8/28/2023 0 Comments Quotes from ida fink![]() Both look about them with fresh eyes, and what they see is the horror of a high European civilization, gone off the tracks of civilization into barbarism and cruelty. It is a trait he shares with the young narrator of Buchenwald, Imre Kertesz. That is why he sees the rawness of this life, without any ameliorating patina. Though a young studious boy of 12, he has not absorbed the conventional clichés of everyday life. Wiesel is an accurate and careful observer. Yes I saw it – saw it with my own eyes – those children in the flames.” He cannot deny what he has seen – and speaks to us directly: “(Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that?)” “They were burning something,” he tells us when he arrives, and discovers it is “Babies. ![]() What for example do the innumerable acts of cruelty in the ghettoization of Sighet signify? Or the horrible travel in cattle cars to Auschwitz of sixty to eighty people shoved in without food, water, and only a common bucket as a toilet – or the murder of the babies, mothers, and children?Ĭonfronted with a prisoner’s remark, “Poor devils, you’re going to the crematory,” Elie Wiesel discovers the reality of Auschwitz, which inverts the civilized conduct of his former world. His struggle to make sense of the Holocaust is part of his story, as we follow his psychic effort to understand. Like Eli Wiesel his experiences will lead Wiesel to ask the questions Job poses in the Biblical account. The questions Moshe, the Shammes addresses to Eliezer Wiesel turn out to be directed through the first person narrator at us, the readers. Many of the great Holocaust accounts – Primo Levi, Ida Fink, Imre Kertesz, Art Spiegelman among others – build their narratives by including how the story is told and Night is part of this genre, this kind of writing. What are the right questions becomes an overarching theme of this book and of Holocaust writing. This exchange hovers throughout the narrative of Night, as the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944 and the cooperation of the Arrow Cross Fascist Hungarian party, lead to the ghettoization of Sighet, and then the deportation of its Jews to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Buchenwald. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself.”īut the teaching does not end here, for Eliezer turns to Moshe and asks him “And why do you pray, Moshe?” the answer: “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” – (pp 2-3.) The young boy learns from Moshe that “every question” possesses a power that does “not lie in the answer.” Man raises himself toward God, Moshe adds, “ by the questions he asks.” And “Prayer 1 is the true dialogue, in which man questions God and God answers.” But, Moshe goes on, touching on themes central to the Book of Job that will haunt us as we read in Night of the terrible experiences these Jews undergo, “we don’t understand His answers. ![]() “Why do you weep when you pray?” Moshe asks Eliezer, “ as though he had known me a long time.” Though his father tells him he is too young to study the Cabala, citing Maimonides’s proscription against studying it before one has reached the maturity of thirty years of study - Eliezer discovers a teacher in Moshe the Shammes. Our twelve year-old narrator of Night and its protagonist, Eliezer Wiesel is a devout Jew, his intense piety evident in the tears that accompany his prayers. of the suffering of the divinity, of the Exile of Providence who, according to the cabbala, awaits his deliverance in that of man.” Moshe is a humble, well-liked member of the congregation, “a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, of seeming invisible.” And he is a Cabalist, who “used to sing, or rather, to chant. He is “a man of all work at a Hassidic synagogue,” in Sighet, Transylvania. Let us call him Moshe the Shammes, a better more Jewish word than Beadle. Night – the brief version we have in English translation from 1960, edited and rewritten from the almost 900 page Yiddish book Elie Wiesel wrote in 1954 and that was later published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, which you will hear more of in a later lecture by Naomi Seidman – Night begins in 1941 with the 12 year-old Elie Wiesel getting to know Moshe, the Beadle. Skylight Gallery Exhibit Area, Main Library 100 Larkin St, San Francisco For Opening of Buchenwald Exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library
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