lie Wiesel, who died on Saturday, wrote fifty-seven books, yet the obituaries and tributes refer to him more consistently as a witness than a writer. His moral authority, which he earned and sought, derived from his experience, not any literary virtuosity, though the spare, confessional prose of his most widely read books—his ability to remember suffered details, and describe their shock on a thinking, pious youth—gave his testimony popular momentum. “Night”—his early masterpiece from the fifties, which eventually sold in the millions—famously recounted how a child was hanged before all in Wiesel’s death camp, slowly suffocating, too light to break his own neck: “Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘. . . Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.’ ” In “One Generation After,” a memoir published in 1970, he writes of the former head of a yeshiva in Galicia, who bonded with him in Auschwitz. The teacher—who seemed to know the entire Talmud by heart—urged him to “preserve his soul” by studying with him:
“Isn’t the soul supposed to be immortal?” I asked innocently.
We were digging. He stopped, as if unwilling to hear his own words, and replied: “You will learn that this is neither the place nor the time to speak of immortality.” . . . In the end, resolution gave way and followed the body: weakened one like the other, one by the other.
A miserable crust of moldy bread came to contain more truth, more eternity than all the pages of all the books put together.
