Night (original 1955; edition 2006)

Read this book as a summer read during my freshman year of High School along with "Summer of my German Soldier"(2006) and must say that even though it was a REQUIRED read for my school, it certainly did not seem like something that I had to force myself to read.

Elie Wiesel crafts an extrordinary novel that makes you FEEL with each character, especially the main character. I would HIGHLY reccomend this novel to anyone looking for a good read. ( )

Review of NIght by Elie Wiesel

As autobiographies go there are few that can hold a candle to the powerful account given by Elie Wiesel in Night. Wiesel recounts memories from the last weeks in his hometown of Sighet to his families transfer to the concentration camp at Auschwitz and then to the death camp at Buchenwald. Wiesel was only 16 years old when the nightmare of World War II began and he experienced the racial cleansing ordered by Hitler.

Instead of a more thorough summary of the contents of the Night, which I am sure you can find in one of the 306 reviews on this website alone, I would like to focus on the elements of this book that make it such an essential title to teach in High School. First, the book takes the Second World War out of the textbook and away from the soldiers and puts it in the hands of a pious, and somewhat naive, 16 year old that is about to be forcefully thrown into the horrors of the holocaust. He is a relatable character. When I observed a class reading Night this past year, I was surprised by how many of the students talked about Wiesel in the present tense as though he was still the 16 year old in the book and thus related things that happened in their life to how Wiesel must have felt. Making a connection to the story is critical when reading a book and is especially needful when the text of the book is so emotionally painful to read. Being disconnected from the story would make the students unable to experience the situations and therefore be unable to understand the warning inherent in the story and why Wiesel felt compelled to write Night. Wiesel suffers through separation, starvation, and all the horrors of the concentration camps until, by the end, he doesn't even recognize himself as a human. Students are able to follow this progress. I watched one student start shaking when she was explaining what Wiesel went through and she kept on repeating, "Can you imagine? It was horrible."

Night is also a very good book for teaching motif (i.e. night equalling loss) and theme because of the clarity of the writing. The vocabulary that Wiesel used to write his memoir is beautifully succinct, clear and not weighed down with the excess poundage of abstract sentence structure or ideas. Once the students were introduced to motif and theme, I watched them quickly pick out annotations to support assertions they made about both topics. Another surprising moment was when the students had to talk about the ideas concerning family as it evolves throughout the book. Most of the boys in the class latched on to the relationship between Wiesel and his father and how supportive the relationship became. While the girls focused on the initial separation and then Wiesel's guilt by the end that he felt when his father died. Because of the range of ideas about family that you can find in the book, the students were able to pick out different elements of it and then have in-depth discussions comparing and contrasting what they had found.

I did not see any flaws in this work or any criticisms with the version that the teacher chose for this class. I have seen some version that have added footnotes and distracting critical analysis. I liked the fact that in this version the preface is by the author and that the translator is Marion Wiesel, the author's wife. I enjoyed reading the book with HIgh School students. I have to admit that some of the students were so taken in by NIght that I think they forgot it was non-fiction. When you are used to reading non-fiction like that found in textbooks it must feel odd to make such a profound emotional connection with a non-fiction work. So if you are looking for a non-fiction work (required by most school systems) that will make the students realize the value of non-fiction than this is one of the greats. ( )

This is one of those great books about human suffering that stays with you forever and always. I can still see some of the images that Wiesel created in this novel, and find that they haunt some of my nightmares. I don’t know if I fully appreciated the text at the time for what it was, but I see that he was a master of using powerful imagery to make a lasting impression of an event so horrific that it is hard to fathom how something like that could ever happen.

I first read this book in high school and it is a book I come back to from time to time. Elie Wiesel is a personal hero of mine. I find him so inspirational. That even after all that he has suffered he spent his life working for the good of humanity. This book is short but it is very powerful and I wouldn't recommend it for tweens or young teenagers. There is horror in this book, all the more terrible because it is true. I think it is even more striking because Mr. Wiesel seems very honest in his recounting his experience, even when the things he remembers don't cast him in the most positive light. ( )

Finished this book yesterday, Feb. 22. Wow. I must admit to being shocked to find out people did not know, or if they did thought it was untrue what was happening to the Jews. especially in 1944/1945!!

We (Netherlands were in occupation since 1940)
Very small book but lots of power. I can so understand this boy.
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