[In the following review, Horn offers a laudatory assessment of All Rivers Run to the Sea.]

World War II and its persecutions of the Jews shattered the author's idyllic shtetl world forever, as he and his were carted off to Auschwitz. (Only two older sisters survived.) Unable to understand the cruelty of a civilized people, angry at those who did not intervene on the victims' behalf, angry too at God for letting it happen—yet still believing in Him—Wiesel emerged at seventeen endowed with a special knowledge of life and death.

Shortly after his liberation from Buchenwald he went to France, where he eventually enrolled at the Sorbonne, enduring hardship and contemplating suicide. Saved by Zionist fervor, he worked as a journalist for a Yiddish newspaper in Paris before hiring out as a stringer/correspondent for an Israeli daily. In this capacity he observed the French cultural and political scene and traveled widely. A crucial meeting with François Mauriac in 1955 was to decide his literary career: Mauriac encouraged him to break his self-imposed silence about the Night Kingdom and found a publisher for Wiesel's first novel (La nuit), to which he contributed the foreword.

After Wiesel moved to New York to become his newspaper's American correspondent, he soon applied for U.S. citizenship. In a series of amusing anecdotes he describes the vagaries of getting published in the United States; his life in Jewish-American milieux; his relations with Le Seuil, his publisher; his meeting with Marion, his future wife and translator. More moving and bittersweet are his return to his native town, where relatives and friends have disappeared and only the ghosts of his youth remain; his personal and literary campaign for Russian Jewry; the unbearable fear caused by the Six-Day War because it could mean the end of the Jewish state and dream; and his prayer of thanksgiving at the newly liberated Wailing Wall.

Throughout, a celebration of life and of the great Hasidic teachers and thinkers as well as a moral and ethical strength permeate Wiesel's first forty years in his engagé conduct and writings. In memorializing his relatives, friends, and acquaintances and in bearing witness to their passing, he ultimately leaves his own mark behind, since, he implies, a life speaks louder than literature.