Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wiesel, Elie (Vol. 165) - James E. Young (review date 18 December 1995)


Wiesel, Elie (Vol. 165) - James E. Young (review date 18 December 1995)

James E. Young (review date 18 December 1995)

SOURCE: Young, James E. “Parables of a Survivor.” New Leader 78, no. 10 (18 December 1995): 17-19.

[In the following review, Young maintains that All Rivers Run to the Sea is part spiritual memoir, part bildungsroman, and “a remarkably self-reflexive if not always self-revealing memoir.”]

How did Elie Wiesel, of all the thousands of Holocaust survivors, become a living icon of that catastrophe, and why? How deliberate was his ascension, how accidental? What has it meant for Wiesel to commit his life to memory of the Holocaust, only to reap a seemingly endless bounty of celebrity, adulation, and material rewards? All Rivers Run to the Sea, the first of two planned volumes of his memoirs, may not explicitly answer these impossible questions, but it does allow subtle and elliptical answers to come gradually into view. Part spiritual Bildungsroman and part...

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