And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969- (Memoirs of Elie Wiesel)

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 Trade Paperback edition

Raphael Lipkin is a man obsessed. He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York--not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest.A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin's Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him?

Publishers Weekly

Exploring the painful affinity between life and death, sanity and madness, Nobel Laureate Wiesel draws yet again on the experiences of the Holocaust to provide an answer. At the novel's center is Raphael Lipkin, a professor who, convinced he is going mad, seeks respite from his tortured imaginings in a mental clinic where he is both a temporary staff member, exploring the relationship between madness and prophecy, and a patient. Raphael's family has disappeared into the death camps, but although he speaks to them in his dreams, it is to his absent friend Pedro that he pours out his heart, for whom he searches among the madmen in the sanitarium. Guilt obsesses him, as it must all survivors, but the particularity of his guilt resides in Pedro, who gave his life or his sanity (which for Raphael are the same) in an effort to save Raphael's brother Yoel. Poignant though the recounted suffering must in fact have been, the canvas is too broad for any single player to kindle sympathy, the expression of emotion too overblown to bring tears. Torture, death, the violence of separation are recounted in cliche-ridden prose. Yet a lingering question manages to possess the reader: Is every survivor already half dead? (May)

The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)A Play by Elie WieselTranslated by Marion WieselIntroduction by Robert McAfee BrownAfterword 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. Raphael Lipkin is a man obsessed. He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New Yorknot as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest. A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalins Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him? A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphaels search to the Mountain Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring from the Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedros truth and the meaning of his own survival in a novel that penetrated the mysteries of good, evil, and madness. What does it mean to be a Jew today -- in America, in Europe, in Israel? Elie Wiesel, whom both the New York Times Book Review and Le Monde have called "one of the great writers of this generation," addresses himself to the question from the unique perspective of one whose whole life has been informed by the sense of his Jewishness -- from his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania, when he lived through Jewish history with each year's holidays and learned that "to be a Jew meant creating links, a network of continuity," through his adolescence in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where to be a Jew meant to be marked for extermination, to the present, when some people are already denying the reality of the Holocaust and when Israel inspires both ultimate fear and ultimate hope. This wide-ranging book weaves together all the periods of the author's life, presenting unforgettable portraits of some of the people he has known along the way who have, in different ways, been important to him. - Jacket flap. 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 RepublicElie 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

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.

Semi-autobiographical story of a young Jew who has survived the Holocaust and returned to his hometown behind the Iron Curtain.

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.

Based on Wiesel's own life, this is the story of a young Holocaust survivor who returns to his hometown after the liberation, seeking to understand the mystery of what he calls "the face in the window"--The symbol of all those who just stood by and watched as innocent men, women, and children were led to the slaughter A Drama Set In A Medieval Village Where Three Itinerant Jewish Actors Put God On Trial To Answer For His Silence During A Pogrom Considers Post-holocaust Issues. By Elie Wiesel ; Translated By Marion Wiesel ; Introduction By Robert Mcafee Brown ; Afterword By Matthew Fox. Includes Bibliographical References. Michael, a concentration camp survivor, returns to the town of his birth in Hungary to find and confront those people who stood by and never interfered when the Nazis deported the Jews, and finds himself arrested and jailed as a foreign agent The final volume of Elie Weisel's memoirs, discussing his life and actions since 1969 when he made the decision to become a militant advocate for Holocaust survivors and the disenfranchised throughout the world Wiesel's essays range from memories of his childhood in Poland and first awareness of what it means to be Jewish to a tribute to Jerusalem and an open letter to a Palestinian friend on the issue of Zionism Translation of: Le crepuscule, au loin. Raphael Lipkin's fruitless search for Pedro, decades after the war, brings him to a clinic where he encounters men whose delusions spring from the Bible. Story based on Wiesel's own life in which a young Holocaust survivor returns to his hometown, seeking to understand the mystery of those who stood by and watched. 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