Elie Wiesel

A spiritual biography of Elie Wiesel, from his early childhood in Sighet to the present. Argues that Wiesel's religious faith is the driving force of his life and the core of his personality. Regards him as a "homo religiosus", who can be compared to the prophet Jeremiah or Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. Wiesel's main formative experience was the Holocaust, first and foremost his internments in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Argues that his spiritual crisis in the camps and after his liberation was more complex than a loss of faith, as has been construed by many researchers of his first novels, "Night" and "Dawn"; to a great extent, it was a sense of abandonment by God, stemming largely from his complicated relations with his parents, and especially from a sense of abandonment by his father. In "Night" Wiesel interpreted the Holocaust as the breaking of the Covenant between God and the Jews. His subsequent books, from "Dawn" to "The Town beyond the Wall" and later, signified the re-establishment of this Covenant. The sum of his first four works is an articulation of a new beginning for Jews after the Holocaust. Dismisses criticism of Wiesel by some writers who depict him as a "professional Holocaust survivor" concerned only with the Jewish trauma and the defense of Jews; in the 1960s-2000s Wiesel identified with all of the oppressed, be they Soviet Jews or Blacks in South Africa, and with all the victims of genocide. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)