Tag Archives: Elie Wiesel

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction, Writing

An Endless Night, Culture Wars, and Editors Make Rotten Writers

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I read The Diary of Anne Frank in sixth grade and don’t remember thinking much about it. Something of the oppressive air stuck with me. Something of the final terror. One of my daughters read it last year and went on a rant against it. Maybe I read an abridged version, because I don’t remember reacting to any nasty thoughts or talk of her period. I think I would have noticed something like that in sixth grade. Then again, I could have drifted into a fog here and there, not realizing what I wasn’t reading.

I read Elie Wiesel’s Night for the first time recently. The author won a Nobel Prize in 1986 “for being a messenger to mankind: his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity.” While reading, I thought he had won the prize for literature for this book. Its sparse prose is marvelous, gripping, and conveys much of the dread of his experience.

In the opening pages, Wiesel’s family and neighbors didn’t know what was coming. Two people tried to warn them, but they couldn’t believe the outrageous truth. Who would do take 100s of people into the woods to dig their own graves before shooting them? Men couldn’t do that to each other. When the Germans came to town, one officer brought chocolate to his Jewish “host.” See? The Third Reich isn’t so bad. Many of them clung to any scrap of human decency they could imagine. Even when others were being killed, surely they would be shown mercy.

Such fantasies about the essence of mankind persist throughout the world and are one reason the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau exists. Many, perhaps most, would say loving your neighbor as yourself is fairly easy if you just try it. They don’t recognize that Christ called this the second commandment, related and subordinate to the first. The first one they would call a nice premise or its own kind of fantasy, and there we have the seed for the hatred Weisel called an endless night.

What else do we have to talk about?

Spring Books: Goodreads has a long list of anticipated books. Some of these look good, not that I’ll ever get around to ’em. My supply of round to’em is a mite limited.

Writing: Jenny Jackson, an accomplished editor with many years of experience, suggests editors make terrible writers. They are used to calls shots, not executing the shots called.

College Closure: The King’s College in New York City has been running deficits for years and experimenting with online education without success. It will likely close by the end of the current semester.

Culture War: Professor Elizabeth Stice argues for living in the truth. “Those who think our culture can be changed only by those with obvious power should consider an alternative philosophical perspective. In 1978 Václav Havel published an essay titled “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel was writing from behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia, in a society he described as ‘post-totalitarian.’

“For Havel, the Soviet system was much bigger than the imposition of rules from a handful of powerful figures. It had come to rely on its own subjects for perpetuation. Using the example of a greengrocer who unthinkingly puts a ‘Workers of the World Unite’ sign in the shop window simply because life is easier that way, Havel explained that the people in Czechoslovakia were engaging in ‘auto-totality.'”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Non-fiction

Reading Wiesel as Protesters March Outside

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I’m glad we’re talking about refugees, immigration, and what loving our neighbors means in practical terms. I hope all of this becomes perpetual opportunities for the gospel, the life-transforming gospel, not just some shell of good wishes.

On Sunday in New York, a large group met at the Jewish Heritage Museum to read from Elie Wiesel’s Night to remember the Holocaust at the same time other New Yorkers were protesting the US administration’s policies on immigrants from terror-watch countries.

“By the end of the [Rwandan] genocide I lost my entire immediate family, my parents, my siblings, most of my family members,” Jacqueline Murekatete told the audience. “As any child of that time, I witnessed a lot of horrors, people being killed around me and losing my family…but I was fortunate that I had an uncle that lived here [America].

She said Wiesel inspired her as a teenager. Night “became a catalyst for the genocide prevention work that I do now.”

There cannot be a 1:1 comparison between Holocaust or Rwandan genocide and what is happening in Syria and other countries. We live in a different world now. I could understand if President Trump were to say, “We are working very hard to provide safe passage to select Syrian communities who are being targeted and have nowhere to run, because frankly, people, we went over there and made a huge mess, a gigantic, stupid mess.” But that’s not his stance today for reasons that should be completely understandable to everyone. There are enemies among us.

But perhaps Wiesel would not agree. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said,

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.

Authors, Non-fiction

Remembering Elie Wiesel

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Residents of Cleveland, Ohio, remember Elie Wiesel as a big-hearted author who wanted to teach and support them like neighbors.

Back in 1966, Wiesel himself remembers friends from his youth. “Today,” he says, “I know that the advice of our wise men — ‘acquire for yourself a friend’ — is ironic. There is nothing with which to acquire them. Nothing any more. Our generation suffers a poverty of dreams.”

Frances Coleman read Elie Wiesel’s Night within the past week, saying it is the best and hardest book she’s ever read.

In the sense that Wiesel’s evocative “deposition,” as he later termed it, shook me to my soul, then “Night” is the best book I’ve ever read; and in the sense that it reminds readers how utterly base we humans can be, it is the most punishing. Reading “Night” at night is punishing, too, because after you finish reading, you are left to lie awake in the dark, wondering if you could have survived such an ordeal.

Authors, Non-fiction

Tipping Off the American Pedestal

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Cheryl Magness tells us how the recently departed author Elie Wiesel’s message will continue to resonate.

As Americans we are taught, and most of us believe, that there is something special about America. We speak reverently of the independent and pioneering spirit that sparked a new nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We cherish the “rugged individualism” that enabled us to build a “shining city on a hill.” We think of ourselves as being the most generous and compassionate people on the face of the earth.

This view of ourselves as something unique in history, a nation markedly different from, and superior to, any other, has the potential both to motivate us for good and to lead us into laziness and neglect. For it is in believing too fully in our pedestal that we have the greatest capacity to fall off of it.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/05/elie-wiesel-is-gone-but-his-message-is-forever/