Night (memoir)

Night
1982 Bantam Books edition, with the original
1960 English translation and cover adapted from the 1958 French edition
AuthorElie Wiesel
LanguageEnglish
English translators
Publication date
1956: Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (Yiddish). Buenos Aires: Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina, 245 pages.
First translation1958: La Nuit (French). Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 178 pages.[1]
Published in English
1960: Night. New York: Hill & Wang; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 116 pages.
ISBN0-8090-7350-1 (Stella Rodway translation. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960.)
ISBN 0-553-27253-5 (Stella Rodway translation. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.)
ISBN 0-374-50001-0 (Marion Wiesel translation. New York: Hill & Wang/Oprah Book Club, 2006.)
LC ClassD811 W4823 1960 (Hill & Wang, 1960)
Followed byDawn (1961) 

Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, to his migration through multiple concentration camps. The typical parent–child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver.[2] His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating from dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.

After the war, Wiesel moved to Paris and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent").[3] The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night.

Translated into 30 languages, the book ranks as one of the cornerstones of Holocaust literature.[4] It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir. Wiesel called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art.[5][6]

Night is the first in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."[7]

  1. ^ For 178 pages: Wiesel 2010, 319; Wieviorka 2006, 34.
  2. ^ In Night: "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In the memoir, everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends", a kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."(Night 1982, 101, 105; Fine 1982, 7).
  3. ^ Wiesel 2010, 319; Franklin 2011, 73.
  4. ^ Franklin 2011, 69.
  5. ^ Franklin, Ruth (23 March 2006). "A Thousand Darknesses". The New Republic.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference academy was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Sternlicht 2003, 29; for the quote, Fine 1982, 29, citing Morton A. Reichek (Spring 1976). "Elie Wiesel: Out of the Night". Present Tense, 46.