Elie Wiesel Books

As I wrote the index for this book, I'd find that I was wrapped up in the story so much that I was crying; I'd have to go back to re-read sections so I could index it. It's very disturbing, but very well written. I highly recommend it for all people, so we'll learn not to repeat these atrocities.

As always, Elie Wiesel's writing is marked by the questions he asks. While his literature dwells around the Holocaust and the persecution of the Jewish people, this book is different and the same. His portraits of five prophets from the Bible are brief yet fully informative, a mixture of religious sources to create pictures of men who are well known but obscure at the same time.

Wiesel focuses on Saul, Jonah, Jeremiah, Elijah and Joshua - five men chosen by God to be his voice to his chosen people. What these five men have in common is obvious, but Wiesel also examines their backgrounds, or lack of background that is known to us. These men were all obscure, some uncertain about the role they were to play in Israel's past, present and future. He paints a compassionate portrait of Saul, the first Jewish king, who will forever be overshadowed by his son-in-law David. His biographical sketch of Jonah shows us a prophet whose prophecy amounts to five/six words, and a run from God in order not to fulfill his mission that separates him from the other prophets.

Elie Wiesel has a way of bringing life to words. By applying his experiences, and the religious writings of Jewish history to these Biblical characters, he offers readers a fresh look at five men who shaped the history of faith. Wiesel applies his typical questioning to the text, allowing modern day dilemmas to influence these questions, knowing that "most good questions remain questions", but offering the experiences of these prophets as examples.

Despair and depression are I guess , the mood of most people at one time or another of their lives. For some people however it is the dominant note, the prevailing feeling and totally takes over their lives. Why this happens and to whom exactly it happens whole Literatures, including my guess is the psychiatric and neuroscience literatures can give only partial answers to. However ' despair ' becomes especially problematic and interesting when it happens in the lives of those who are our spiritual models , and who in the Hasidic tradition are to continually be clinging to and uplifted by the Presence of God.
How explain the fall and the darkness?
Elie Wiesel tells the individual story of four great Hasidic masters and their particular struggles with their own inner darkness.
My only Holy Teacher the late Dovid Hertzberg who loved these Hasidic masters with all his soul, and taught their Torahs with such love and inspiration once suggested ( And this is not his suggestion alone) that the great Kotzker went into his ten year period of isolation and solitude because the sufferings of his own Hasidim ( It was his task to listen to them and help them) became so great that they overwhelmed him completely i.e. The despair was not a private despair of an individual for himself but a despair which came out of his love of his own Hasidim and people. Perhaps, even a holy despair.

This treasure of a book is a collection of essays (and a few poems) on friendship. The stories show how varied friendships can be, and how essential they are for human life. There are, among others, stories of life-long friendship, regret over lost friendship, and friends who only meet once in life. This book does not have to be read in one sitting, and would make a lovely gift for a friend. It is indeed bread for the journey.

Once upon a weekend retreat at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, I became absorbed by Elie Wiesel's fascinatingly describing his Memory of Jewish holidays, the Talmudic literature, the Jewish Laws and stories of Abraham, Moses, Isaac and Jacob. At that point in my life after retiring as Prison Chaplain, I began to look at the lives of Jewish writers. I wished to grasp some of their pain, suffering and depths of Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Elie Wiesel had written much of those feelings in his "Night"; "Dawn" and "Souls on Fire."

While caught-up in writing about my Memories of serving as a Prison Chaplain, I wanted to choose a good Model. My first underlining began with Elie's wonderful quote from "Society and Solitude" by Emerson to begin his chapter, "The Stranger in the Bible." Then I looked back at the first chapter, "To Believe or not to Believe." There I read the habits of a Jewish mother as she teaches her children, a Talmudic Ledgend of Moses and Rabbi Akiba, other stories of other Rabbi's...I was really hooked!

After Elie's return to his birthplace of the little Jewish city of Sighet, revisiting sights of his boyhood, he arrives to that key chapter, "Making the Ghosts Speak!" He writes of his own "despair of humanity and God!" From his studies of history, philosophy, psychology, he realized his anger at the Germans. "How could they have counted Goethe and Bach as their own and at the same time massacred countless Jewish children?" Then he admits that he "was angry at God too, at the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob! How could He have abandoned his people just at the moment when they needed Him?" His struggling led to his conclusion: "I am free to choose my suffering but not that of my fellow humans."

This small gem of Essays has that fearful power to prod around one's insides, revealing your own gut-wrenching memories! It surely has done that and much more for me in every reading! Don't miss it!
Retired Chap Fred W Hood

This book is very interesting, creepy at times, but still interesting and informative without getting boring.

This is a fabulous book!
My whole family loved it. Each story has a twist. It's not what you think.
It's light and yet deep reading and fun to read aloud whatever one's Jewish outlook is. Engaging even for non-jews like my husband.

Cargas shows great knowledge and understanding of Wiesel's work. The respect he has informs the interview and makes it a dignified and sometimes moving conversation. This is one of the first of the many books of interviews with Wiesel which will appear through the years. And it is a very good one indeed. Anyone who wishes to understand Wiesel's basic point- of- view on many issues would do well to read this work.

This volume contains some of Wiesel's most important essays. In one he explains how his meetings with Francois Mauriac led to his writing of his masterpiece, one of the important works of the twentieth- century,"Night."In another he chides Solzhenitsyn for his failure to include the special sufferings of the Jews in his vast account of Soviet prison- world, the Gulag. In yet another he reflects on the aftermath of the war in Biafra. In still another he parses for us the meaning of "Jews of Silence' and how it was intended not for the Russian Jews captive in the Soviet Union but for those who did not speak out in their behalf. In still another he chides the U.N. for its immoral 'Zionism is Racism' motion. In another he writes of his saintly grandfather murdered by the Nazis.
In many essays he stresses the value of unity for the Jewish people. In many he defends Israel against its accusers. In all his awareness of the worlds and people lost in the Shoah are present.
All in all Wiesel reveals himself here as a great voice for the Jewish people, and humanity as a whole.

This is a book found tucked behind many of Wiesel's other books. (As well as Cardinal O'Conner's books I imagine). It is a shame because this book invokes a deeper faith than one can imagine from such a small book. One can read it in one or two sittings and will be glad to hear all that these to brilliant men have to say. I can not encourage you enough to read this dialoge.