Night by Elie Wiesel

The first thing I will say for this book is how relieved I was to read Wiesel's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech at the end. The book itself paints such a bleak and barren picture, not only of the concentration camps, but of life as a whole, that I feared the worst for the author even after having been rescued, even after having written about those horrors. While cringing from the hideous events and sympathizing with the man whose boyhood was suddenly ripped away from him, I still could not help engaging the text with what I know many others would consider "victim-blaming." I was angry with the author, if I am brutally honest about it. First angry, of course, with the inhumanity of the situation, but I've spent a lot of time in my life already being angry with the Nazis, and, even with the specificity that Wiesel brings, that hatred has settled into a steady foundation, rather than burning like a fire. What I have not been often exposed to is Wiesel himself, as he portrays himself in the book. I've seen the situation primarily through the eyes of Anne Frank (of course) and Corrie ten Boom. Especially with Corrie ten Boom, a lot of the same events were experienced, yet her book, The Hiding Place, never dwells for long on the horrific darkness that pervades Night. Instead, she never fails to bring the reader back into the light of God's Goodness. While I sympathized wholly with the boy in Night, I found myself unable to do so with with the adult author, whose tone was still that of a captive to Auschwitz. Throughout the book this disturbed me, to think that the author may have gone to his death in uncompromising rage for the God he had rejected, the God who had allowed such things to happen. So I was mercifully relieved that this edition included the speech from 1986, in which the softer and meeker tone reveals the beautiful and humble perspective that Wiesel attained in later years.

The second thing I will expound upon is my dislike for prefaces and forewords that contain significant parts of the story in them. With a fictional story, I'd call them plot-spoilers, but it does seem flippant for me to treat those events as such. But it would have been better in hindsight if I had skipped those parts, as I normally do. I convinced myself to read them this time because they were short enough that I didn't mind. They did have undeniable value, but most of it was not ideal for reading prior to the book itself. The exception to this statement is the very end of the foreword by Mauriac, whose response to Wiesel's dark perspective was a perfect model of Christlike love. My anger at Wiesel's seemingly godless and hopeless attitude was certainly tempered by the conviction that Mauriac's response should have consistently been mine as well, if I had been a better man. There is a time when there have been quite enough words, and the only appropriate response is quiet.

While I do not mind being overt, here at the university, that Mauriac's religious propensities are my own as well, I know full well that the expression of such in a public classroom could be highly problematic. If I were to assign Night in a high-school classroom, I would condense the foreword, purging it of its "plot-spoilers," and make it available to the students, because that image of non-preaching religion is valuable to the structure of the story. I would also have the students read Wiesel's acceptance speech before reading the book itself to alleviate the tension that consumed me when I read it believing that the graceless attitude of the author towards God and the world was absolute. I would not impose such a heavy book at all on any student younger than a senior. This book is very mature, in a truer sense of the word than is commonly used today, that is, not because of violence or sex, but because of raw and brutal passion. A comparison of the book with The Hiding Place could be very enlightening, however I would hesitate to add text after text of holocaust life-stories on top of the inevitable Diary of Anne Frank. It would be better, if possible, to encourage this as an independent reading book.