It was probably Night that Chris read, which is a decent enough book of its type, pitched, probably deliberately, at the level of a smart middle school reader. I agree with Chris, although it's fairly churlish to pick on this sort of literature, that it' not at the level of (say) Primo Levi's memoirs. But it must be unbelievably hard to write about this sort of thing. If you think about it, the great literature of the Stalin terror was mostly produced by non-zeks: Grossman's Life and Fate (the Great Soviet Novel), Akhmatova's heartbreaking Requiem, Nadheza Mandelstam's Hope and Against Hope. Yes, there's Solzhenytsn (Ivan Denisovitch, The First Circle), and the fellow who wrote the Kolyma memoir, but they're exceptions. Ginzberg's Into the Whirlwind is capable, but not great writing. And Solzhenytsn didn't see the worst of it. On reflection, I can't think of any first rate literature (including memoirs) that came from Holocaust survivors. Sach's O The Chimneys is probably the
closest. Now Wiesel seems to have learned nothing generalizable from his experience. He's the worst kind of Zionist Holocaust panderer, trading on his own nightmare to justify imposing horrors on others. Unfortunately, terrible suffering doesn't seem to teach the lesson you'd hope it would. Look at Solzhenytisn, for one.Akhmatova stayed decent, but she was a bystander, and she was rock-solid decent to start with. Wiesel, well, less said the better. His response is just what you'd expect given his record. jks
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema <crdbronx at erols.com> wrote:
I read one of Wiesel’s books once and was all ready to be sympathetic. How can you not be sympathetic to an account of Nazi concentration camp experience? Also, I had met him once and he seemed a sensitive and decent guy. But then I found the book disappointingly lightweight, in comparison with other books of its type.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20021223/e6094fbb/attachment.htm>