Franek - Eliezer’s foreman at Buna. Franek notices Eliezer’s gold tooth and gets a
dentist in the camp to pry it out with a rusty spoon.
Rabbi Eliahou - A devout Jewish prisoner whose son abandons him in one of many
instances in Night of a son behaving cruelly toward his father. Eliezer prays that he will
never behave as Rabbi Eliahou’s son behaves.
Zalman - One of Eliezer’s fellow prisoners. Zalman is trampled to death during the run
to Gleiwitz.
Meir Katz - Eliezer’s father’s friend from Buna. In the cattle car to Buchenwald, Katz
saves Eliezer’s life from an unidentified assailant.
Stein - Eliezer’s relative from Antwerp, Belgium, whom he and his father encounter in
Auschwitz. Trying to bolster his spirit, Eliezer lies to Stein and tells him that his family is
still alive and healthy.
Hilda - Eliezer’s oldest sister.
Béa - Eliezer’s middle sister.
Tzipora - Eliezer’s youngest sister.
Plot Summary:
The autobiography began in 1941 with Elie and his family living in Sighet, an area in Germany. In 1944
German and Hungarian police set up ghettos where all the Jews and other religious and ethnic people were
kept, and Elie and his family were basically kept captive in this area by the Gestapo. This was just until
they were to be taken away to the concentration camps. When Elie and his family arrived at the
concentration camp in Birkenau, he was separated from his mother and sister, whom he later found out had
been killed. It was hard for him to deal with the fact that he would never see them again, and he wanted to
give up. Elie almost killed himself while he was on the line waiting to get into the camp, facing the fire
pits. A line straying to the left and one to the right decided his fate. If he was pointed on the right line, he
would be immediately sent to the fire pit. He lied saying that he was 18, but was actually 14. When he was
almost at the front of the line, he decided to throw himself at the barbed wire fence, rather than dying by
fire. He changed his mind when the line suddenly shifted and he didn't have to go in the fire after all. He
was relieved, but also dispirited by knowing that he would never see his mother and sister again.
Elie's father kept him going, constantly saying that they would make it, and that he should never lose his
faith. Upon arriving, all the men had to give in their clothes and personal articles, and get checked
physically by the SS troops to see their physical condition, and to deplete them of any confidence and
privacy they had left.
They were sent off to Auschwitz where they were put to work. They couldn't say they were skilled workers,
because as a result they would be separated. Elie worked in a factory, where he met a lot of people,
including a girl from France. He was separated from his father at that time. He liked Auschwitz better
because it was cleaner and set up nicer than Birkenau. He had become numb to beatings by now, and had
witnessed numerous hangings of his friends at the camp.
He was then sent from Auschwitz to Buna with his father. He had become accustomed to the stench of
burning bodies. He injured his foot, which caused him to have an operation. After the operation, the camp
was sent out to march because the Russians were coming to bomb the camps. Elie was told not to stay in
the hospital because he would be killed. So, he went out with his weak father and barely healed foot to
march. It was the middle of the winter, and none of the prisoners were dressed well enough. They were
headed for Buchenwald, which was a forty-two mile march. They had to run for most of the time. Once
they reached Buchenwald, they rested for awhile. Elie's father passed away at the camp from dysentery.
Elie had to continue going on without his father. They were later liberated at Buchenwald, and Elie was one
of the very few to survive.
Themes:
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Death
Faith
Hatred
Survival
Perserverence
Loss of Innocence
Key Issues:
Death-- A theme which was used throughout the book. It was shown through the loss of
loved ones, especially when Elie lost his entire family to the concentration camps. It was
also shown through the constant torture that went on, and the putrid smell of dead bodies
penetrating in the prisoner's nostrils.
Faith - Elie was told by his father to never lose his faith of his religion it would help him
through everything, and keep him strong. At first Elie wasn't sure of his faith because if
there was a God, then why did he create the situation that they were in.
Hatred - The Nazi's acted through hatred against the Jews, Gypsies, and many others
who stood in their way. They killed and tortured for no other reason than hate. The hate
prevailed over all and it took over the minds of everyone.
Loss of Innocence - Elie was a young boy when he was taken to the concentration
camps, and he led a sheltered life. He did not realize how cruel people could be, and what
far measures they would take when faced with power and death. He saw the torture, and
the death of his family, which brought him great pain, but also made him grow up and
face reality.
Morals and Life Applications:
The autobiography, Night , by Elie Wiesel is written proof of the real life horror that
existed during the Holocaust. It is not fiction, therefore its life applications are evident.
One should never lose faith or whatever guiding force that may keep them going. This
faith was the only force that helped Elie to survive, and without this faith Elie would have
surely succumbed to dying. Some morals of this autobiography are that life is not always
fair, and people are not either. People give in to power to save themselves and protect
their own lives. People will sometimes hurt others, even those close to them, if put in a
life or death situation. The major purpose of this autobiography is to recount the events
that took place during the Holocaust. One may think that Elie wrote his story to tell
people of the great tragedy that took the lives of his family and of millions of others that
were taken for no reason at all
Vocabulary from Elie Wiesel’s Night
From Chapters 1-2
compatriots
edict
expound
firmament
hermetically
pestilential
phylacteries
daily prayer
pillage
premonition
warning
truncheon
From Chapters 3-5
bestial
n. fellow countrymen
n. official statement; law
v. to set forth in detail
n. the sky, or heavens
adv. completely sealed; airtight
adj. filled with disease; contagious
n. small boxes containing scripture; worn by some Jewish men for
v. to rob with open violence
n. anticipation of an event, usually negative, even without actual
n. a police officer’s stick
adj. like a beast or animal
blandishments
crucible
emaciated
leprous
affects body tissue
manacle
queue
wizened
From Chapters 6-9
contagion
embarkation
encumbrance
indeterminate
rivet
semblance
vigilance
n. something used to coax
n. container for cooking at high heat
adj. marked by abnormal thinness caused by starvation or disease
adj. showing signs of leprosy, which is an infectious disease that
v. to handcuff
n. waiting line
adj. dry, shrunken, wrinkled
n. an influence that spreads rapidly
n. beginning of a journey
n. burden
adj. vague, not fixed in advance
v. to hold attention tightly, as if physically attached
n. outward appearance, but with a sense of falsity
n. state of extreme watchfulness
January 20, 2008
Essay
The Story of ‘Night’
By RACHEL DONADIO
This fall, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” was removed from the New York Times best-seller list,
where it had spent an impressive 80 weeks after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book
club. The Times’s news survey department, which compiles the list, decided the
Holocaust memoir wasn’t a new best seller but a classic like “Animal Farm” or “To Kill a
Mockingbird,” which sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year largely through course
adoptions. Indeed, since it appeared in 1960, “Night” has sold an estimated 10 million
copies — three million of them since Winfrey chose the book in January 2006 (and
traveled with Wiesel to Auschwitz).
But “Night” had taken a long route to the best-seller list. In the late 1950s, long before
the advent of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust studies, Wiesel’s account of his time at
Auschwitz and Buchenwald was turned down by more than 15 publishers before the
small firm Hill & Wang finally accepted it. How “Night” became an evergreen is more
than a publishing phenomenon. It is also a case study in how a book helped created a
genre, how a writer became an icon and how the Holocaust was absorbed into the
American experience.
Raised in an Orthodox family in Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel was liberated from
Buchenwald at age 16. In unsentimental detail, “Night” recounts daily life in the camps
— the never-ending hunger, the sadistic doctors who pulled gold teeth, the Kapos who
beat fellow Jews. On his first day in the camps, Wiesel was separated forever from his
mother and sister. At Auschwitz, he watched his father slowly succumb to dysentery
before the SS beat him to within an inch of his life. Wiesel writes honestly about his
guilty relief at his father’s death. In the camps, the formerly observant boy underwent a
profound crisis of faith; “Night” was one of the first books to raise the question: where
was God at Auschwitz?
Working as a journalist in his mid-20s, Wiesel wrote the first version of “Night” in
Yiddish as “Und di Velt Hot Geshvign” (“And the World Remained Silent”) while on
assignment in Brazil. But it wasn’t until he returned to Paris and met François Mauriac, a
noted Catholic novelist and journalist, that “Night” took the shape we know today.
Mauriac urged Wiesel to rewrite the book in French and promised to write a preface.
Still, “it was rejected by the major publishers,” Wiesel recalled in a recent interview,
“although it was brought to them by François Mauriac, the greatest, greatest writer and
journalist in France, a Catholic, a Nobel Prize-winner with all the credentials.” Les
Éditions de Minuit brought it out in 1958, but it sold poorly.
The American response was similarly tepid. Georges Borchardt, Wiesel’s longtime
literary agent and himself a Holocaust survivor, sent the French manuscript to New York
publishers in 1958 and 1959, to little effect. “Nobody really wanted to talk about the
Holocaust in those days,” Borchardt said. “The Diary of Anne Frank,” published in the
United States in 1952, had been a huge success, but it did not take readers into the horror
of the camps. Although “Night” had sophisticated literary motifs and a quiet elegance,
American publishers worried it was more a testimonial than a work of literature. “It is, as
you say, a horrifying and extremely moving document, and I wish I could say this was
something for Scribner’s,” an editor there wrote to Borchardt. “However, we have certain
misgivings as to the size of the American market for what remains, despite Mauriac’s
brilliant introduction, a document.” Kurt Wolff, the head of Pantheon, also turned
“Night” down. Although it had qualities “not brought out in any other book,” Pantheon
had “always refrained from doing books of this kind,” meaning books about the
Holocaust, he wrote to Borchardt.
Finally, in 1959, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang agreed to take on “Night.” The first
reviews were positive. Gertrude Samuels, writing in the Book Review, called it a “slim
volume of terrifying power.” Alfred Kazin, writing in The Reporter, said Wiesel’s
account of his loss of faith had a “particular poignancy.” After the Kazin review, the
book “got great reviews all over America, but it didn’t influence the sales,” Wiesel said.
The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 brought the Holocaust into the mainstream of
American consciousness. Other survivors began writing their stories — but with higher
visibility came the first glimmerings of criticism. In a roundup of Holocaust literature in
Commentary in 1964, the critic A. Alvarez said “Night” was “beyond criticism” as a
“human document,” but called it “a failure as a work of art.” Wiesel, he argued, had
failed to “create a coherent artistic world out of one which was the deliberate negation of
all values.”
By the early ’70s, the Holocaust had become a topic of study in universities, spurred in
part by the rise of “ethnic studies” more generally and a surge of interest in Jewish
history after Israel’s dramatic military victory in the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973.
Wiesel, who had moved to New York in the mid-’50s, began lecturing regularly at the
92nd Street Y in Manhattan and teaching at the City University of New York. (Since
1976 he has taught at Boston University.)
Although his books were all reviewed respectfully, some critics questioned Wiesel’s role
as a self-appointed witness. “His personal project has been to keep the wounds of
Auschwitz open by repeatedly pouring the salt of new literary reconstructions upon them,
and thus to prevent the collective Jewish memory — and his own — from quietly letting
the wounds heal,” Leon Wieseltier, now the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote in
Commentary in 1974. Reviewing Wiesel’s novel “The Oath,” about a pogrom, Wieseltier
criticized Wiesel for “turning history into legend.” His characters were “archetypes of the
varieties of Jewish pain,” Wieseltier wrote, so “what remains is ... a kind of elaborate
superficiality which does justice neither to the author’s intentions nor to his terrible
subject matter.”
In 1978, President Carter appointed Wiesel to a commission that eventually created the
Holocaust Museum. In Wiesel’s mind, the “real breakthrough” that brought “Night” into
wide view came in 1985, when he spoke out against President Reagan’s planned visit to
the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany, where SS members were buried. While
Reagan was awarding him a Congressional Gold Medal at the White House, Wiesel told
him: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the
SS.” The next day, Wiesel’s words were on front pages worldwide. (Reagan still made
the trip.)
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The Nobel committee
called Wiesel “a messenger to mankind,” teaching “peace, atonement and human
dignity.” Wiesel’s “commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people,
has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races.” By the late ’90s, “Night”
was a standard high school and college text, selling around 400,000 copies a year.
Yet some critics have homed in on the very qualities that have helped “Night” find a
broad readership. Some have criticized Wiesel for universalizing — and even
Christianizing — Jewish suffering. In “The Holocaust in American Life” (1999), the
historian Peter Novick cites crucifixion imagery in “Night” as evidence of the “unJewish” or Christian tenor to much Holocaust commemoration. Others have suggested
Wiesel may have revised the book to appeal to non-Jewish readers. In a 1996 essay,
Naomi Seidman, a Jewish studies professor at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union,
detected strong notes of vengeance in the Yiddish version. In the final scene, after the
camp has been liberated, Wiesel writes of young men going into Weimar “to rape
German girls.” But there’s no mention of rape in the subsequent French or English
translations. Wiesel said his thinking had changed between versions. “It would have been
a disgrace to reduce such an event to simple vengeance.”
To Lawrence L. Langer, an eminent scholar of Holocaust literature and a friend of
Wiesel’s, what sets “Night” apart is a moral honesty that “helps undermine the
sentimental responses to the Holocaust.” To Langer, “Night” remains an essential
companion — or antidote — to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” That book, with its ringing
declaration that “I still believe that people are really good at heart,” is “easy for teachers
to teach,” Langer said, but “from the text you don’t know what happened when she died
of typhus, half-starved at Bergen-Belsen.” Wiesel takes a similar view. “Where Anne
Frank’s book ends,” he said, “mine begins.”
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book
Night resources
http://www.ushmm.org/
http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/
http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/teaching/activity1.html
http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahsbookclub/night/book_excerpt_01/1
http://www.teacheroz.com/holocaust.htm
http://remember.org/educate/
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/wie0int-1
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007176
http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/
Links to primary source documents @
http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/document.htm
Study preparation materials
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/night/