![]() Whereas Anne Frank told the story of a young girl in a world rapidly approaching apocalypse - a catastrophe that, after the diary’s conclusion, would claim her life as well - Night actually takes place in the camps themselves, grappling with their horror directly. American readers could not yet comprehend what it was that the author had survived, much less what it meant.ĭespite the success of The Diary of Anne Frank, originally published in the United States in 1952, Night was rejected by nearly all of the American publishers that Elie Wiesel’s agent, Georges Borchardt, also a Holocaust survivor, had approached in the late 1950s. There were no departments of Holocaust studies at American universities, and there were no proliferation of books, histories, and films to grapple with a chapter of history that would soon be understood as modernity’s darkest.Ī short memoir by an obscure, 30-year-old Franco-Romanian survivor - originally written in Yiddish, then translated into French - was thus a difficult sell. In the late 1950s, there was not yet a name for the orchestrated murder of six million European Jews. ![]() “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s Enduring TestimonyĮlie Wiesel’s Night - brief and arresting - was one of the first ways America would learn about the Holocaust.Īlthough today the book is a universal fixture on school curricula and even a former Oprah’s Book Club selection, it was actually a text that struggled to find a publisher - and, more importantly, an audience - when it was written.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |