Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence (Jewish Lives)

Joseph Berger, a former NYTimes reporter and a gifted writer, has written a fascinating biography of one of the past century’s most important and influential thinkers. Nobel Prize Winner Élie Wiesel was best known for having written the vivid, haunting book Night about his experiences as a teenager in several Nazi concentration camps. Night is one of the world’s best selling books and, in many US states, is on the high school curriculum. Wiesel also received a Nobel Prize for his international work in Holocaust remembrance.Berger writes about Wiesel with a warmth and skill that make reading nearly effortless. He certainly admired his subject. But he does not shy away from the warts - some less desirable aspects of Wiesel’s life, actions, or character. As such, the book is a wonderful look at a real-life person who became, more than any other individual, the voice of Holocaust survivors and the of reason in a crazy world. This book is an excellent biography and well worth reading.

I just turned the final page of this deeply moving biography of this great and tortured soul whom the author was privileged to know and write about. It would not suffice to say how much I "enjoyed" the book because enjoyment misses the mark. The central themes and many of the incidents portrayed are either too deep or too dark for that description. Let's say instead that I basked in the presence of the subject's magnetic, paradoxical and simply splendid personality. Joseph Berger performed the magic trick of the best biographers by creating the illusion through his limpid prose and uncompromising research that the reader comes to know Elie Wiesel as an old friend.

This concise biography of Elie Wiesel is not a great book, but it is on the right side of history. Which is to say that it opens a view onto Wiesel as a person without sensationalizing either his accomplishments or his faults. It does so while steering a central path between all the factions claiming him as their own and focusing on the known deeds of the man himself. As such it must contend with his secretiveness and likewise with a simple fact: until the very end of his life, his schedule was superhuman. It left smaller room for a personal life and so the impression is that of a workaholic who had he not been famous, would stand out as a classic Type A character of his generation. His wife Marion gets her due here as his right hand, but his son sometimes struggled, and Wiesel’s many friends, associates, and sporadic enemies saw a little of him at a time. And that may be just what we need to know, starting out: instead of convoluted speculation or encomiums on what Wiesel represented to others, we get a guide to the amount of schlepping that any more detailed biography will have to fit into its timeline. We also get an impression of a quirky and resilient man who could be difficult, while inspiring great loyalty in most of his intimates. His weary last years are handled with delicacy, and his devotion to Israel is presented with not uncritical respect. There is much more to be said about Wiesel as a writer, speaker, teacher, and activist and probably more to be said about him as a man. We can however take Berger’s tough-minded sketch as a guide to Wiesel’s official life and an intimation of the limits it imposed on him, keeping future biographies within rational parameters. And it gives a hint of what Cynthia Ozick has called elsewhere “the smell of a house”: an inner circle centered on a moving target, easier to love than to catch, though we end with the conviction that Marion Wiesel did both.

The book is an elegantly written tribute to Elie Wiesel, capturing his charm, wit, courage, and eloquence. It is both fair and balanced, humanizing Wiesel in ways I’ve never considered. Particularly interesting is the description of his life as a Hasidic student in a Hungarian town, and his brave public confrontation of Ronald Reagan about visiting a cemetery where murderous nazis are buried. Anyone interested in the enormous resilience of so many holocaust survivors after such suffering should read this biography.

Elie Wiesel was a brilliant, thoughtful man, who measured his actions by the moral code that he developed in the wake of his experiences during the Holocaust. The story of his life should be an inspiration to readers.

An inspiration…as He try’s to comes to grips with the question: How could a loving God allow this tragedy to happen….God gave man free Will is all we can acknowledge.

In general, this is a beautifully written, well-researched, thoughtful, and insightful biography of Elie Wiesel. Other than Wiesel's memoirs, this is the first biography of the distinguished teacher and storyteller since he passed away. As both a son of Holocaust survivors and a New York Times journalist, Joseph Berger is well qualified to write this biography. A few caveats: (1) Berger reports that when Wiesel was liberated, after not having eaten for six days, "he devoured the first can of food a solder threw at him, which was lard." However, Wiesel told my class that he was given non-kosher food, and when it touched his lips, he immediately passed out, so my understanding is that he did not actually eat this food. (2) Berger reports that 49 SS graves were discovered at the Bitburg cemetery. However, later reports said that two more SS graves were also found, making 51 SS graves at Bitburg in all. (3) Berger describes President Trump as "virulently anti-immigrant," but this misrepresents Trump's views: he welcomes legal immigrants, but supports enforcement of laws passed by Congress against illegal immigration. Surely Berger is aware of this distinction! (4) Wiesel seems to have often had Democrat leanings while regarding himself as non-political and being open to friendships with both Democrats and Republicans, which Berger seems to find morally troubling (??). Notwithstanding such caveats, I read this book with great interest and recommend it to others.

ACR’s customer review is a curiously spiteful take on an excellent book. It does a great disservice to the only biography of an important man, Elie Wiesel.