Dawn by Elie Wiesel

In this report you will see the comparisons between the novel Dawn and the life of Elie Wiesel, its author. The comparisons are very visible once you learn about Elie Wiesel s life.

Elie Wiesel was born on September28,1928 in the town of Hungary. Wiesel went through a lot of hard times as a youngster. In 1944, Wiesel was deported by the nazis and taken to the concentration camps. His family was sent to the town of Auschwitz. The father, mother, and sister of Wiesel died in the concentration camps. His older sister and himself were the only to survive in his family. After surviving the concentration camps, Wiesel moved to Paris, where he studied literature at the Sorbonne from 1948-1951. Since 1949 he has worked as a foreign correspondant and journalist at various times for the French, Jewish, periodical, L Arche, Tel-Aviv newspaper Yediot Ahronot, and the Jewish daily forward in New York City. Francois mauriac the Roman Catholic Nobelest and Nobel Laureate convinced Wiesel to speak about the Holocaust. Wiesel wrote an 800 page memoir which he later edited into a smaller version called "Night". In the mid 60 s Wiesel spoke out a lot about the Holocaust. Later on Wiesel emerged on as an important moral voice on Religious Issues and the Human Rights. Since 1988 Wiesel has been a professor at Boston University. Some of Wiesel s greatest novels has been "Night", "Dawn", "The Accident", "The Town Beyond The Wall", "The Gates Of The Forest", "The Fifth Son", "Legends Of Our Time", "One Generation After", "A Jew Today", "Souls On Fire", 5 Biblical Figures", and "Somewhere A Hero". Eventually Wiesel went on to win an Nobel Peace Prize.

The book Dawn concerns about the experiences of a survivor just after the World War who joins the Jewish Underground efforts to form an independent Israeli state. This novel is closely related to the one "Night". The Novel is about a character named Elisha who like Wiesel s life has to live through the concentration camps as a youngster growing up. Elisha was a young Israeli freedom fighter whose assignment was to kill the officer in reprisal for Britain s execution of a Jewish prisoner. She tried to form a free Israeli state, because she was tired of all of the killings going on in the concentration camps and so forth. She like many other Jews would have felt so much more comftorable with peace then all the deaths that were taking place. Throughout the book her voyage is to kill the man that killed a fellow Jewish prisoner for no apparent reason.

This book forwards attention to the life of a young Israeli who struggles through the Holocaust and wants to maintain peace throughout Israel . She is a "diamond in the rough" one could say. Her strong hope was not the same among her fellow Israeli s. The future looked dim and prospects were low. She had to convince the other and make them all strong in their conviction that their people would survive, and would get through this horrible time.

As a freedom fighter her main goal was to kill the officer who was responsible for the execution of Jewish prisoners. She stabbed him at the climax of the book. This added closure to her dreams and desires. She finally got what she wanted, the officer and a free Israeli state.

This book relates to Elie Wiesel s life because they both had to deal with and feel the struggles of the Holocaust.

Some reviewers consider his plots and characters more vehicle for rhetorical concerns and questions whether his fiction is art or polemick. His writings sustain the plea that death deserves no more victories and that evil should never have the last word. Most praise his sensitive insight into human behavior, his moral cander and his ability to objectively examine the holocaust and it s affect on modern jewish thought.

The novels of Weisel strike me a singularly impressive instance of how the creative imagination can surprise our expectation of what it s limits should be.

WORKS CITED

Barber, Lawrence "Critical Analysis of Elie Weisel"

Columbia house press 1989

Stein, Harold "Weisels Mastery"

Hoover Press 1991

Weisel, Elie "Dawn"

Clancy Publishing 1964