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.
Bibliography
Barber, Lawrence "Critical Analysis of Elie Weisel" Columbia house
press 1989 Stein, Harold "Weisels Mastery" Hoover Press 1991 Weisel,
Elie "Dawn" Clancy Publishing 1964