“To read it is to lose one’s own innocence about the Holocaust all over again.”
- Ruth Franklin, New Republic review of Night
Tonight, at Boston University, as a part of the university’s celebration in honor of Elie Wiesel’s 80th birthday, Wiesel will give his annual plenary lecture, this year on Kristallnacht. (Tickets are sold out for the lecture – I know, I tried.)
2008 also marks the 48th anniversary of the English publication of Night, perhaps Wiesel’s best-known work. I rarely make universal book recommendations, simply because each person is different and each person will like different books. Night, however, is one of the few exceptions.
Night is one of those books that doesn’t just stay with you; it haunts you. In a New Republic review of the book, Ruth Franklin wrote that Night was “the most devastating account of the Holocaust that [she had] ever read.” It is unflinching and, at times, difficult to read. Wiesel offers no rationale or explanations. The words are simple and plain, the story short. It simply is. Whereas The Diary of Anne Frank gave us a relatively sheltered glimpse of the Holocaust (sheltered in the sense that we never read directly about Anne’s experience in the concentration camps), Night holds nothing back. When a friend asked me to describe the book to her, the first word that popped into my head was “harrowing.” And that’s an apt description – of Wiesel’s experiences certainly, but also of the reader’s journey.
In her review (which is a good read, if you’ve got the time), Franklin also explores the difficulty of categorizing Night (is it autobiography? memoir? something else?), the need to balance truthfulness and literature, and the differences between the various editions (Yiddish, French and English).
Below is an interview Wiesel gave with Charlie Rose in 1994 after going back to the Buchenwald concentration camp for the first time (Wiesel was transferred to Buchenwald in January 1945 after being in Auschwitz):
What books would you universally recommend to people? Do you think there are some books everyone “should” read? What’s on your Must Read List?
