Elie Wiesel Books In Order

Night Trilogy Books In Order

  1. Night (1960)
  2. Dawn (1961)
  3. The Accident (1962)

Novels

  1. The Town Beyond the Wall (1964)
  2. The Gates of the Forest (1966)
  3. A Beggar in Jerusalem (1970)
  4. The Oath (1970)
  5. The Testament (1981)
  6. The Golem (1983)
  7. The Fifth Son (1985)
  8. Twilight (1988)
  9. Forgotten (1990)
  10. The Judges (2002)
  11. The Time of the Uprooted (2005)
  12. A Mad Desire to Dance (2009)
  13. The Sonderberg Case (2010)
  14. Hostage (2012)

Plays

  1. Zalmen, or the Madness of God (1975)
  2. Zalman Or the Madness of God (1978)
  3. The Trial of God (1979)

Non fiction

  1. The Jews of Silence (1966)
  2. Legends of Our Time (1968)
  3. One Generation After (1970)
  4. Souls On Fire (1972)
  5. Messengers of God (1976)
  6. A Jew Today (1978)
  7. Four Hasidic Masters (1978)
  8. Five Biblical Portraits (1981)
  9. Somewhere a Master (1982)
  10. The Six Days of Destruction (1988)
  11. Against Silence (1988)
  12. A Journey of Faith (1990)
  13. Evil and Exile (1990)
  14. From the Kingdom of Memory (1990)
  15. Sages and Dreamers (1991)
  16. In Dialog and Dilemma With Elie Wiesel (1991)
  17. Passover Haggadah (1993)
  18. Telling the Tale (1993)
  19. All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995)
  20. Memoir in Two Voices (1996)
  21. And the Sea Is Never Full (1999)
  22. Conversations with Elie Wiesel (2001)
  23. After the Darkness (2002)
  24. Wise Men and Their Tales (2003)
  25. Rashi (2009)
  26. Open Heart (2012)

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Elie Wiesel Books Overview

Night

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Na*zi death camps. This new translation by Marion Weisel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in the substantive new preface, Elie Wiesel reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Dawn

‘The author has built knowledge into artistic fiction.’ The New York Times Book Review Elisha is a young Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and an Israeli freedom fighter in British controlled Palestine; John Dawson is the captured English officer he will murder at dawn in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The night long wait for morning and death provides Dawn, Elie Wiesel’s ever more timely novel, with its harrowingly taut, hour by hour narrative. Caught between the manifold horrors of the past and the troubling dilemmas of the present, Elisha wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and ultimately God as he waits for the appointed hour and his act of assassination. Dawn is an eloquent meditation on the compromises, justifications, and sacrifices that human beings make when they murder other human beings.

The Accident

‘Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man.’ The New York Times Book Review
The publication of Day restores Elie Wiesel’s original title to the novel initially published in English as The Accident and clearly establishes it as the powerful conclusion to the author s classic trilogy of Holocaust literature, which includes his memoir Night and novel Dawn. In Night it is the I who speaks, writes Wiesel. In the other two, it is the I who listens and questions.
In its opening paragraphs, a successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps off a New York City curb and into the path of an oncoming taxi. Consequently, most of Wiesel s masterful portrayal of one man s exploration of the historical tragedy that befell him, his family, and his people transpires in the thoughts, daydreams, and memories of the novel s narrator. Torn between choosing life or death, Day again and again returns to the guiding questions that inform Wiesel s trilogy: the meaning and worth of surviving the annihilation of a race, the effects of the Holocaust upon the modern character of the Jewish people, and the loss of one s religious faith in the face of mass murder and human extermination.

A Beggar in Jerusalem

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.

The Oath

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.

The Testament

On August 12, 1952, Russia’s greatest Jewish writers were secretly executed by Stalin. In this remarkable blend of history and imagination, Paltiel Kossover meets the same fate but, unlike his real life counterparts, he is permitted to leave a written testament. From a Jewish boyhood in pre revolutionary Russia, Paltiel traveled down a road that embraced Communism, only to return to Russia and discover a Communist Party that had become his mortal enemy. Two decades later, Paltiel’s son, Grisha, reads this precious record of his father’s life and finds that it illuminates the shadowed planes of his own. Passionate and fierce, this story of a father’s legacy to his son revisits some of the most dramatic events of our century, and confirms yet again Elie Wiesel’s stature as ‘a writer of the highest moral imagination’ San Francisco Chronicle.

The Fifth Son

When a Holocaust survivor’s son discovers that his brooding father has been haunted for years by his role in the murder of a brutal SS officer just after the war, the son also discovers that the Na*zi is still alive. What begins as a quest for his father’s love becomes a reenactment of the past, as the son sets out to complete his father’s act of revenge. An unforgettable novel by the Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author Elie Weisel.

Twilight

Searching for the friend who saved him during the Holocaust, a man is compelled to question the very meaning of survival, in a story of memory, loss, and madness that reflects the history of the twentieth century.

Forgotten

A profoundly moving novel about a Holocaust survivor’s struggle to remember both the heroic and the shameful events of his past, and about his American born son’s need to assimilate his father’s life into his own. ‘A book of shattering force that offers a message of urgency to a world under the spell of trivia and the tyranny of amnesia.’ Chicago Tribune Book World.

The Judges

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. From the Hardcover edition.

The Time of the Uprooted

From Elie Wiesel, a profoundly moving novel about the healing power of compassion. 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, he survives the war, but in 1956, to escape the stranglehold of communism, he leaves Budapest after painfully parting with Ilonka. He settles in Vienna, then Paris, and finally, after a failed marriage, in New York, where he works as a ghostwriter, living through the lives of others. Eventually, he falls in with a group of exiles: a Spanish Civil War veteran, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, a victim of Stalinism, a former Israeli intelligence agent, and 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 is barely able to communicate but 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. Aching, unsentimental, deeply affecting, and thought provoking, The Time of the Uprooted is the work of a master.

A Mad Desire to Dance

From Elie Wiesel, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of our fiercest moral voices, a provocative and deeply thoughtful new novel about a life shaped by the worst horrors of the twentieth century and one man’s attempt to reclaim happiness. Doriel, a European expatriate living in New York, suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II only to die in an accident, together with his father, soon after. Doriel was a child during the war, and his knowledge of the Holocaust is largely limited to what he finds in movies, newsreels, and books but it is enough. 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. Th r se 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. Despite Doriel s initial resistance, Dr. Goldschmidt helps to bring him to a crossroads and to a shocking denouement. In Doriel s journey into the darkest regions of the soul, Elie Wiesel has written one of his most profoundly moving works of fiction, grounded always by his unparalleled moral compass.

The Sonderberg Case

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.

The Trial of God

Set in a medieval European village where three itinerant Jewish actors put God on trial to answer for His silence during a pogrom, a powerful drama considers historical and especially post Holocaust issues surrounding faith.

The Jews of Silence

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.

Legends of Our Time

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

One Generation After

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.

Souls On Fire

In Souls On Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, Elie Wiesel reenters, like an impassioned pilgrim, the universe of Hasidism. ‘When I am asked about my Jewish affiliation, I define myself as a Hasid, ‘ writes the author. ‘Hasid I was, Hasid I remain.’ Yet 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.’ As a critic appearing on the front page of The New York Times Book Review has written, ‘The judgment has been offered before: Elie Wiesel is one of the great writers of this generation.’ 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.’

A Jew Today

In this powerful and wide ranging collection of essays, letters and diary entries, weaving together all the periods of the author’s life from his childhood in Transylvania to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Paris, New York 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.

Somewhere a Master

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 Six Days of Destruction

This book honors Yom Ha shoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day.

A Journey of Faith

A provocative and moving dialogue between two men of faith, two voices of conscience, about the most profound events and issues of our time, based upon, but expanded from, a WNBC TV broadcast. A book that all who cherish the essential goodness in man will want to read and reread and give to friends and loved ones.

Evil and Exile

Two interviews have been added to this second edition, in which Wiesel discusses religious faith in the face of evil and love, the moral responsibilities of Jews and non Jews, the plight of the exiled, Jewish Christian relations, antisemitism, and mystery and the ineffable.

From the Kingdom of Memory

‘One of the great writers of our generation’ The New Republic weaves together memories of his life before the Holocaust and his great struggle to find meaning afterwards. Included are Wiesel’s landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the trial of Klaus Barbie and his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

Sages and Dreamers

The Nobel Peace Prize winning author of more than 30 books, including the bestselling Souls on Fire and, most recently, The Forgotten, offers a collection of 25 portraits of men and women of the Bible, the Talmud, and the Hasidic tradition. Sages and Dreamers is a moving and revealing reminder of our common history, beliefs, and aspirations. Glossary.

Passover Haggadah

With this Passover Haggadah, Elie Wiesel and his friend Mark Podwal invite you to join them for the Passover Seder the most festive event of the Jewish calendar. Read each year at the Seder table, the Haggadah recounts the miraculous tale of the liberation of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, with a celebration of prayer, ritual, and song. Wiesel and Podwal guide you through the Haggadah and share their understanding and faith in a special illustrated edition that will be treasured for years to come. Accompanying the traditional Haggadah text which appears here in an accessible new translation are Elie Wiesel’s poetic interpretations, reminiscences, and instructive retellings of ancient legends. The Nobel laureate interweaves past and present as the symbolism of the Seder is explored. Wiesel’s commentaries may be read aloud in their entirety or selected passages may be read each year to illuminate the timeless message of this beloved book of redemption. This volume is enhanced by more than fifty original drawings by Mark Podwal, the artist whom Cynthia Ozick has called a ‘genius of metaphor through line.’ Podwal’s work not only complements the traditional Haggadah text, as well as Wiesel’s poetic voice, but also serves as commentary unto itself. The drawings, with their fresh juxtapositions of insight and revelation, are an innovative contribution to the long tradition of Haggadah illustration.

Telling the Tale

This book is a tribute to Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, that features essays and poems by twelve renowned scholars, artists, and commentators. Exclusively for this book, Elie Wiesel has contributed seven original works previously unpublished in English: a sequence of three poems, two interviews, and three personal reflections on the things he most values.

All Rivers Run to the Sea

From his early years with his loving Jewish family to the horrors of Auschwitz to his life as a Nobel Prize winning novelist, Elie Wiesel tells his story. Passionate and poignant, All Rivers Run to the Sea is an unforgettable book of love and rage, doubt and faith, despair and trust, and ultimately, of wisdom. of photos.

And the Sea Is Never Full

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.

Conversations with Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel has given hundreds of interviews. Yet his fame as a human rights advocate often directs such conversations toward non literary issues. Indeed, many of Wiesel’s questioners barely address the writer’s role that has defined him since the 1950s.

Unlike previous volumes in which he speaks with interviewers, Elie Wiesel: Conversations collects interviews which set in relief the writer at work. This book focuses on Wiesel the literary artist instead of Wiesel the Holocaust survivor or the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Beyond highlighting Wiesel’s literary significance, these interviews also correct many faulty assumptions about his achievement. Few American readers know that he writes in French, that he has been favorably compared to Andr Malraux and Albert Camus. Not many realize that the Holocaust has been the subject of only a few of his forty books. Particularly in his nonfiction, Wiesel’s scope is wide, addressing Jewish life in all its religious and historical complexity.

Though most of Wiesel’s books do not focus on the Holocaust, they are written against the backdrop of what he has come to term ‘The Event.’ Always, the presence of Auschwitz can be felt, always the author ‘lives in the shadows of the flames that once illuminated and blinded him.’

These interviews are reminders that the writing life is both solitary and public, interior and social. The writer must venture beyond his study and speak out against the world’s traumas and outrages.

Robert Franciosi is an associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich. He is the editor of Good Morning: A Holocaust Memoir. His work has appeared in American Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Modern Jewish Studies, and the William Carlos Williams Review.

After the Darkness

A poignant, powerful distillation of the Holocaust experience from the internationally acclaimed writer and Nobel laureate. In his first book, Night, Elie Wiesel described his concentration camp experience, but he has rarely written directly about the Holocaust since then. Now, as the last generation of survivors is passing and a new generation must be introduced to mankind’s darkest hour, Wiesel sums up the most important aspects of Hitler s years in power and provides a fitting memorial to those who suffered and perished. He writes about the creation of the Third Reich, Western acquiescence, the gas chambers, and memory. He criticizes Churchill and Roosevelt for what they knew and ignored, and he praises little known Jewish heroes. Augmenting Wiesel s text are testimonies from survivors, who recall, among other moments and events: the establishment of the Nurembourg Laws, Kristallnacht, transport to the camps, and liberation. With this book richly illustrated with 45 photographs from the U.S. Holocaust Museum Wiesel proves once again the ineluctable importance of bearing witness.

Wise Men and Their Tales

In Wise Men and Their Tales, a master teacher gives us his fascinating insights into the lives of a wide range of biblical figures, Talmudic scholars, and Hasidic rabbis. The matriarch Sarah, fiercely guarding her son, Isaac, against the negative influence of his half brother Ishmael; Samson, the solitary hero and protector of his people, whose singular weakness brought about his tragic end; Isaiah, caught in the middle of the struggle between God and man, his messages of anger and sorrow counterbalanced by his timeless, eloquent vision of a world at peace; the saintly Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who by virtue of a lifetime of good deeds was permitted to enter heaven while still alive and who tried to ensure a similar fate for all humanity by stealing the sword of the Angel of Death. Elie Wiesel tells the stories of these and other men and women who have been sent by God to help us find the godliness within our own lives. And what interests him most about these people is their humanity, in all its glorious complexity. They get angry at God for demanding so much, and at people, for doing so little. They make mistakes. They get frustrated. But through it all one constant remains their love for the people they have been charged to teach and their devotion to the Supreme Being who has sent them. In these tales of battles won and lost, of exile and redemption, of despair and renewal, we learn not only by listening to what they have come to tell us, but by watching as they live lives that are both grounded in earthly reality and that soar upward to the heavens. From the Hardcover edition.

Rashi

From Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, comes a magical book that introduces us to the towering figure of Rashi Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki the great biblical and Talmudic commentator of the Middle Ages. Wiesel brilliantly evokes the world of medieval European Jewry, a world of profound scholars and closed communities ravaged by outbursts of anti Semitism and decimated by the Crusades. The incomparable scholar Rashi, whose phrase by phrase explication of the oral law has been included in every printing of the Talmud since the fifteenth century, was also a spiritual and religious leader: His perspective, encompassing both the mundane and the profound, is timeless. Wiesel’s Rashi is a heartbroken witness to the suffering of his people, and through his responses to major religious questions of the day we see still another side of this greatest of all interpreters of the sacred writings. Both beginners and advanced students of the Bible rely on Rashi s groundbreaking commentary for simple text explanations and MidRashic interpretations. Wiesel, a descendant of Rashi, proves an incomparable guide who enables us to appreciate both the lucidity of Rashi s writings and the milieu in which they were formed.

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