| Nobel-Laureate Elie Wiesel divides his memoirs into 10 segments starting with his childhood in Transylvania in the 1930's and ending in present-day Jerusalem. He is haunted by dreams of his dead family; his father and grandfather, his mother and grandmother and younger sister.
After he was liberated from the concentration camp, Wiesel was sent to France where he received an education and recovered his religious fervor. Later, he became a journalist, joining a secretive Yiddish weekly, an organ of the Irgun, a resistance movement in Israel. As such, he was able to travel to Israel and observe the fight for Independence in 1947. In Israel, Wiesel found little attention paid to the Holocaust. "Six hundred of us defeated six Arab armies," he was told. He became a correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth, the smallest of Israel's daily papers and sailed back to Paris. To supplement his meager income, he became a sumultaneous translator. At one of his assignments at a Geneva conference, he heard Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish congress accept an offer of reparations from Germany in exchange for the promise that Israel would not mention German war crimes. Elie Wiesel quit his job as translator to report this shocking capitulation for his newspaper. On the question of forgiveness, Wiesel writes, "I could conceivably forgive the evil the Germans did to me personally, but not the suffering and death they inflicted on my parents, on all the dead Jewish parents and all their murdered children." In New York, where he went as a foreign correspondent, Wiesel landed a job witht he most presigious most widely read Yiddish daily, the Forward, (now a weekly), and became a U.S. citizen. He compares the ease with which he received his papers witht he complicated bureaucracy of France where he lived for many years. Wiesel concludes his memoirs in Jerusalem where he marries Marion at age 40 and has a child. | ||
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Plot & Themes War/Cloak & Dagger story? - holocaust War/Spying Yes Period of greatest activity? - 1950+ Subject of Biography Gender - Male Profession/status: Ethnicity - Jew Nationality - American Setting Europe Yes European country: - Eastern Europe City? Yes City: - New York - dangerous Misc setting - prison - moving train Century: - 1930's-1950's Writing Style Book makes you feel? - in awe Pictures/Illustrations? - More 6-10 B&W How much dialogue in bio? - roughly even amounts of descript and dialog How much of bio focuses on most famous period of life? - 76%-100% of book |
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