Tag: Elie Wiesel

Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets

Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…

To Have Been Exiled by Exiles

I was rereading Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which is a great collection of essays on literature and  culture with exploration of the experiences of dislocation, exile, migration, and empire as well…

“Everything Must Be Told and Written Down”

Laura Jockusch,  Collect and Record: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe  (Oxford University Press, 2012). Laura Rockusch has performed an inspiring service in producing her book, Collect and Record. Contrary to many people’s assumptions…

Yiddish Writers/4

I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…

Yiddish Writers/3

Isaac Bashevis Singer was the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (Elie Wiesel, whose first book, And the World Remained Silent, was in Yiddish, was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.)…

Elie Wiesel and Worthy Remembrance

See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit:  I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…

On Moshe-Leib of Sassov

  Before we leave Sassov, let us take a minute to ask ourselves these last questions:  Was Reb Moshe-Leib the forerunner of all those helpless men and women who, generations later, eternities later, continued to…