Artists are praised when what they have created is described as their world. Elie Wiesel would defy anyone to write of “Wiesel's Auschwitz.” And yet, nobody has made that place more present than he, or has done so more relentlessly, more remorselessly, more persistently. That being the case, it becomes impossible to expect his work to do what he has said cannot be done: to concretize the mystery.

One generation later it can still be said, and must now be affirmed: there is no such thing as literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be. … Those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely. … The very attempt to write such a novel is blasphemy.¹

Wiesel has produced a body of writing which is a meditation on humanity, on God, on humanity and God and on their shared world. His literature of radical survival by the victims of ultimate persecution is a protest and an attempt to discern the ways in which life may be lived in the face of sovereign absurdity: “We must invent reason; we must create beauty out of nothingness.”² In work after work, Wiesel makes it clear that even as an artist he is engaged in theological speculation of an extraordinary kind. Despite all the despair, in the face of the undeniable absurdity of history and of the challenging doubts about the theodicy, despite an ever-unraveling revelation of a brutalized, cheapened society and indifference to life or death, he will shake the cynic and assert mystery: “Does the word ‘mystery’ make you sneer? Well, I'm beginning to believe in it. The words you strangle, the words you murder, produce a kind of primary, impenetrable silence. And you will never succeed in killing a silence such as this.”³

The risks Wiesel has taken are those of artist, philosopher and theologian, not to mention the stake he has laid on his very sanity. All these risks are inescapable, bearing in mind his obsessive sense of being a survivor, his role as an angry but not bitter witness and his vocation as a teller of tales, enriched by his religious background and the great Hasidic masters but governed by the dark overlay of his experiences in the territory which he has so often called the “Kingdom of the Night.” Wiesel's tales and speculations center on a world so different from all others that its emotions and events bear scant relation to any outside that world, either in degree or in kind. It is after all a world in which emotions were burned; it deals with the dead and not the living, at least primarily. Its focus would tend to be moral rather than emotional, mysterious rather than intellectual, theological rather than psychological. But Wiesel, however maddened or driven, is also a teller of tales, and it is well to remember that despite the existential horror suspended in its emotionally strictured language and arid expression, a novel such as Night deals centrally with inconsolable grief and extreme despair. Those feelings, raw and human, establish the moral spaces of the writing; they are parts of the whole, as much as everything they hold and frame.

The other novels reflect similar balances and interfaces between human and moral passions, even as each expresses its particular modulations and describes its own circumstances. Thus, for example, Dawn poses an extreme moral dilemma against a severely contrasted blunt emotional background: Elisha, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, must execute John Dawson, an English soldier in occupied Palestine, for crimes committed by the British forces to which Dawson belongs. Elisha has no doubts about the need to kill the hostage; but he has never killed, and his hatred of the enemy is impersonal. Indeed he abhors not the man he must kill, but his own hatred. Murder remains murder no matter how it is considered, and it holds no triumph. Having been a victim, Elisha has come to know that killing is bestial; but confronting the imperatives of the changed circumstance in which he is made executioner, he faces new questions: “When is a man most truly a man? When he submits or when he refuses? Where does suffering lead him? To purification or to bestiality?”⁴

The matter is not cut and dried. The answer of the victim is not the answer of the executioner. But the questions are the same. Indeed the resolution of the book goes quite beyond answers, leaving the doubts and questions intact. The young executioner who kills for the first time destroys the boy who has never killed before. Elisha kills John Dawson and also kills himself: “We shall be bound together for all eternity by the tie that binds a victim and his executioner” (D, [Dawn] x). All this moral speculation, however, is urgently personalized: “‘Elisha—’ said the hostage. I fired. When he pronounced my name he was already dead; the bullet had gone through his heart. A dead man, whose lips were still warm had pronounced my name: Elisha” (D, 126). These two symbolic figures had each been intended as a person as well, and the humanity of each is the stamp which makes the speculative dimension at all important. Everything boils down to man in the end: his friendships, his hates, his passions, his choices, his virtues, his evils, his indifference. The heart of A Beggar in Jerusalem expresses a similar resolution about a wholly different issue.

“What do you expect of life?” I asked Katriel.

“Life itself,” he answered.

“And of love?”

“Love itself.”

“I envy you,” I told him. “I am more complicated than you. I want the one to surprise the other. I ask of them to surprise me as well.”

“So do I but that's a secret. Keep it to yourself.”

“I will. What I like most about you is your secrets.”⁵

In addition to the author's handling of the fragile balance between intense meditation and moral speculation on the one hand, and human interrelations and feelings on the other, the order of art also makes its demand. In this regard, the storyteller must come to terms with his often stated belief that in the face of mystery, silence is the only and proper response. Out of this consideration come the discursions on irrational but necessary laughter, the gibbering secrets of the madman, the haunting and inconclusive heart of the Hasidic tale and language itself.

And now teller of tales, turn the page. Speak to us of other things. Your mad prophets, your old men drunk with nostalgic waiting, your possessed—let them return to their nocturnal enclaves. They have survived their deaths for more than a quarter of a century; that should suffice. If they refuse to go away, at least make them keep quiet. At all costs. By every means. Tell them that silence, more than language, remains the substance and seal of what was once their universe, and that, like language, it demands to be recognised and transmitted.⁶

It is not clear whether Wiesel has resolved the conflict between the artist and his words on the one hand and, on the other, the man and his resolve that only in silence can he respond to his past. That would depend on the way in which the books read. But the tension as he moves along his seemingly irreconcilable courses, compelled by the variety of their urgings, is stirring and prepossessing. The torment of this dichotomy is shared by the author and the reader. While the experiences themselves may not be imparted, let alone shared, speculations on the meaning of these experiences can be conveyed, and at similar levels of intensity: “Because you too have lived the Holocaust. You were born after? No matter. One can step inside the fiery gates twenty-five, fifty years later. … One can die in Auschwitz after Auschwitz. We are all survivors” (One Generation After, 168-69).

Answers tend to be limiting, defined by all manner of private notions, facts and experiences, by things acquired and innate. But questions remain open-ended, and they bind people to people, past to future, the present to eternity: “I attach more importance to questions than to answers. For only the questions can be shared” (OG, [One Generation After] 175). Such a terse conclusion is neither evasive nor stentorian. It is typical of Wiesel's refusal to deny the imponderable, the mysterious and the ineffable. In the face of all risk—both philosophical and artistic—he will dare to sum up by that kind of moralizing. The reader may well be shocked by the witness to whom facts are disturbing and even distorting. But Wiesel is neither a historian nor simply a recorder. The question arises compulsively: is this man not a prophet rather than a witness? I have already mentioned, in respect to Wiesel the survivor, witness and storyteller, such descriptive terms as “obsessive sense,” “role” and “vocation.” Those are words which go a considerable way toward defining a prophet.

There is more: the notion of sacred madness; possession by an unshakable purpose directed from the revealed vision toward society; unceasing response to the revelation; irresistible commitment to an external vision or circumstance, quite independent of and even antagonistic to reason, desire or natural psychological orientation; the sense of being a messenger, randomly but ineluctably appointed; and above all, after all, the speaking, the communication of the message, the revelation. There is really no great difference between the spirit of God which took hold of the biblical prophets and Wiesel's tangent with another world. The prophet was forced to remark that all trembled at the lion's roar and that the Word of God compelled his prophecy. There is no real distance between the prophet's trembling, his words and the bewildered, terror-filled novels of one who lived where madness reigned in the Kingdom of the Night. There is really no reason why the voice of prophecy should be thought completely stilled in an age such as ours, which has endured so much of the unfolding mystery of creation, of its savagery and glory. To call Wiesel's a prophetic voice might be an exaggeration, but it is not a gross one. Certainly the prophetic passion reverberates there. His tales have the power of myths in which the basic material, the facts and events they contain, are so awesome that they do not yield to any but the most heightened of responses. Anguish, joy, even ecstasy are among those responses. Fury, rage, protest and ardor are others. But Wiesel is also the chronicler of less exacting passions like human yearning and loss, grief and sadness, celebration and bravery. When it comes to these, he is gentle, encouraging and concerned. Not for him, then, stoic indifference, or worse, cynicism. While he is predominantly called a Holocaust writer—and seen by some as the greatest of them all—paradoxically, his major theme is the redemptive power of love and friendship. He has not avoided saying that this would also include knowing when and how to despise and hate, often strangely more difficult. Recognition of Wiesel as the poet of fellowship and human engagement would not be inappropriate. It would certainly help account for his widespread attractiveness as a contemporary author.

Whether Wiesel would go as far as Auden—“We must love one another or die”—is not altogether clear, for in his works we also discover those who live without love, despite fellowship. We witness the survival of people in the midst of a frenzy so murderous and brutal that it robbed more than life itself, destroying every humane gesture. This was the place, after all, where a son, so driven by hunger, could kill his beloved father and then gouge the lump of half-chewed bread from his dead mouth. It also included a skilled and refined surgeon who had no compunction about using his best talents to spitefully remove the fingers of a sculptor's hand, one by one, day by day. And it was the slaughter-house of a million or more children, killed by men who were themselves fathers and sons.

Nevertheless, Wiesel, without any sense of self-consciousness (for it is not trite at the time he chooses to say it), has also written of unequivocal love and friendship.

“When the self of man has crumbled away, what can remain if not love without limits, an absolutely pure love, pure of all self?” … Still, there must be some true liberation in the silence of the soul—or rather its muffled murmuring. At least this: a liberating movement of the self which has suffered enough to be transformed into love.⁷

The doctor's words to Kathleen when he learns of her love for the critically injured would-be suicide, the protagonist of The Accident (“In that case, there are good reasons not to lose hope. Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more”) and the words of the patient's friend Gyula (“Maybe God is dead, but man is alive. The proof: he is capable of friendship”)⁸ express an important thematic movement forward which occurs in this the third of Wiesel's books and continues throughout his oeuvre: the recognition of the grace of fellowship, friendship and its redemptive force. This central theme and most persistent focus assumes far-reaching connotations, becoming the bridge by way of which lives and whole histories are transported to the future. Borne upon their human agents, ideas and moral imperatives gain a living potency which can influence and determine present and future events as much as can breathing people. In this way events gain legendary power and, like the Hasidic tale, come to “humanize fate.”

But Wiesel's writing is nothing if not deliberately and complexly inconsistent. No sooner is the theme of messianic fellowship pinned down as an option for hope, even harmony, than Wiesel reintroduces Moshe the madman, who had haunted the first novel, Night, but then assumed an ever more important and central role until he became the protagonist of The Oath. This madness is of course not clinical insanity. It is rather the obsession with describing what cannot be imagined, with submitting dreams to what the writer has called “the weight of history.” This madness is the driven urgency of the witness who has uncovered a most hideous secret at the very heart of creation, a destructive secret which calls creation itself into question, and certainly the Creator. Elie Wiesel, the youthful Talmud student from Sighet (Transylvania), was just ready to begin his earnest search for the meanings and purposes of life and creation when he was deported with his family by the Nazis and cast into the madness of the Kingdom of the Night. What he was to find there was an awful and shattering horror, a horror which cast darkness on the hope and certitude of an earlier, beloved kingdom and on the legends of that place as well: “And so, in the kingdom of Hasidic legend, the Baal Shem follows his disciples to the end of night. Another miracle? Certainly not. Death negates miracles, the death of one million children negates more than miracles.”⁹

He can explain nothing of the purpose of the insane destruction but is haunted by its undeniable reality. He is left to grope for a response: “There is no alternative: one must impose a meaning on what perhaps has none and draw ecstasy from nameless, faceless pain” (Souls on Fire, 35-36). Which brings him to the madness of the survivor. Before wanton cruelty and persecution, this special madness is defined: “What must we do, what can we do in response? We must continue to sing. Because we have been hurt? No, more likely because we are mad. But ours is a different kind of madness; when the enemy is mad, he destroys; when the killer is mad, he kills. When we are mad, we sing.”¹⁰

In this sense, then, the beggars, the tellers of strange tales, the rabbis whose behavior may betoken more than just eccentricity, the broken and the betrayed—heralds all—are madmen. They are the necessary population of an abandoned universe in which history is absurd and disconnected, where only dreams and visions are mutable enough to withstand the shattering anguish of betrayal and loneliness, where madmen alone are equipped with energy disjointed enough to shield them from being overwhelmed by chaos. It is the madman who is sufficiently disengaged from the world to escape its terrors, or perhaps, altogether aligned with its wild disorder, he lives without fear despite all that the world shows of itself. Today's post-Holocaust witness of the Holocaust is also the madman who will dare to see the present as a pre-Holocaust time too, like a harbinger.

The tale the beggar tells must be told from the beginning. But the beginning has its own tale, its own secret. That's how it is, and that's how it always has been. There is nothing man can do about it. Death itself has no power over the beginning. The beggar who tells you this knows what he is talking about. … For tales, like people, all have the same beginning.

(A Beggar in Jerusalem, 3)

Moshe the madman laughed as he led the prayers on his last day in his hometown, the day of the transport. He sang and danced at the railway station and finally, “walking at the head of a silent procession, Moshe was still singing, louder and louder, until the end, as if to mock an enemy known only to himself.”¹¹ But defeating time, unbroken by the murderous wickedness, Moshe still moves about the world: “That enemy did not succeed in silencing his deep, disturbing voice. That voice wanders through the world, as dangerous to hear as not to hear.”

Typically, as soon as he has shifted his prepossessing image into its central thematic place, Wiesel begins to move on, to see the image not as answer or explanation, but as the impulse to a further challenge. He perceives and considers the possibility of a beatific, mysterious, perhaps divine intervention in the course of human history. Writing about his journey to Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, he describes his compulsion and what came of it, the novel A Beggar in Jerusalem

Then came the Six-Day War and I had to put everything aside. I went to Jerusalem because I had to go somewhere, I had to leave the present and bring it back to the past. You see, a man who came to Jerusalem then, came as a beggar, a madman, not believing his eyes and ears, and above all, his memory. … If I were to qualify this tale, I would say perhaps: this is neither novel nor anti-novel, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither poem nor prose—it is all this together. It is an adventure of one madman, who one night saw not the end of all things, but their beginning.

(BJ, [A Beggar in Jerusalem] preface)

Such beginnings, which are not independent of the past and are not rooted in innocence, do not leave the new voyager free of the past, of its haunting, its loss and its anguish—or of its darkness and evil. But it takes the place of the past in the movement of things.

What is important is to continue. It will take time and patience: the beggar knows how to wait. … That is why I am still here on this haunted square, in this city where nothing is lost and nothing dispersed. An indispensable necessary transition. To catch my breath. To become accustomed to a situation whose newness still makes me dizzy. During this time I do not count the hours or the men. I watch them go by. The beggar in me could detain them, he lets them pass. He could follow them. He lets them pass. …

(BJ, 210-11)

The overlapping themes each seek their own emphasis, and the author tries to give them place and voice, enveloping them in situations which are no less real for posing also as symbols. The centuries of human communication have made it plain that the ideogram has its own reality and the notion that a man can become a cipher is reversible. Although he has often warned that words can obscure and are inadequate for what they are sometimes—even often—called upon to do, he has also warned that “some words are as important as deeds—some words are deeds” (SF, [Souls of Fire] 59). Amplifying these views, Wiesel modifies his caution and the backtracks with an example of the characteristic startling directness which contributes so much to maintaining the tensile dialectic of this central speculation: “Perhaps you are lending too much importance to words. Tell yourself that they too are God's creation. Tell yourself that they possess an existence all their own. You prefer to feed truth with silence? Good. But you risk distorting it with contempt” (BJ, 135).

The author's own awareness of the paradoxes of his sudden shifts of focus and direction leads him to monitor his reader's responses carefully, lest these readers become lost in the contemplation of paradox, lest they perceive that paradox as an esthetic device rather than an integral element of the storyteller himself and his tale. Thus, for example, he reminds us that the madman was no sudden advent; he had always been present.

But how does one assassinate an angel gone mad?

One day I thought I had found the solution: I imprisoned him in a novel. … Panic-stricken, I re-read my earlier narratives: there too he reigned as master. There too he had preceded me. Even more serious: he had accorded himself the status of temporary resident, turning up and disappearing as he pleased. Hardly was he unmasked than he was already running off, more savage than ever, to new adventures to which he was dragging me by force.

(Legends of Our Time, 76)

Not only madmen and madness were ever-present, ever-hovering, but also fear and faith, the ubiquitous confined spaces, fire, darkness, friends, lovers, beggars, Death and the haunting dead for whom he bears such relentless witness, the living to whom he speaks about the past in order to bespeak the future, stories and storytellers, history and chaos. And surrounding it all, the Kingdom of the Night, which he even reads backward, into the ancient memory of his Jewish people, its victims. The Kingdom had been there even before it enveloped its victims with its smokestacks and gas chambers and furnaces, its whips, disease and torment. It always was a threat and it still is. It always was a vision, too unimaginable to describe or believe, and it remains unimaginable: “Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred” (LT, [Legends of Our Time] viii). For the witness-survivor, what took place not only happened but existed too as a prevision: “From time to time I would look up to find my mother staring at me as though seeing the future witness I would seek to become” (BJ, 67).

The heavy portent of this and other observations, where time is melted down in the wake and vanguard of history, has little to do with esthetic devices, with deliberate anachronism. It is part of the mysterious reality which has conquered the witness and which, however disconcerting, the writer must contemplate, cannot escape. The obliteration of time and its replacement with another kind of reality altogether—the myth, the legend and the tale—is central to his witnessing and thought. These are independent of their protagonists, their locale, and gain sudden transcendent meaning in the author's mind, where the filter of memory and experience associates them with events they neither influenced nor really bore upon. The effect very quickly ceases to be startling, becoming rather, altogether and readily, an appropriate angle of vision in the storyteller's world, wherein both author and reader are participants.

A disciple sent by Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, to learn the secrets of the high holy days by observing the actions of an ordinary innkeeper, returns to describe how the ordinary man, seeking to render account for his sins, suggested a deal to the Judge of the Universe. The innkeeper asked that his own infractions—which to the disciple seemed very minor indeed—be offset against God's, the enormity of which were alarming, and that they call the score even between them. The Maggid asked:

“So now you know?”

“Yes,” said the disciple, “Now I know.”

“And you agree”

“Yes,” said Reb Elimelekh, “I agree.”

Not I, says the storyteller, not I.

(LT, 127)

The storyteller, haunting uncharted places outside of time, was naturally attracted back to the Hasidic tales of his youth and the strange masters who told them. Unrestricted by chronology or geography, the tales had the resilience to supplant time and place, to survive the destructive fires of the death camps, to sustain their tellers and the listeners: “In Hasidism everything becomes possible by the mere presence of someone who knows how to listen, to love and to give of himself” (SF, 257).

Possessed by his nightmares and his memories, driven by his obsessive need to witness and to warn, to speak, perhaps in order to change a dismal world or at least to prevent that world from changing him, the storyteller was not drawn to the Hasidic masters by nostalgia. The voices of the masters spoke in the midst of his living; indeed he felt their very presence, and he meaningfully called his collection of their stories, biographical sketches and commentaries Souls on Fire. The incandescent stories in the book owe as much to the transforming and burning passion with which their new narrator has welded them together as they do to the sacred purposes of their original tellers—perhaps more. The Hasidic master, the Tzaddik, was called Rebbe by his followers. There is a proportion of the Tzaddik in Wiesel too. It is found in his arresting personal presence, the challenging, anguished protest of his words and the healing, redemptive power of his message, his melancholy and his mystery—the unavoidable sensation experienced in his presence and in his writings of someone who has uniquely seen to the limits of circumscribed human life and maybe beyond. Thus his laughter is not that of the clown in a spirit of hilarity but that of the saint in the face of absurdity; his insanity is not of the broken mind which registers bits and pieces irregularly; it is the temper of the prophet; he who has been haunted terribly with a vision of the whole, its juxtapositions, paradoxes and immutable mystery. The Rebbe is the teacher, and his tales must bear the full weight of their moral burden, to which the pure creative impulse and all esthetic considerations and devices are subservient. Because he is a Jewish writer, however universally received, his work finds its place in a clear tradition stretching from the Bible, the Haggada of the Mishnah and Talmud, through the Hasidic writings and to his own work. That was a tradition in which he had been nurtured very early at the religious schools of Sighet and in his home. Insofar as he is a European writer—his books are almost all written in French, although the fine English translations undertaken by a few diverse hands show a stylistic unity which in large part is obviously to be ascribed to his own judicious monitoring—he speaks in a unique form, for all its echoes of Kafka and Camus, among others.

While the traditions in which he writes are tangible in theme and emphasis, they have little to do with the curiously awkward and sometimes distractingly discursive prose, the stentorian notes and the rhetorical parentheses, the sharp shifts of tone and focus which frequently depend on no more than an aphorism as they move from dramatic passion to theology or portraiture or even anecdote, the often stilted and lumbering characters who barely cope with their dialogue. Perhaps most perturbing in his style is the imaging of cruel and raw emotions in platitudes and against clichéd backgrounds. Wiesel's sustained arresting passion and the emotional, intellectual and psychological responses of his readers compel consideration of the reasons for the stylistic flaws. They are quite clearly not accidental lapses. Their persistence alone would make that clear. In addition, his stylistic talent—characterized by the fluid, easy grace evidenced so spectacularly in Souls on Fire and in a quieter way in Messengers of God—is clear proof of a decidedly refined literary sensibility.

Traditional analytic technique would not show how Wiesel's work so repeatedly shatters indifference and exacts response, excites passions and often arouses remarkable commitment to the challenges posed in his work, how his writing breaks down complacency and stirs previously unrecognized feelings. There is a level of passion in his works which invites comparison with the greatest confessional writings. In his books Wiesel has frequently questioned whether or not the Holocaust is a fit subject for art. On the other hand he has also questioned whether, after the Holocaust, any attempt to understand humanity and history is possible without the Holocaust. Despite the eclipse of the writer's art by the survivor's theme and his certain claim that the only and proper response to absolute horror is horrified silence—a challenging, protesting silence—Wiesel the witness is doomed to articulate. He is so uncompromisingly merciless with himself and engages his readers with such daring as he explores his and their world, that to carp about stylistic flaws is nitpicking and quite unhelpful in any attempt to understand the source of his achievement. The language of silence has had to be invented to avoid minimizing either Auschwitz or the words that bear witness to it on behalf of all its victims. The awful irony torments the author with its ethical dimension: it becomes impossible to divorce the moral and esthetic implications of the dilemma. The tension in Wiesel's work, so arresting, derives in no small degree from his grave doubts about the validity of his literary endeavor and the violence of the creative impulse which demands his art. His responsibility as witness adds the element which makes of this a moral rather than an esthetic tension. But if his work gains immediacy from the implicit problem of reconciling the conflicting elements, the resolution itself yields sometimes startling and often evocative imagery as well as the characteristic and tantalizing silences. It also transfixes experience and transcends art by its mythic power. In short, the art is consciously and deliberately overwhelmed by its theme. That is what Wiesel has been forced to achieve, despite himself and because of his integrity and commitment to a demand more imperative than esthetic obligations.

His one-sentence meditation upon a blessing received from a revered rabbi illustrates with what anguish he performs his task.

“You're young and you'll grow up. I promise you that. You'll see things neither I nor your mother can imagine. That too I promise you. Know therefore that we shall see them through your eyes.”

I was too innocent to understand that that was not a blessing.

(BJ, 68-69)

Blessings, like people, have their own fate. And so, it would appear, do curses. But it sometimes happens by way of rare, magical transformations that when certain curses and certain people transfix and change us, deeply and for a long time—even forever—they are themselves changed and move among us as saving blessings. It may well be that Elie Wiesel and his tales are such curses and such blessings.

Notes

1. Elie Wiesel, “For Some Measure of Humility,” Sh'ma, 5:100 (31 October 1975), pp. 314-15.

2. Elie Wiesel, “Jewish Values in the Post Holocaust Future,” Judaism, 16 (Summer 1967), p. 299.

3. Elie Wiesel, The Testament, New York, Bantam, 1982, p. 15.

4. Elie Wiesel, Dawn, New York, Avon, 1970, p. 24. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation D.

5. Elie Wiesel, A Beggar in Jerusalem, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970, pp. 29-30. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation BJ.

6. Elie Wiesel, One Generation After, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, pp. 197-98. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation OG.

7. Elie Wiesel, The Town beyond the Wall, New York, Avon, 1969, p. 86.

8. Elie Wiesel, The Accident, New York, Avon, 1970, pp. 21, 123.

9. Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire, New York, Random House, 1972, p. 37. Subsequent citations use the abbreviations SF.

10. Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, New York, Random House, 1978, p. 184.

11. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968, p. 74. Subsequent citations use the abbreviation LT.