Elie Wiesel Books

Elie Wiesel has proven himself to be a master storyteller, taking real life accounts and events, and turning them into haunting literature. While the focus of "The Testament" is not the Holocaust, as is the focus of many of his other works, Jewish history and what happens to the Jews in WWII plays a large role. "The Testament" bears Wiesel's trademark stylings, the shifting back and forth between time, that brings past and present together, and a son trying to come to terms with his father's life, a father he was never able to know.

"The Testament" is the 'confession' of sorts of the main character, Palatiel Kossover. Palatiel was a Russian-born Jew who traded in his faith for communism while he was a teenager. He devoted his life to words to stir the party to action, taking part in the fighting in Spain and Russia, fighting against the Nazis. Yet upon returning to Russia after the war, he finds the party isn't what he once believed in, and soon finds himself a hunted man because of what he has said and printed. It is while he is in prison that he writes out his testment, a long letter to a son he shall never see again. Palatiel's story is intersected with that of his son Grisha, a young mute estranged from his mother and desperate to learn of his father. When a mutual friend informs him of his father's past, Grisha knows that it is his task to tell people of his father, to bring his father back to life.

Normally the stylings of Wiesel's novels work for him - the shifts back and forth between time in "The Testament" get too bogged down with characters, who because of espionage related reasons, have more than one name. This can make it difficult for readers to follow all of Palatiel's movements and associations during the war. Yet despite that, "The Testament" is as powerful of a work as any Wiesel has written. It explores and exposes what is really at the heart of human nature, and how in the midst of desolation, hope can live on no matter how desperately it is being crushed.

Weisel delved deep into the complex nature of humans and the human attempt to deal with society's constantly changing moral/ethical guides. I know I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come. Although the topic can be depressing, Weisel finds the beauty in the way his characters deal with the problems in front of them.

When I read this book, the only other works of Elie Wiesel that I read were those from The Night Trilogy. The Town Beyond the Wall is a bit of a departure from those three stories. You see more optimism in this work, though this only becomes obvious towards the end. The language is more poetic and really sucks you into the protagonist's world.

As always, Elie Wiesel has transformed his personal experiences into a work of fiction that is anything but. In "The Town Beyond the Wall" readers are introduced to Michael, a Jew who has survived the Holocaust and spends the rest of his life searching for meaning and answers to questions that may not even have answers. Wiesel's stories are driven by questions and the memories that haunt his characters.

"The Town Beyond the Wall" is told through flashbacks. Michael, the narrator, is being tortured in jail after finding his way back home inside the Iron Curtain. His torture is the 'prayer', to stand face to a wall until the pain in his legs causes him to speak. But Michael is strong and resists telling on his friend because he wishes to save a life. He no longer cares about God or religion. He is plagued by memories of his childhood and the regrets he has about actions not taken. He desperately wants answers but knows that some of his questions have no answers.

Wiesel is a master storyteller. He creates characters who are vivid and alive, perhaps because they are endowed with who he is. In "The Town Beyond the Wall" he has crafted perhaps his most optimistic tale, ending with a parable that is at once as thought-provoking as it is disturbing. Perhaps Wiesel has Michael sum up the story the best with these words: "...it isn't easy to live always under a question mark. But who says that the essential question has an answer? The essence of man is to be a question, and the essence of the question is to be without an answer."

Elie Wiesel's second book, "Dawn," is a clear improvement over "Night." The former, rather than simply giving a gory firsthand account of history, explores the reasons behind the most terrible act of all - killing. However, this book is still written too tersely for my tastes. The first paragraph, for example, reads:

Somewhere a child began to cry. In the house across the way an old woman closed the shutters. It was hot with all the heat of an autumn evening in Palestine.

Much more interesting is:

The orphan's high-pitched wailing interrupted the sultry autumn evening like a burglar alarm. The airborne scream buzzed like a bumblebee across the way, colliding with the hag's eardrums. She slammed the shutters shut - this was more than she could bear on a muggy Palestinian night. All her life she had managed to eke out a paltry existence on her family's plot of land without complaint. She had never asked for much, only a quiet home in which to tell her grandchildren stories and to do her nighttime knitting...

If Eliezer from "Night" was not pitiable, then Elisha is downright despicable. He lets his superstition rule him (in giving Gad God-like qualities he falls victim to his propaganda), resulting in his suffering.

This book makes a more powerful case against religion than for it - if the terrorists did not believe in their religion, then there would have been no cause for their hatred, and nobody in "Dawn" would have had to die.

In "Dawn," Wiesel again picks a topic that transcends his ability to write.

The book dawn is about Elie's life after the war and his stay in the concentration camps. He ends up being drawn to a Palestinian terrorist group. He joins this group and quickly learns their ways and becomes close friends with the leader and others. Elie ends up being told that he must a kill a man named John Dawson because their friend David Mosh was captured and is going to be hung at dawn. The group of Elie's friends and himself stay up until dawn to think about what is going to happen.

I did not enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed the book Night. This book became very confusing at times and lost my interest when certain events would be drawn out for to long. The end of the book was also hard to follow. Another thing I did not like about this book is that a large piece of this book takes place in one room and all the thought revolves around one event that is going to take place. It did catch my attention and seem to be interesting in the first part of the book until it seemed to drag on and it lost my attention. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes complicated and hard to follow books.

A wonderful book with great insight into the moral dilemnas of conflict and Israel's fight for independence.

Elie Wiesel's Night is one of the most horrifying, moving accounts of the Holocaust experience that I have read. This book, Dawn, is sometimes referred to as a sequel to Night; however, I think that is misleading. Though readers of Night will see the influence of the author's concentration camp experience reflected in this book, Dawn is something very different.

The most obvious difference, of course, is that Night is nonfiction whereas Dawn is a novel. Dawn tells the story of Elisha, a Holocaust survivor, who is recruited to a terrorist group in Palestine that is trying to drive out the British in the years after World War II. After participating in a number of terrorist activities without remorse, Elisha is assigned to execute a prisoner in retaliation for the execution of one of his comrades. As he waits through the night for his task at dawn, Elisha struggle (literally) with his ghosts.

When faced with an author like Wiesel who has written a classic piece of nonfiction like Night, it is often difficult to judge his fiction fairly. The fiction doesn't seem to have the same impact. And though I, too, prefer Night, I found this book to be powerful in its own right. Dawn gives real insight into how people can be haunted and changed by an unfathomable trauma. In addition, it addresses real philosophical issues such as when does killing become murder and how does becoming a murderer change a person? Does suffering unto death justify a (some might say) disproportionate response?

In these post 9/11 days, I also found the insight into the terrorist mindset very interesting. The American revolutionaries and the Zionists were considered terrorists in their day much as the Palestinians and al Queda are today and, though there are obviously differences between all these groups, there are some attitudes that run through all who can find it in themselves to use terror tactics. It is fascinating to see words come from the mouths of these young Jewish partisans that would fit equally well in the mouths of Palestinians today.

All in all, Dawn is an excellent work: brief but powerful.

Dawn written by Elie Wiesel is a story about two men who are
meant to be killed at the same time, at dawn. David Ben Moshe is
Jewish and will be killed by the English at the same time as Elisha; a Jewish man will kill an English man John Dawson.Elisha and his friends wait all night for dawn, the book takes place with them in one room, thinking about what they have to do, they have little conversation between each other.

I did not find the book Dawn very interesting,I found it to move very slow, because Elisha and his friends stayed in one room during the whole story, and while one man was thinking about what he should do or how he felt, the reader did not know how the other people where feeling at that time. The part I found the most interesting was when there would
be conversation between Elisha and his friends, especially when they talked about their pasts, which was one of my favorite parts of the book, it was
interesting because there was more action happening when they when explaining their past.

Although I found this book boring for the most part it was very descriptive and therefore I would recommend it to anyone who likes very descriptive books.

Former Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat is a man of great moral conviction and political savvy. He epitomizes what it means to be a true public servant. His passion for justice comes through very clearly in this book. Historians of the Clinton administration and of Europe's response to the Holocaust will find this book invaluable.

That said, I found this book quite difficult to read. Eizenstat's blow-by-blow descriptions of the seemingly endless negotiations lack dramatic structure and are far too detailed for a book intended for the general reader. When Eizenstat looks at the big picture -- the differing political cultures of France and the United States, the Austrians' cramped apologetics for their role in the Holocaust -- he is convincing. But far too much of this book feels as if it's written by a lawyer for other lawyers. It needed an editor who could get past Eizenstat's note cards and create a real narrative.

On one level, this book is worth reading just to affirm that there have in fact been times when important people, in this case one in particular -- the author -- cared fiercely about showing many suffering and powerless thousands that the world cared about the unfathomable injustices they had suffered. The victims didn't really get justice, as that was, as the title acknowledges, not remotely possible. But at least they knew that, finally, after decades of wall to wall indifference, someone was listening and trying, seriously, to do what could be done.

But what will make it hard for many readers to put this book down is that it is both a good story, entertainly told, and a shrewd analysis of a complex multi-party, multi-governmental, legal and political negotiation with high stakes, bitter differences, and high-powered protagonists. The book is certainly one of the best case-studies in captivity of the tricky and combustible mix of law, diplomacy, and politics both bureaucratic and democratic, that drives such processes. That this episode stayed on track to reach the best result that it could have was very far from a sure thing, from the beginning to the end. Eizenstat's seasoned, sometimes cynical, frequently amusing exegisis of the calculations, mistakes, and victories of the players makes the book hugely instructive for professionals as well as entertaining for casual students of government. It could be a popular teaching aid in law schools, especially for Eizenstat's exposition of his own strategies, and his often surprisingly candid Monday Morning quarterbacking of himself.

You MUST be interested in the Nazi era to a radical degree to stick with this book. It is a left-nostril account of nuances of negotiations, mainly regarding Swiss and German reparations, mainly for Jewish Holocaust survivors. Complicating the reading effort are grammatical errors (see, for example, page 198) and some apparent scholarship inconsistencies. (To illustrate, contrast discussion in next to the last paragraph on page 206 with descriptive matter associated with the first photograph on the sixth page of photographs.) Moreover, in my view, the book is as much about its author's sense of self-importance as it is about the negotiation process it describes.

Imperfect Justice is a book that will appeal to many readers . . . but for different reasons. At one level, it's a magnificent story of turning back the clock to right wrongs dating back to the 1930s. At another level, it's an intriguing story of how to secure agreement among those who have vastly different interests and are pursuing them aggressively. At a third level, it's a tale of how a negotiating team learned from its experiences. At a fourth level, it's an inspiring tale of what the U.S. can accomplish when it focuses its attention on improving life for everyone. At a fifth level, it's an insightful case history of how agreements can have negative, unintended consequences. At a sixth level, it's a template for working on other important international issues in the future. I felt greatly enriched by this book, and am sure you will to. I believe this book deserves many more than five stars.

Although I had read about some of the many settlements made in the 1990s by European countries and companies concerning slave labor, looted bank accounts, and misdeeds during World War II, I had no idea of the scope of that experience and effort until I read this book. It's a candid appraisal of how class action lawyers, Jewish groups, the U.S. government, some state government officials, some well-meaning Europeans and lots of recalcitrant parties came together to recognize wrongs that had been previously ignored.

To me, it was shocking to recognize the full extent of misbehavior during World War II. The numbers of slave laborers and the conditions are beyond easy comprehension.

The misbehavior of companies and countries since then to take advantage of those who were victims of the Holocaust and the Nazi era was even more shocking. The insensitivity and lack of concern for others described in this book made me shake my head in disgust.

I also came away with a different impression of the leaders and Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Israel and many other countries as a result of understanding more about how they handled these issues. It's an important education that you should have for yourself.

Ultimately, we must all be very grateful for the good will of those who worked so hard to provide some justice (including apologies and some payments) for those who had been overlooked and ignored for so long. Those who obstructed the process know who they are (and the book names many of them), and should be ashamed of themselves.

I was pleased to see that this paperback version has a new epilogue to update the implementation of the agreements since the end of the Clinton administration. I was disappointed to see that the Bush administration has not been very effective in following up on the fine work that preceded them in office in this important area.

If you think justice is important, read this book!

I am glad that all copies of this book on Swiss territory were confiscated yesterday by order of the Geneva district attorney. The author insults my country by showing our national flag together with a fascist symbol.

This book was a little bit confusing to follow. I understood that he was a holocaust survivor, and it was sad what he went through. I didn't like how the author left it up too us when he got hit by the taxi. Did he do it on purpose or was it just an accident?

This book did give me a better prespective on what life was like for the survivors and how much suffering they went though after the holocaust. I thought this book was ok.

The Accident was a well-written book. It showed a life that I don't hear much about, life after the Holocaust. I didn't realize what happened to the survivors and how their lives were changed forever. This book was a little confusing at first but it all made sense in the end and was great. It was a sad story but a story that people need to hear to fully understand the effect the Holocaust had on people. I am glad I read this book.

The novel "The Accident" by Elie Wiesel is about a young boy named Eliezer who was a prisoner in a Nazi death camp, but who is now trying to get on with his life. However, readers wonder if he is really trying to live his life again when he steps out in front of an oncoming taxi. This makes us question whether the car incident was an accident or a suicide attempt. Throughout the book he has many flashbacks of the death camp in Germany and what horrible things happened there. Along with flashbacks from the Holocaust, he has flashbacks of his grandmother, his mom, Sarah, and a French prostitute whose name is also Sarah. Because of his past, Eliezer is suicidal and does not want to live, but the book still leaves readers with the question of was the taxi incident an accident or a suicide attempt?
I liked this book because although it was depressing at times, it kept my interest and was exciting. It did not have very much history except for Eliezer's past experiences of the Holocaust, but it was still very gripping. In addition to the question of whether Eliezer attempted suicide or not, there is also a question of whether people can move on with their lives after horrifying experiences. For Eliezer, he is trying to get over his experiences in the Nazi death camps, but it is hard because he keeps having flashbacks. These flashbacks seem to prevent him from moving on with his life. Overall, this book was fictionally a great book, but historially, not the most descriptive book to read on the Holocaust.

As usual, Elie Wiesel has taken the experiences of his life in the concentration camps and instilled those experiences into his main character. As he says in his introduction the story springs from his imagination, "I speak for my protagonist, but he does not speak for me. He has lived through some of my experiences, but I have not lived through his." And those experiences are what motivate and frustrate the main character throughout the course of this novel.

"The Accident" tells the story of Eliezer, a survivor of the death camps, who cannot forget his past. He is constantly haunted by his memories and those who have died, so much so that he cannot even live his life. So when he his hit by a taxi one summer evening, the reader is unsure whether it was on purpose or if it was an accident. As he lies in his hospital bed, not necessarily fighting for his life, his story fluctuates between the past and present, allowing the reader to enter into his suffering and understand his misery.

As always, Wiesel's writing is full of questions. For a Jew who survived the horror of the Holocaust, these questions always include how God could have allowed this to happen. Eliezer is convinced that God uses humans as toys to manipulate and enjoy their sufferings. He is finally brought to terms with his inability to live and what he needs to do in order to leave his past where it belongs and move ahead with his future. "The Accident" is a quick read, full of daunting questions and fearless searching that typifies Wiesel's writings.

I do not agree with most of the other reviews.

The greatness in this book lies Elie Weisel's ability to come so close to answering unanswerable questions. He has a perspective that none of us will ever attain. An unspeakable suffering is captured in mere words. Living is the horror, not death. The living mourn the dead; the dead mourn no one.

The main character sees every aspect of life from an unnatural perspective. He cannot love, he sees death in everything, he yearns for silence, he lives in his past. We are jealous of his severance from a pitiful humanity. He is almost a true stoic.

As a technical note: No, as the other reviews stated, the character did not try to commit suicide. Suicide is killing yourself. He was walking a few feet behind his girlfriend, and although, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a car speeding toward him, he did not try to save himself. This is not suicide. It is an indifference toward life. Death was his only chance for freedom. The true accident was that the doctor was able to save him.

As a history teacher I have discovered that one of the most enduring myths of younger Americans not versed in the history of their country preceding their birth, is that the United States entered the Second World War in order to save the Jews of Europe.

In fact, the very opposite was the case.

The government deliberately chose not to save the Jews until it was much too late.

After FDR's callous immigration authorities illegally obstructed and surreptitiously slammed the door to freedom for vast numbers of potential refugees, his administration continued its policy of deliberate betrayal of the millions of European Jews in Hitler's death camps until the "Final Solution" was almost finalized.

David S. Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews is a masterpiece in meticulous scholarship in documenting these horrific events.

This brilliant book formed the basis for the powerful PBS documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference.

Wyman's choice of a title is indicative of what is wrong with this book. However, there is also much right about it as well. "Abandonment" implies there was some sort of relationship to begin with between European Jews and and the United States. In order to "abandon" someone, you have to "leave." The US was never "there" to begin with. To say that America "turned its back" to European Jewry during WWII implies that it once had its back NOT turned to European Jews...and this simply was never the case. It wasn't even the case within the United States. The U.S. paid lip-service to American Jewry by including a few in the Roosevelt Administration, a couple on the Supreme Court, but there was no truly significant Jewish influence even in the United States at that time. Therefore this is a study of much more than simply the Roosevelt Administration. It is a study of America and any study of America during the time after WWI through the mid 1960's must include an acknowledgement of American anti-Semitism. It reached its peak, ironically, during WWII. FDR was the consummate politician. He may have held sympathy for what was happening to the Jews of Europe - but he was a POLITICIAN! And we all need to remember that. Had the American people demanded it, Roosevelt would have acted. Better put, there was enough anti-Semitism to make rescue a "political impossibility." Politics is, among other things, the "art of the possible." The real tragedy Wyman thus exposes is American anti-Semitism. Most significantly (and unfortunately) in the State Department. Wyman is "nice" (in my opinion) to Breckinridge Long, one of the most destructive anti-Semites in American History.

It is sad to acknowledge that The United States of America couldn't muster the courage to drop a single bomb on the rail lines leading out of Hungary, or into Auschwitz-Birkenau. One bomb would have done nothing to stop the Holocaust - but it would have spoken symbolic volumes about what America supposedly stood for.

Anti-Semitism was bad in the United States at that time. And anti-black racism was even worse. As sad an episode as this was in US History (not simply the US failure to act symbolically or otherwise to rescue European Jewry - but also the internment of Japanese Americans in camps, and the relegation of blacks to driving trucks in the military) it did, in the longer run, finally force America to look itself in the mirror.

I consider this a "must read" for anyone even slightly interested in American History, especially the upheavals of the 1960's. America "ignored" the Jews in Europe as it always had, and as it mostly ignored its own. WWII set in motion events that forced America to live up to what it was supposedly fighting for in "The Good War."

This book is also valuable because it reveals the depth of the split within American Jewry over how to respond the mass killings. That split certainly contributed to the ease with which FDR could concentrate on other issues besides The Jews of Europe...and thereby avoid any hint of a schism with Churchill.

This is a highly influential book. Roosevelt has had many enemies growing out of his presidency. No one has had the same negative impact on Roosevelt's name to equal Wyman's attack. But, although Wyman, a professional historian has well-documented his research, much of the indictment of the Roosevelt Administration is based upon conjecture incapable of proof. The litmus test of his proposals was the bombing of Auschwitz. He asserts that the failure to bomb was due to a lack of caring. Thousands of Jews could have been saved. But there is no way to prove this. Many Jews could also have died because bombing was inaccurate and Jewish prisoners lived close to the crematoria. Too much in his charges is based on too little evidence. Peter Novick in his book, The Holocaust in American Life, calls Wyman's thesis a "comfortable morality tale" and "bad history." In addition to Novick, Henry L. Feingold, Frank W. Brecher, and William Rubinstein have written critically about Wyman.

Wyman wrote this book in the mid 1980's. Since then, many other historical studies have shown the same shamful findings:FDR and the State Department and many segments of the American public, including most of the Jewish leaders, not only suppressed the news on the extermination of the European Jews, but did their best to hinder efforts of rescue. Wyman includes undisputed sources for every fact, but being a gentile, he is too soft on the American Jewish leaders who looked at FDR as a God, and in order not to upset him, kept quiet. For those who still worship FDR, consider this: A million Americans are stranded in Europe during War World II and the Germans are systematically shipping them to concentration camps, torturing and gassing them. What would FDR and his administration have done? Conduct the war in a gentlemantary manner with taking of prisoners, etc., (a quarter million Axis prisoners were shipped to the US while a common American and British response to the abandonment of the Jews was no ships available), or immediately start a military operation to rescue them. Readers who still believe that saving the Jews was not possible because of the war effort, should read historical books on Great Britain during the war. While the British refused to consider any plan of saving the Jews they deployed more than 100,000 troops and a large armada in Palestine and the Med Sea for the sole purpose of capturing Jews who escaped the European hell. In 1940, the British had elaborate plans to attack would be German invaders with low flying planes dropping gas on the invaders, despite the Geneva agreements that the German kept (except with respect to the Jews, of course,who were gassed by the millions). This book is a Noble Price material because it reveals the truth about the darkest period in human history, a truth hiden because too many people still cannot confront the sicknening facts: The leaders of the free world in the 1940's were cowards, anti-Semites, and liers. Only a handful of brave men such as Hecht, Rogers, and a few Irgun members fought against overwhelming odds to bring about some response to the terrible plight of the Jews.

The reader will not want to believe what is being read.

The evil, satanic Nazi regime and it's methods intent on the slaughter and genocide of the European Jews is well documented elsewhere.

Little is written or heard about the passive accomplices....I hesitate in using the latter word, but none other can really suffice in this context. The author has provided an extremely valuable service with this work in bringing this subject to our attention.

It is difficult to estimate how many of the six million murdered Jews could possibly have been saved through a concerted, determined Allied rescue campaign. However, suffice to say no such measures were taken and all the victims perished.

The author documents that the US State Department and the British Foreign Office has absolutely no intention of rescuing large numbers of European Jews from the Nazi genocide machine.

Indeed, the author shows that the Allies actually feared that the Nazi regime would release tens of thousands of Jews into Allied hands and the inherent responsibility that such a move would impose upon them.

Such a move by the Nazis would have inevitably placed immense pressure on the British to open Palestine to increased Jewish immigration, and the US to admit even larger numbers of Jews to their own shores.

A situation that neither Government wanted to face. The British, although allowing virtually unhindered Arab immigration from surrounding Arab nations into Palestine, had their own reasons for refusing increased Jewish entry into what is now Israel. Instead, the British provided concentration camps of their own on Cyprus for those Jews seeking what they perceived as `illegal' entry to Palestine. A damning historical indictment, which being British and a non-Jew, I still find difficult to stomach.

The author shows that there was clear, authenticated documentation available to the US State Department in 1942, that revealed unmistakable evidence that the Nazis were pursuing a systematic extermination of European Jewry. However, it is shown that nothing was done for some 14 months, and only then were limited measures eventually adopted. Even so, the US record of action is still far better than that of the British.

These limited measures of assistance adopted by the US are shown to have been impeded by rampant anti-Semitism throughout US society and the US Congress, plus the mass media's failure to publicise Holocaust details and the virtual near silence of the Church and it's own leadership.

The author also shows that appeals to bomb the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, railroads and bridges were refused outright amidst claims that such military action would divert essential air-power. Yet, at the very same time numerous heavy Allied bombing raids were still taking place within 50 miles of Auschwitz, only a few minutes flying time away. The value of saving Jewish lives was not worth a single Allied bomb.

This is a disturbing book about a disturbing period of history and a disturbing analysis of the integrity of our leaders together with our foreign policies & agendas during the war years. There is so much information here. Read this and Sir Martin Gilbert's `Auschwitz and the Allies' for differing approaches to the same subject, but which reveal the same conclusions. Recommended.

First off, this is not Night 2. I naively expected that when publisher's try to frame them as part of a 'trilogy'. Night is absolutely and without bar one of the most fantastic books I have read in my life.

This is not just another chapter of that. And it is not a sequel. It is an incredibly profound, and beautifully written meditation on the journey of many Holocaust survivors -- but not his. This is a work of complete fiction. Many survivors went to Palestine, and fought the British (not the Arabs) to kick them out and thus be able to establish a free Jewish state.

It is the story of a fictional Elishah (who has remarkably similar childhood and Holocaust experiences to those of Wiesel) who becomes one of these freedom fighters, and is ordered to execute a British officer in retaliation for their hanging one of the rebels. It is an account of the night that Elishah passes, knowing he has to become a murderer in the morning, and all of his internal struggles with that. In a particularly powerful lead up to the end, he realizes the power of hatred, how without hatred, terrorist groups like theirs, and indeed any violence against others is almost impossible. He notes how nations are so adept at teaching their people to hate, and even comes to the point of trying to make himself hate this stranger in order to be able to follow his orders.

EXTREMELY powerful and evocative.

One word of caution -- there is almost no action here. This is a thinking book. If you are not up to the mental effort to think and feel along with him, you will not like it.

Have you ever had to do something very serious that you did not really want to do? Dawn, is an extraordinary novel written by Elie Wiesel, a surviovor in the Holocaust. Dawn is not in any way connected to Night or Day. Dawn is about responsibility and dity, unlike Night or Day. This novel is about a young boy that has been given the responsibility of executing John Dawson, a British soldier. He holds John hostage and brings him food, I know surprising right? The reason he brings John food is because he does not want John to die with an empty stomach. Later he feels sorrow for John Dawson. What will he do? I would have to say the young boy, main character is my favorite character in Dawn because he changes for the best, I think. This is definitely a novel I would read again because the first time you read it you can not comprehend it very well. I recommend Night, Dawn and Day but I would also recommend it for pleasure read only. You can not do any research on the Holocaust with these three books. I hope you take the time to read them.

"Dawn" is an extraordinary fiction novel. "Dawn" is not in any way connected to "Night" or "Day". Unlike "Night", "Dawn" is all about responsibility and duty. This novel is about a young boy that has given the responsibility of executing one of the British soldiers, named John Dawson. He holds the man hostage and brings him food because he does not want the hostage to have an empty stomach. Later he feels sorrow for the man. It is crazy how he used to be beaten for no specific reason but yet he is beating and starving Dawson for no good reason either. This is an amazing book to read. I definitely recommend it for others but I would read it for pleasure only. It is not the book you would read to find out information on the Holocaust or World War II.

This book would have been better served as short story in an anthology. I thought there was too much padding in order to make this a "short novel". Even as a short novel, "Dawn" barely exceeds 80 pages.

To address the content of the story, the main theme is the futility of the cycle of violence and reprisal. The narrator is assigned to execute a hostage in a nationalistic conflict. The story illustrates the narrator's internal moral stuggle in carrying out his task. There are some flashbacks to the narrator's youth, which I thought used some mixed metaphors and didn't contribute much to the story. But nevertheless, these are largely interpretive to the reader.

Certainly not as good as Night, and probably some of Wiesel's other works. But someone interested in reading more Wiesel might find some value in this book.

A survivor of this becomes a proponent for that. . .by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Ellie Wiesel's fictional "Dawn" is all too true; all too often repeated.
Terrorized as a Jew by Nazis in World War II, Elisha now terrorizes as a Jew for a free Palestine.
Swap out the name of the Holocast survived and the name of the cause proposed and you have the skeleton of all political or religious terrorism. The terrorists will always be with us. . .they usually will win. . .the body count will certainly rise. It will always be the season of terror.

First I must say that Mr. Wiesel's other books including Night, Dawn, and the Accident are all wonderful books.

Second, someone who is reading for action should not read the book. It doesn't have action in the book, but it does allow the reader to dive deep in philosophy.

Third, some say that it doesn't have a "realistic" plot. Can I ask, which fiction book truly has a realistic plot? I think Mr. Wiesel was trying to get the reader to "get" more out of the characters than the way the characters ended up in the cabin. I think we could all learn something from reading this book. I know I did.

I must say that this book was a good read and I recommend it to all. I would also like to recommend the other three books I mentioned earlier--Night, Dawn, and the Accident. Great books from a great writer!

first of all, i am not a kid, i am simply a person without a bunch of time floating around to fill out all that crap simply to write a review. second, this book was utterly facsinating and i was genuinly disappointed when i came to its end. i love how real elie wiesel makes his characters and really enoyed getting to know the five passengers as well as the judge and his little hunchback. a great read for anyone not afraid to think.

Mr. Wiesel is pretty good at developing characters, however he doesn't pay attention to the reality of details. It is not just implausible for the characters to end up at the cabin it is virtually impossible. The events getting the characters to the cabin is simply not realistic. It would have been a better story and a more reasonable if "Q" (Star Trek) had showed up and transported them there.

I am a cowgirl from Arizona and I would have put up with the Judges nonsense for about 15 minutes max. Then I would have acted. Mr. Wiesel spend why too much time on thought and not enough on action. Whatever.

The plot seemed so real. While reading the book, my dad had told me my aunt had once had to stay overnight at someone's home because of a simlar event like the one in the book, the book kinda hit close to home. I never had read any of Elie Wiesel's books before, but checked the book out of the library after reading the inside cover and deciding that the plot would be interesting and make a good story. However, I was disappointed. I really felt that Wiesel could have expanded a lot more on the plot. I didn't feel like I knew the charcters well enough. I didn't understand why the ending ended the way it did. It wasn't the best book I read, but it wasn't the worst.

Through numerous novels, Elie Wiesel has proven himself to be a master storyteller. He is able to intermingle the fictional world with the all too real memories of the Holocaust that haunt almost every piece of writing he produces. While "The Judges" has an intriguing premise, it is not among his better works.

When a plane en route to Tel Aviv is forced down by a snow storm, five random passengers find themselves offered refuge in a nearby house. What at first appears to be a safe haven quickly turns into a nightmare when the host, who simply refers to himself as the Judge, tells them of the 'game' at hand. All five of those present will be judged and the one who is the least worthy among them must pay the ultimate sacrifice. The five strangers have trouble believing the Judge at first, simply thinking his pronouncement a farce, but when they discover that they are locked within the room, they quickly realize the seriousness of their predicament. They must try to work together to fight their way out, or decide who should be the sacrificial lamb for the others.

"The Judges" has many characteristics that trademark a Wiesel novel. There is the shift in narrative between various characters, and between past and present times. Yet unlike his other works, the narratives here have little cohesiveness - there is no thread that ties them all together and even though the five characters are forced to spend one night together under one roof, that is all that unites them. There may be commonalities among their pasts and their reasons for wishing to remain alive, but beyond that, this story is about disconnect. The ending is far too rushed for the story that is offered and the conclusion to the host's 'game' is trite and predictable. With that being said, "The Judges" is still a fine read, thanks in large part to Wiesel's intellect and his poetic use of language.

I find that this novel is about a loser in life and I cannot stand reading about losers. Simply, the main character Gamliel had a "mild" experience as compared to others who survived the war. And yet for some reason Elie enjoys writing about losers in life who are searching for love, never happy, busy or accomplished. There is more to life than that and certainly more to Judaism.

Elie is at his best when he writes non fiction about real people such as in Souls on fire, Sages and Dreamers. It is a real shame that he wrote more novels than non fiction works and yet there is still time to rectify that... and yet...

BG

Elie Wiesel's THE TIME OF THE UPROOTED shouldn't work. With its sudden shifts in point of view, disturbingly eloquent children, truncated storylines and generally convoluted, if scanty, plot, the book should be a disappointment. But the Nobel Prize winner's meditation on despair and hope in the face of both the unthinkable and the mundane is deeply moving.

Wiesel (and his translator, David Hapgood) skillfully controls the mood of the work, immersing the reader in the sadness of Gamaliel Friedman, a man whose life has been a series of struggles. A childhood spent in hiding from the Nazis and an adulthood spent in unhappy romances have left Gamaliel irreparably harmed.

Spiritual issues are pervasive in this book. A ghostwriter, Gamaliel is at work on a story of his own centered on a conflict between a rabbi and a priest. He is also enamored of a rabbi seeking to force the arrival of the Messiah. And he is preoccupied with a woman, near death, who he imagines might be the woman who protected him as a child. Each interlocking piece of his life adds heft to the book's spiritual themes.

Gamaliel's relationships with women, central to the story, are almost cursorily described. Each seems a rich vein of material that Wiesel barely mines. Indeed, the same could be said of many of the plot points.

THE TIME OF THE UPROOTED often feels like a slimmed down version of a potentially more ornately layered tale. Ultimately, however, Wiesel stirs the reader's emotions with economy and power.

--- Reviewed by Rob Cline ([...])

With all of the novels that Elie Wiesel has written, it may seem like a difficult task to write a story with a fresh take on Jewish history and the lingering aftermath of the Holocaust. Yet with "The Time of the Uprooted", Wiesel mangages to do just that, although in a slightly more convoluted and confusing manner than usual. Best known for his time shifting rambles through past and present, "The Time of the Uprooted" lacks a lot of cohesiveness that his other novels have to tie their stories up, not to mention jolting shifts between differing points of view.

The narrator of this tale is Gamaliel, a Hungarian refugee who lost both parents to the concentration camps while he was saved by a Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. The reader gains insight into Gamaliel's distant past bit by slow bit; the majority of the narrative is taken up with the more recent past, and with tales told by his fellow refugee friends. When he receives a call to visit a dying Hungarian woman in the hospital, Gamaliel believes he may finally meet up with his war time savior, but the old woman's face is scared beyond recognition and he may be too late. All of this unfolds in the span of one day, but the quantity of stories that fill these pages distorts that time span.

Eloquently written as always with prose as beautiful as poetry, Wiesel proves yet again why he is a master storyteller worthy of his craft. "The Time of the Uprooted", while definitely not his best novel, is an aching examination of despair and the meager glimpses of hope that get one through life's trials and tribulations. Will Gamaliel finally find what he has been seeking for his whole life and will he recognize it as such when he does so? It is a familiar question often with surprising and difficulty attained answers.

From May 25-28 2006 a pope from Germany, Benedict XVI, visited Poland, in part to honor the memory of his predecessor, John Paul II, in part to call upon the religious faith of this largely Roman Catholic nation to revitalize the Christian roots of Europe. During his visit to Auschwitz -- which called forth memories of my own visit on October 31, 1987 -- the pope noted that the Holocaust was an attempt to slay the God of Abraham.

Truly this is "The Time of the Uprooted." Any endeavor to identify the Christian roots of Europe must begin by uprooting the historic roots of that which renders us oblivious to the obvious, the three faiths of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. How do we at once recognize and acknowledge one another's sameness and otherness? Is each faith set "apart from" the others for its own sake? Or is each faith "a part of" a Divine Providence to which Abraham chose to respond?

Apart from an uprooting of all that which sets us apart from one another, we are refugees on fragile planet that offers no refuge.

Pondering the "silence" of God during the Holocaust, I find refuge, during this, his centennial year, in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, noting that both Wiesel and Levinas studied under Mordechai Chouchani. One-anothered into existence, we never cease one-anothering one another into the fullness of our humanity, a one-anothering that entrusts us with the responsibilities of Historical Providence.

This book is one that will make you think. I cannot understand the history of the author, I was born in 1951. Because of that, I can also not understand the history of the characters as much as I would like... I can only imagine, and I don't always like what I see.

Gamaleil, the protagonist (sp?) speaks of what it means to be a refugee, and a stateless person. His words are powerful.

He also speaks of other persons who he met....some funny, some tragic and some religious. And, most important to me in this book, he spoke of where he did not belong.

Something I took from this book, and the reason that I would recommend it is...well...two things

first, and foremost....we must try do do the best we can, especially if we can do so with a sense of humor (after all, Gamaliel and friends named their group with humor, macabre though it was).

But also, we need to work together for good. The past is horrific, let's all work on the future.

Mr. Wiesel's book gave understated hope for our future.

It is a book well worth reading.... take your time... your time will be well spent.

This book is a must for those who have read Night and Dawn. Night and Dawn were both extremely powerful, but Day truly was the highlight of Wiesel's wonderful trilogy. A must for everyone of all faiths.

The books Dawn(Second book in trilogy of Night) and Day(Third book in trilogy of Night) are written by Elie Wiesel and they are both about life after the holocaust which was the worst thing that could ever happen in my opinion.

Dawn is the second book in the trilogy Night by Elie Wiesel. Elisha is the main character in this book and he is actually living as a terrorist in British-controlled Palistine. The scary part is that he is ordered to kill an English officer. He can't choose between horrors of the past and dilemmas is the present. You have to read to find out what he does because I don't want to give it away.

The book Day is the last book about the Holocaust by Elie Wiesel and it is a very strong ending to the three books I think. One of the main questions that Elie asks himself throughout the book is "Is it ever possible for Holocaust survivors to create new lives for themselves without remembering their old ones?" and I personaly think that it is a great question to ask yourself because it might be possible to but it is probably really hard to do that if you want to forget your past but remember people in it.

All three of the books should give you an idea of how lucky you are to live in this time period and give you a strong idea of what life used to be like and what life is like for Holocaust survivors now.

Day is superior to both Night and Dawn, the first two books in Elie Wiesel's Night trilogy. However, six aspects of Day really bug me:

First, Day's plot lacks cohesion and is out of chronological order, unlike Night and Dawn. The heart of a novel should either consist of either solid storytelling and an advancing plot or delicately crafted interwoven stories. In Day, it is instead largely a jumble of disparate memories - typically of women in steamy situations. This is not conducive to seamless communication.

Second, Wiesel originally wrote The Accident separately from Dawn and Night. As such, it is the least connected to the other two books. He decided at some point to change the title to Day, tack it on to his first two books, and call the resulting mumbo-jumbo a "trilogy." This is sloppy, self-centered, and ultimately irritating because now students at my school are required to read all three volumes.

Third, my same old complaint about Wiesel's writing holds true in Day: too much crying! I find it absurd how many times people cry in the Night trilogy - readers of Night and Dawn (as many of you readers this review are) can attest to this. Rather than making his readers more sympathetic to the feelings of his characters, Wiesel conditions them to indifference with this blatant overuse of sadness.

Fourth, Wiesel's comparisons in Day are too often uncreative at best, stale at worst. Too often he compares one woman to another, typically his mother or grandmother. Comparing one woman to another does nothing. These comparisons would be acceptable once or twice, but, one's patience wears thin after reading paragraph after paragraph of them. Wiesel should keep in mind that he is writing to other people who did not grow up with these women. Much more interesting and effective would be to compare the women to romantic inanimate objects such as the sun, the moon, or a budding rose.

Fifth, Wiesel shies away from many chances to show us a lurking literary prowess throughout Day. These opportunities crop up whenever somebody "talked for hours." It's hard to imagine that these terse, two-dimensional characters are really capable of speaking for hours without seeing the monologue on paper. Why does Wiesel hold these soliloquies back from us?

Sixth, and last, Wiesel doesn't vary his sentence structure enough, in Day or either of the other books in his Night trilogy. This is a run-of-the-mill high school error, and I'm surprised that neither he, nor Oprah, nor the legions of devoted oprah&wiesel fans pick up on this. His short, choppy sentences should be reserved those rare pulse-pounding moments, but Wiesel uses them everywhere.

I will quote from the text to illustrate my points:

Kathleen's face was twisted with pain. She looked like a sorceress who has lost her true face from having put on too many masks. A great fire burned around her. Suddenly she cried out and began to sob. My mother, I had never seen my mother cry. (p.74)

Kathleen. Tears were coming to her eyes. My mother didn't cry. At least not when other people were there. She only offered her tears to God.
Kathleen looked a little like my mother; she had her high forehead, and her chin had the same pure lines. But Kathleen wasn't dead. And she was crying. (p.89)

These selections are the concluding paragraphs of two back-to-back chapters. And yet they say the same thing. That's not any kind of plot advancement that I've ever heard of. I hung my head upon reading the following, though I agree with it:

Nothing is more sacred than life, or healthier, or greater, or more noble. To refuse life is a sin; it's stupid and mad. You have to accept life, cherish it, love it, fight for it as if it were a treasure, a woman, a secret happiness. (p.67)

This "profound" realization flies in the face of what the narrator previously thought - that life wasn't worth fighting for. However, I knew that "life is all we have" before I even knew who Wiesel was. I know we humans must simultaneously struggle for our lives while still finding time to cherish them. I don't need an emotionally-estranged Holocaust-survivor narrator to take me by the hand and lead me through the way he discovered that truth, which is essentially the only task that Day accomplishes for society. Day certainly doesn't make one happier, unless one derives pleasure from knowing one can write better than a Nobel Peace Prize winner. I cannot speak for how this book affects other readers, however. Perhaps this book will save someone from suicide someday?

I will make you suffer though one more irresistible passage before I quit:

In the beginning she didn't cry. We were on the same level. We dealt with each other like equals. We were free. Each one free from himself and free from the other. When I didn't feel like keeping a date, I didn't. She did the same. And neither of us was angry or even hurt. When I didn't talk for a whole night, she didn't try to make me explain. The familiar question asked by lovers, "What are you thinking about?" didn't enter our conversations. Hardness had become our religion. Nothing was said that wasn't essential. We tried to convince each other that we could live, hope, and despair, alone. Each kiss could have been the last. At any moment the temple could have collapsed. The future didn't exist since it was useless. At night we made love silently, almost like our own witnesses. A stranger watching us in the street could easily have taken us for enemies. Rightly so, perhaps. True enemies aren't always the ones who hate each other. (p.90)

I prefer that my novels not read like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Gyula arrives near the end of the book, providing the comic relief and fog-cutting outsider's insight that the rest of Wiesel's Night trilogy needed so desperately to keep from being the bore that it was. In Gyula's laughing light and portrait-mirror, the narrator sees himself for who he truly has become and discovers that he needs to change his outlook. Day was a more satisfying novel than either Night or Dawn in part due to this resolution and promised change in attitude.

I have concluded my reading of the Night trilogy, and of Wiesel, for good. I can't wait to discuss this trilogy in English class - fur will fly, for sure, as most readers of Wiesel whom I've met become insta-fans. I will conclude by saying this - if you enjoyed Night and Dawn, then Day will be right up your alley.

I disagree with the other comments. Of course, this may not be for everyone. It was full of self and ramblings. I, however, felt very much connected to this story. Especially with all its confusion. I think that was the point. He wrote this story so beautifully, I couldn't put it down.

There is not much to this novel but it's effective when you finish it. When I was done the book i thought what really happend what was the point of the book and I came to a cunclusion it's about life and to see how a memory will haunt you the rest of your life and it show us if we can forgive god and to see if we belive in god. Not much ahppend through out the book I enjoyed the holicost flashback. Overall it's not as good as night and I havent read dawn yet so ic an not say but it's enjoyable.