Elie Wiesel's Night and Day

I have many favorite genres for books but desire above all else, to seek literature and writing that works for the world, that tells a necessary and untold story that remains with me, that changed my view and urges me to work harder for others, for myself and for our shared surroundings. Literature that dives into culture and religion will always be favored. I was attracted to Nobel Peace prize recipient and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel's trilogy of Night, Dawn and Day but as my local library held only Night and Day, I skipped Dawn and found both to be extraordinary.

I preferred Night of the two. I had greatly enjoyed the Diary of Anne Frank earlier this year and found Night to be a companion of sorts, the latter part. Wiesel's descriptive writing, short sentences and autobiography of his experiences in Auschwitz and later, Buchenwald as a Romanian-Jewish teenager during World War II were powerful and can't thoroughly be explained or appreciated here.

I've read many powerful endings to pieces of writing in journalism, poetry and fiction, and think that any ending that carries a lasting effect of any sort is powerful writing. When I finished Night about a month ago I felt immediately then, and remain confident now, that Wiesel's ending lines were the most lasting I had ever read in literature. I listened to the book as an audio-book while driving and I can remember so vividly exactly where I was and what I watched as I heard his last two sentences. Describing seeing himself in a mirror for the first time in years two weeks after being liberated from Buchenwald, Wiesel writes,

"From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me."

Day was far more fictional in comparison to Night although select themes did appear to arrive from Wiesel's own life as he writes in the first person of a Holocaust survivor living in New York and contemplating the existence and power of God in the modern day. I felt that Wiesel closely examined the Jewish faith against the backdrop of a city of immigrants, and the emptiness the main character experiences in his relationship with God as he works to understand the injustices seared into his memory from half a world away decades earlier. Day was far less direct than Night, speaking instead to general and familiar issues of memory, loss, and recovery after tragedy, yet in the context and frame of a tragedy that few will ever experience or understand.