Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Life in a concentration camp, where, in spite of the miserable conditions, suicide rates were very low.
Your second book is Night…
This was published by Elie Wiesel and now is probably the best known memoir that has been written about the experience of the death camps. Elie Wiesel was a young boy of 14 when his tiny city, a place called Sighet, mostly Jewish, in what was then the Romania-Hungary borderland, was overrun. You have to remember that until 1944, Hungarian Jewry had been spared the most extreme forms of Nazi violence. But in 44 the situation changed and the Nazis essentially took over much of the organisation of the Jewish population in Hungary. They came into his little town, the shtetl, and they took him and his family. He went to Auschwitz, where his father died. But he survived the war, miraculously. Then, in the 1950s, he wrote a memoir in Yiddish. It was a very long memoir, too long, and at that time he was living in Paris. He was with some French intellectuals who told him to shorten the volume and to publish a very watered down or limited version in French. Which he did – and the rest is history. It started to be read widely, and it continues to have an enormous impact all over the world. For example, a few years ago in Chicago they chose it as the book of the year that everybody in all the schools read. Also, Oprah Winfrey picked his book, the new translation, for her book club recently. So I would say of all the books that people read about the Holocaust, besides The Diary of Anne Frank, the most famous memoir is by Elie Wiesel.
What do you think makes it so good?
I think the way the personal scenes are described, the telling scene of his father’s death, the characters he is able to draw and portray and this strange twilight life that people lived. All that has enormous emotional power. And he has the craft; he is a novelist and, unlike many memoirs (which are all important and all have information and all shed light), this has a literary kind of quality. He is able to bring to the focus of the reader a deep emotional power, and something also of the mysteriousness of what happened in the camps. There was something here that really reached the limits of human experience.
I should add there are other important memoirs. The other person who deserves to be mentioned is the great Italian novelist and memoirist Primo Levi. Primo Levi’s books are also extraordinarily important. They are, along with Elie Wiesel’s, the most important record we have of first-person survivor memoirs of the camps. Like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi has great power. It is very sparse, very minimalist, very, very straight, but very powerful material.
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Steven Katz is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University, where he holds the Alvin J and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies. He was Chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Museum for five years and remains on the committee. He is one of the American representatives to the International Task Force on the Holocaust, established by the King of Sweden. He is the editor of the journal Modern Judaism, and has served on the editorial team of The Cambridge History of Judaism and The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Academy of Jewish Philosophy.
