The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day [Paperback]

Elie Wiesel (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 15, 2008

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1958, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel writes of their battle for survival and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day. In the short novel Dawn (1960), a young man who has survived World War II and settled in Palestine joins a Jewish underground movement and is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage. In Day (previously titled The Accident, 1961), Wiesel questions the limits of conscience: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life despite their memories? Wiesel’s trilogy offers insights on mankind’s attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wiesel has taken his own anguish and imaginatively metamorphosed it into art." --Curt Leviant, Saturday Review

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; First Edition Thus edition (April 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809073641
• ISBN-13: 978-0809073641
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Jewish

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 72 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotional, Eloquent, And Largely Without Hope August 16, 2000

By Skylar Hamilton Burris

Format:Paperback

This collection consists of a biography and two novels by Elie Wiesel, who survived the horror of the concentration camps in World War II.

Dawn:

Dawn is perhaps the most thought-provoking and reflective of all of Elie Wiesel's novels. It is a beautifully written but disturbing novel about an Israeli terrorist waiting to assassinate a British officer in retaliation for the hanging of an Israeli. This novel inspires a great deal of thought about stopping violence with violence and hate with hate. When the nation of Israel was established after World War II, for the first time in centuries, the Jews were not trying to appease their opressors, but they were fighting back, and fighting effectively. Reflecting on the persecution the Jews have suffered, the young assassin Elisha says: "Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity of the art of hate." However, Elisha cannot make himself hate his enemey, as much as he desires to. The novel ultimately suggests that hatred is not the answer, that it must be fought, or man will be lost. Wiesel asks the poignant question, "Where is God to be found? In suffering or rebellion? When is a man most truly a man? When he submits or when he refuses?"

Night:

Night is a powerful, beautifully written autobiography of a concentration camp survivor. Elie Wiesel deals with his loss of faith during the holocaust, and relives the horrors of the concentration camp. Perhaps most importantly, he shows how such a life affected the people in the camps--how it changed many of them into something less than human. The question of injustice is indeed an unsettling one, but Wiesle's loss of faith--and the seeming impossibility (at the end of the book) of his ever regaining it--is deeply saddening.

The Accident:

Wiesel's writing style makes this novel, a mixture of biography and fiction, interesting to read. The story itself, however, is often obscure and stubbornly depressing. The narrator of the novel refuses to admit any happiness to his life, even when it is quite possible to do so. The Accident is the most consistently pessimistic of Wiesel's three novels, and the least thought-provoking, but still well worth reading.

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Night October 7, 2008

By Steve Christensen

Format:Paperback

Night is a painful and harrowing story about the madness and the evil that darkened Europe during the Second World War. Elie's story begins in Transylvania in a small Jewish neighborhood where Elie and his family live, unknowingly, on the brink of terror.

Elie, his family, and community are captured, shuttled into railroad cars, and transported to Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's largest concentration camp. So quickly turns the fate of Elie and his family that they disbelieve their circumstances even as they witness people being conducted en masse to gas chambers and crematoriums. The weak are killed. The strong become industrial slaves, entitling them only to hope for another day and a slower death.

Elie survives Auschwitz and Buchenwald, outliving both his mother and his sister. But Elie still has his father. Sensitive and intuitive, he notices that many fathers die after losing their loved ones. Elie realizes that if he were to die, his father would soon follow. Elie tells himself that he must live in order to give his father hope for living.

Elie does eventually live to see his father die in an infirmary, emaciated, exhausted, beaten, spiritless, and vulnerable like a child.

While his father's health is still in decline, Elie daily brings half his ration of bread to him, but that would not save his father from the darkness. A German soldier beats the last bit of life out of his father while he lay prostrate on the edge of death. "Elie," his father exhaled with barely the strength to whisper his son's name as his last word. Elie, motionless, unable to utter the words in his throat, confronts the guilt of being unable to help his father. How could he allow the soldier to beat his dying father? Why was he too afraid to cry out to answer his father's call? So helpless against the growing darkness.

Elie is most vulnerable when contemplating a world without God where darkness prevails. How can we, he asks, witness thousands burned in crematoriums or children being shot, thrown into a pit, and buried without losing our belief in a loving God? How can God himself ignore such evil? Where can we find a place in such a world for the Torah, the Kabala, and belief?

Yet, in a world hostile to belief and hostile to life, Elie witnesses and shows us himself that hope and faith do still sprout up like grass through cracks in the sidewalk, or, more appropriately, like moonlight through cracks in the curtain. The Night is dark, but not pitch-black where yet lives one sensitive soul.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Outstanding Trilogy February 1, 2004

By Randy Keehn VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its' parts. Although all three books are very good to excellent, the way they fit together creates an excellent story from beginning to end. We start with "Night" which creates the understanding of the Holocaust through the perceptive eyes and ears of the youthful story teller. We then move to the book "Dawn" in which we find the main character as a young man who is involved in a moral dilemna. How he resolves the dilemna makes him realize that there is evil in all of us. His attempt to rationalize his actions are not sufficient to redeem himself in his own mind. We finish up with "The Accident" where we find the main character as a middle-aged man whose anger at the world makes him incapable of love. Certainly all that has preceded in his life helps us to understand his feelings but his anger is uncompromising and a dead end in and of itself. The problem resolves itself in a solution that brings an impressive closure to essentially all three books.

As a matter of clarification, each novel is a seperate story in itself. There is no "common Character" to all the novels. However, we get a sense that this all happens to one person. This is how well these stories fit together. Essentially, these works would appear to be autobiographical which adds to their meaning. Although Wiesel writes extensively about the Holocaust, there is certainly a special common thread to these stories. Read all three and make sure you read them in their proper order. Despite their brevity, it is as good an overall explantion, evaluation and summation of the Holocaust as you will find.