Night: Page One

• In Event: “Forging an Intergenerational Holocaust Testimony”

Abstract

Elie Wiesel’s Night is one of the most widely read and perhaps least understood of all the Holocaust memoirs. He once said to me that the first sentence of a novel should contain the whole novel. Just so, the first page of Night contains the keys to the memoir, if not to the entire corpus of his writings. This paper identifies and explains seven allusions to Jewish tradition that appear on page one of Night and are crucial to an understanding of Wiesel’s memoir, his testimony, and his art as a first generation survivor. The seven allusions to be explicated here are: the Hasidic house of prayer, the divine suffering, the Shekhinah, the Redemption, the Kabbalah, the Talmud, and the destruction of the Temple. I argue that the significance of this explication extends to understanding the memoir’s canonical, foundational, and global place as influencing how we read first generation survivor testimony. The seven allusions signify fundamental categories of the Jewish tradition that informs Wiesel’s response to the Holocaust. While these categories are based in Jewish religious teachings, they extend to their importance to Nazi anti-Jewish ideology, policies, and practices. Indeed, in his remembrance and testimony as a first-generation survivor, Wiesel turns to the very teachings that the Nazis systematically targeted for annihilation. Without this testimony to the millennial Jewish tradition that the Nazis set out to destroy in what Wiesel called “a war against memory,” there can be no succeeding generations of remembrance—generations of trauma, yes, but not of remembrance. For the meanings of Holocaust memory will have been lost.

Author

• David Alan Patterson, University of Texas at Dallas