Best Selling Books by Elie Wiesel

Winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.

When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary man—Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic—steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last words—a plea for silence—and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town’s last days and nights of terror. For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath—until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man’s loyalty to the dead confronts head-on another’s reason to go on living. One of Wiesel’s strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was when first published in 1973.

A collection of tales immortalizing the heroic deeds and visions of people Wiesel knew during and after World War II.

Three works deal with a concentration camp survivor, a hostage holder in Palestine, and a recovering accident victim.

Conversations with Elie Wiesel is a far-ranging dialogue with the Nobel Peace Prize-winner on the major issues of our time and on life’s timeless questions. In open and lively responses to the probing questions and provocative comments of Richard D. Heffner—American historian, noted public television moderator/producer, and Rutgers University professor—Elie Wiesel covers fascinating and often perilous political and spiritual ground, expounding on issues global and local, individual and universal, often drawing anecdotally on his own life experience. We hear from Wiesel on subjects that include the moral responsibility of both individuals and governments; the role of the state in our lives; the anatomy of hate; the threat of technology; religion, politics, and tolerance; nationalism; capital punishment, compassion, and mercy; and the essential role of historical memory. These conversations present a valuable and thought-provoking distillation of the thinking of one of the world’s most important and respected figures—a man who has become a moral beacon for our time.

In Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, Elie Wiesel re-enters, like an impassioned pilgrim, the universe of Hasidism. Souls on Fire is not a simple chronological history of Hasidism, nor is it a comprehensive book on its subject. Rather, Elie Wiesel has captured the essence of Hasidism through tales, legends, parables, sayings, and deeply personal reflections. His book is a testimony, not a study. Hasidism is revealed from within and not analyzed from the outside. "Listen attentively," Elie Wiesel''s grandfather told him, "and above all, remember that true tales are meant to be transmitted—to keep them to oneself is to betray them." Wiesel does not merely tell us, but draws, with the hand of a master, the portraits of the leaders of the movement that created a revolution in the Jewish world. Souls on Fire is a loving, personal affirmation of Judaism, written with words and with silence. The author brings his profound knowledge of the Bible, the Talmud, Kabbala, and the Hasidic tale and song to this masterpiece, showing us that Elie Wiesel is perhaps our generation''s most fervid "soul on fire."

The Nobel winner’s classic look at Job and seven other Biblical characters as they grapple with their relationship with God and the question of His justice. “[Elie] Wiesel has never allowed himself to be diverted from the role of witness for the martyred Jews and survivors of the Holocaust, and by extension for all those who through the centuries have asked Job’s question: ‘What is God doing and where is His justice?’ Here in a masterful series of mythic portraits, drawing upon Bible tales and the Midrashim (a body of commentary), Wiesel explores ‘the distant and haunting figures that molded him’: Adam, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Job. With the dramatic invention of a Father Mapple and the exquisite care of a Talmudic scholar, Wiesel interprets the wellsprings of Jewish religious tradition as the many faces of man’s greatness facing the inexplicable. In an intimate relationship with God it is possible to complain, to demand. Adam and Eve in sinning ‘cried out’ against the injustice of their entrapment; Cain assaulted God rather than his brother; and Abraham’s agreement to sacrifice his son placed the burden of guilt on Him who demanded it. As for Job, Wiesel concludes that he abdicated his defiance as did the confessing Communists of Stalin’s time to ‘underline the implausibility’ of his trial, and thus become the accuser. Wiesel’s concern with the imponderables of fate seems to move from strength to strength.” —Kirkus Reviews “The extraordinary thing that Elie Wiesel has done in this book is to take ancient tales and make them contemporary, in ways that are both dazzling and disturbing. Messengers of God is captivating.” —Robert McAfee Brown, author of Unexpected News

A powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, letters, and diary entries that weave together all the periods of the author''s life from his childhood in Transylvania to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Paris, and New York. • "One of the great writers of our generation addresses himself to the question of what it means to be a Jew." —The New Republic Elie Wiesel, acclaimed as one of the most gifted and sensitive writers of our time, probes, from the particular point of view of his Jewishness, such central moral and political issues as Zionism and the Middle East conflict, Solzhenitsyn and Soviet anti-Semitism, the obligations of American Jews toward Israel, the Holocaust and its cheapening in the media. "Rich in autobiographical, philosophical, moral and historical implications." —Chicago Tribune

Deals with the conflicts and thoughts of a young Jewish concentration-camp veteran as he prepares to assassinate a British hostage in occupied Palestine.

A profoundly and unexpectedly intimate, deeply affecting summing up of life so far, from one of the most cherished moral voices of our time. Eighty-two years old, facing emergency heart surgery and his own mortality, Elie Wiesel reflects back on his life. Emotions, images, faces, and questions flash through his mind. His family before and during the unspeakable Event. The gifts of marriage, children, and grandchildren that followed. In his writing, in his teaching, in his public life, has he done enough for memory and for the survivors? His ongoing questioning of God—where has it led? Is there hope for mankind? The world’s tireless ambassador of tolerance and justice gives us a luminous account of hope and despair, an exploration of the love, regrets, and abiding faith of a remarkable man. Translated from the French by Marion Wiesel

The compassion of Reb Moshe-Leib, the vision of the Seer of Lublin, the wisdom of Reb Pinhas, the warmth of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the humor of Reb Naphtali–to their followers these sages appeared as kings, judges, and prophets. They communicated joy and wonder and fervor to the men and women who came to them in the depths of despair. They brought love and compassion to the persecuted Jews of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. For Jews who felt abandoned and forsaken by God, these Hasidic masters incarnated an irresistible call to help and salvation. The Rebbe combats sorrow with exuberance. He defeats resignation by exalting belief. He creates happiness so as not to yield to the sadness around him. He tells stories to escape the temptations of irreducible silence. It is Elie Wiesel’s unique gift to make the lives and tales of these great teachers as compelling now as they were in a different time and place. In the tradition of Hasidism itself, he leaves others to struggle with questions of justice, mercy, and vengeance, providing us instead with eternal truths and unshakable faith.

The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) A Play by Elie Wiesel Translated by Marion Wiesel Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown Afterword by Matthew Fox Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination. Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: “Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.” Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.

Atemlos, bewusst karg im Stil erzählt der Friedensnobelpreisträger seine Erfahrung als Kind in Auschwitz. Jede Zeile spricht uns unmittelbar an.

Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late. Elhanan''s story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another.

In this "powerful" (New York Times Book review) collection of personal essays and landmark speeches by "one of the great writers of our generation" (New Republic), Elie Wiesel weaves together reminiscences of his life before the Holocaust, his struggle to find meaning afterward, and the actions he has taken on behalf of others that have defined him as a leading advocate of humanity and have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."

Now in paperback, Wiesel’s newest novel “reminds us, with force, that his writing is alive and strong. The master has once again found a startling freshness.”—Le Monde des Livres A European expatriate living in New York, Doriel suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II only to die soon after in France in an accident, together with his father. Doriel was a hidden child during the war, and his knowledge of the Holocaust is largely limited to what he finds in movies, newsreels, and books. Doriel’s parents and their secrets haunt him, leaving him filled with longing but unable to experience the most basic joys in life. He plunges into an intense study of Judaism, but instead of finding solace, he comes to believe that he is possessed by a dybbuk. Surrounded by ghosts, spurred on by demons, Doriel finally turns to Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt, a psychoanalyst who finds herself particularly intrigued by her patient. The two enter into an uneasy relationship based on exchange: of dreams, histories, and secrets. And despite Doriel’s initial resistance, Dr. Goldschmidt helps bring him to a crossroads—and to a shocking denouement. “In its own high-stepping yet paradoxically heart-wracking way, [Wiesel’s novel] can most assuredly be considered beautiful (almost beyond belief).”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Gamaliel Friedman is only a child when his family flees Czechoslovakia in 1939 for the relative safety of Hungary. For him, it will be the beginning of a life of rootlessness, disguise, and longing. Five years later, in desperation, Gamaliel’s parents entrust him to a young Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. With his Jewish identity hidden, Gamaliel survives the war. But in 1956, to escape the stranglehold of communism, he leaves Budapest after painfully parting from Ilonka. Gamaliel tries, unsuccessfully, to find a place for himself in Europe. After a failed marriage, he moves to New York, where he works as a ghostwriter, living through the lives of others. Eventually he falls in with a group of exiles, including a rabbi––a mystic whose belief in the potential for grace in everyday life powerfully counters Gamaliel’s feelings of loss and dispossession. When Gamaliel is asked to help draw out an elderly, disfigured Hungarian woman who may be his beloved Ilonka, he begins to understand that a real life in the present is possible only if he will reconcile with his past.

Twenty years after he and his family were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel returned to his town in search of the watch—a bar mitzvah gift—he had buried in his backyard before they left.

From Elie Wiesel, a gripping novel of guilt, innocence, and the perilousness of judging both. A plane en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers: Claudia, who has left her husband and found new love; Razziel, a religious teacher who was once a political prisoner; Yoav, a terminally ill Israeli commando; George, an archivist who is hiding a Holocaust secret that could bring down a certain politician; and Bruce, a would-be priest turned philanderer. Their host—an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself simply the Judge—begins to interrogate them, forcing them to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces that one of them—the least worthy—will die. The Judges is a powerful novel that reflects the philosophical, religious, and moral questions that are at the heart of Elie Wiesel’s work.

A six-day series of interviews between Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and French journalist Michaël de Saint Cheron, Evil and Exile probes some of the most crucial and pressing issues facing humankind today. Having survived the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust, Wiesel remained silent for ten years before dedicating his life to the memory of this tragedy, witnessing tirelessly to remind an often indifferent world of its potential for self-destruction. Wiesel offers wise counsel in this volume concerning evil and suffering, life and death, chance and circumstance. Moreover, the dialogue evokes candid and often surprising responses by Wiesel on the Palestinian problem, Judeo-Christian relations, recent changes in the Soviet Union as well as insights into writers such as Kafka, Malraux, Mauriac, and Unamuno.

"If you do not take up this text to pray, take it as a book to be studied. Once you have read these stories, they will not leave you, for they are part of human history." (From the Introduction by Albert Friedlander). The Six Days of Destruction is a religious text for use in both Jewish and interfaith services for Yom Ha-Shoah; it also stands on its own as a work of great poignancy. The six stories were written by Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Elie Wiesel, with liturgies by Rabbi Albert Friedlander. The book opens with prefaces by Cardinal Basil Hume, Bishop Richard Harries and Lord Jakobovits, and is illustrated with a collection of drawings by inmates of the Nazi concentration camps, introduced by Elisabeth Maxwell and Roman Halter.

In the fall of 1965 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent a young journalist named Elie Wiesel to the Soviet Union to report on the lives of Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. “I would approach Jews who had never been placed in the Soviet show window by Soviet authorities,” wrote Wiesel. “They alone, in their anonymity, could describe the conditions under which they live; they alone could tell whether the reports I had heard were true or false—and whether their children and their grandchildren, despite everything, still wish to remain Jews. From them I would learn what we must do to help . . . or if they want our help at all.” What he discovered astonished him: Jewish men and women, young and old, in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vilna, Minsk, and Tbilisi, completely cut off from the outside world, overcoming their fear of the ever-present KGB to ask Wiesel about the lives of Jews in America, in Western Europe, and, most of all, in Israel. They have scant knowledge of Jewish history or current events; they celebrate Jewish holidays at considerable risk and with only the vaguest ideas of what these days commemorate. “Most of them come [to synagogue] not to pray,” Wiesel writes, “but out of a desire to identify with the Jewish people—about whom they know next to nothing.” Wiesel promises to bring the stories of these people to the outside world. And in the home of one dissident, he is given a gift—a Russian-language translation of Night, published illegally by the underground. “‘My God,’ I thought, ‘this man risked arrest and prison just to make my writing available to people here!’ I embraced him with tears in my eyes.”

A lecture held at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, June 1996. Discusses the importance of memory to human life. Unlike history, it has an ethical aspect; and it must be inclusive - of good and evil, the painful and the encouraging, Nazi crimes and those few who heroically resisted them. Points to the ghetto and concentration camp inmates who wrote journals, and to Dubnow who continued to write his history, so that we might remember. We should remember the Jews in the photographs - the old Jew whose beard is being cut off by laughing German soldiers, the starving children begging for bread. But as the generation of the Holocaust passes away, who will remember or want to remember? While Germany is now a praiseworthy democracy, there are troubling manifestations of insensitivity toward the Jewish past. Pp. 1-10 contain introductory remarks by Wolf Lepenies on the occasion of the lecture.

When the Six-Day War began, Elie Wiesel rushed to Israel. "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, the man who came to Jerusalem then came as a beggar, a madman, not believing his eyes and ears, and above all, his memory." This haunting novel takes place in the days following the Six-Day War. A Holocaust survivor visits the newly reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall he encounters the beggars and madmen who congregate there every evening, and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present. Weaving together myth and mystery, parable and paradox, Wiesel bids the reader to join him on a spiritual journey back and forth in time, always returning to Jerusalem.

Bears witness to the events and horrors of the Holocaust.

In this first volume of his two-volume autobiography, Wiesel takes us from his childhood memories of a traditional and loving Jewish family in the Romanian village of Sighet through the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the years of spiritual struggle, to his emergence as a witness for the Holocaust''s martyrs and survivors and for the State of Israel, and as a spokesman for humanity. With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs. "From the abyss of the death camps Wiesel has come as a messenger to mankind--not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement." --From the citation for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize

There are probably no two men of such stature who can speak to the Holocaust as Christian theologian Johann Baptist Metz, author of A Passion for God and Jewish writer, Nobel laureate and human rights activist, Elie Wiesel, author of Night. One was drafted into the German army at the age of fifteen; the other was interned at Auschwitz. Both came from upbringings of deep faith, only to have their lives broken by the horrors they witnessed during the war. Both share the sense that the Holocaust is a rift in history itself, after which nothing could ever be seen in the same way as before. Yet for both, there is hope ... "nonetheless."

Nobel Peace Prize–winner Elie Wiesel brings ancient religious leaders to literary life, framing his commentary with pressing and enduring questions as a survivor and witness to the Holocaust. Five Biblical Portraits represents an old-new approach to Jewish textual commentary. This sequel to Elie Wiesel’s Messengers of God continues the work done in that volume of bringing religious figures to life and studying their place both in the text and in our lives. Wiesel reflects on his own life as well as the tragedy of the Holocaust as he discusses each figure and adds personal framing and insight into the religious study. Through sensitive readings of the scriptures as well as the Talmudic and Hasidic sources, Wiesel illuminates Joshua, Elijah, Saul, Jeremiah, and Jonah. He seeks not simple answers but fully complex responses to the crucial questions of human suffering as he examines each religious figure in turn. Originally published in 1981, this new edition of Five Biblical Portraits includes a new text design, cover, and an introduction by Ariel Burger, which examines how Wiesel’s post-Holocaust Midrash teaches us not only how to read the Bible but also how to read the world.

Raphael Lipkin, a professor at New York''s Mountain Clinic psychiatric hospital, struggles to hide his own mental delusions and demons from his fellow staff.

As this concluding volume of his moving and revealing memoirs begins, Elie Wiesel is forty years old, a writer of international repute. Determined to speak out more actively for both Holocaust survivors and the disenfranchised everywhere, he sets himself a challenge: "I will become militant. I will teach, share, bear witness. I will reveal and try to mitigate the victims'' solitude." He makes words his weapon, and in these pages we relive with him his unstinting battles. We see him meet with world leaders and travel to regions ruled by war, dictatorship, racism, and exclusion in order to engage the most pressing issues of the day. We see him in the Soviet Union defending persecuted Jews and dissidents; in South Africa battling apartheid and supporting Mandela''s ascension; in Cambodia and in Bosnia, calling on the world to face the atrocities; in refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia as an emissary for President Clinton. He chastises Ronald Reagan for his visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg. He supports Lech Walesa but challenges some of his views. He confronts Francois Mitterrand over the misrepresentation of his activities in Vichy France. He does battle with Holocaust deniers. He joins tens of thousands of young Austrians demonstrating against renascent fascism in their country. He receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Through it all, Wiesel remains deeply involved with his beloved Israel, its leaders and its people, and laments its internal conflicts. He recounts the behind-the-scenes events that led to the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He shares the feelings evoked by his return to Auschwitz, by his recollections of Yitzhak Rabin, and by his memories of his own vanished family. This is the magnificent finale of a historic memoir.

From the Nobel laureate and author of the masterly Night, a deeply felt, beautifully written novel of morality, guilt, and innocence. Despite personal success, Yedidyah—a theater critic in New York City, husband to a stage actress, father to two sons—finds himself increasingly drawn to the past. As he reflects on his life and the decisions he’s made, he longingly reminisces about the relationships he once had with the men in his family (his father, his uncle, his grandfather) and the questions that remain unanswered. It’s a feeling that is further complicated when Yedidyah is assigned to cover the murder trial of a German expatriate named Werner Sonderberg. Sonderberg returned alone from a walk in the Adirondacks with an elderly uncle, whose lifeless body was soon retrieved from the woods. His plea is enigmatic: “Guilty . . . and not guilty.” These words strike a chord in Yedidyah, plunging him into feelings that bring him harrowingly close to madness. As Sonderberg’s trial moves along a path of dizzying yet revelatory twists and turns, Yedidyah begins to understand his own family’s hidden past and finally liberates himself from the shadow it has cast over his life. With his signature elegance and thoughtfulness, Elie Wiesel has given us an enthralling psychological mystery, both vividly dramatic and profoundly emotional.

"For centuries, Jews have remembered the Golem, a creature of clay said to have been given life by the mystical incantations of the mysterious Maharal, Rabbi Yehuda Loew, leader of the Jewish community of 16th-century Prague. Some versions have the Golem as a lovable, clumsy mute; others as a monster like Frankenstein''s who turned against his creator, giving a vivid warning against magic and the occult. In this beautiful book, Elie Wiesel has collected many of the legends associated with this enigmatic and elusive figure and retold them as seen through the eyes of a wizened gravedigger who claims to have witnessed as a child the numerous miracles that legend attributes to the Golem. ''I, Reuven, son of Yaakov,'' he begins, ''declare under oath that "Yossel the mute," the "Golem made of clay," deserves to be remembered by our people, our persecuted and assassinated, and yet immortal people. We owe it to him to evoke his fate with love and gratitude .... He was a savior, I tell you.'' Reuven''s Golem is no fool or monster, but a figure of intuition, intelligence, and compassion who may yet return, perhaps in our own generation, to protect the Jews from their enemies. Mark Podwal''s highly imaginative drawings recapture the mystery of Gothic Prague, and the elusive Golem is given a shape as the shadow of the Maharal. Thus, two remarkable artists have come together in the creation of a work of rare spiritual beauty which is also a triumph of the bookmaker''s art."--Dust jacket.

Grisha Kossover, arriving in Russia in 1972, twenty years after his father, poet Paltiel Kossover, was executed by Stalin, is finally able to read the written testament his parent left behind and finds that it illuminates the shadowed places of his own life.

Michael—a young man in his thirties, a concentration camp survivor—makes the difficult trip behind the Iron Curtain to the town of his birth in Hungary. He returns to find and confront “the face in the window”—the real and symbolic faces of all those who stood by and never interfered when the Jews of his town were deported. In an ironic turn of events, he is arrested and imprisoned by secret police as a foreign agent. Here he must confront his own links to humanity in a world still resistant to the lessons of the Holocaust.