Elie Wiesel is a Jewish writer and journalist. Here’s a brief excerpt from his biography.

Elie Wiesel, author of, among other books, Messengers of God, Souls on Fire, A Beggar in Jerusalem and Night, was born in the town of Sighet in Transylvania. He was still a child when he was taken from his home and sent to Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald concentration camps. (249)

Wiesel’s writing is devastating. His depiction of life is stamped with the horrors of his childhood. He writes with unflinching honesty, and his conclusions are anything but conventional. Take for example, his plea for the survivors of the holocaust:

I remember the spring of 1945. Rescued almost against their will, the few survivors realized how old and lonely they were. And how useless. Nothing but frightening ghosts. … Time does not heal all wounds; there are those that remain painfully open. … Ask them whether on the day of their liberation they experienced joy. Permit me to answer in their stead. It is a day I remember as an empty day. Empty of happiness, of feeling, of emotion. Empty of hope. We no longer had the strength even to weep. There were those who recited the Kaddish in an absent-minded sort of way, addressing an absent God on behalf of the absent. We were all absent. The dead and the survivors. (222–223)

Speaking of God, as I noted regarding Souls on Fire, Wiesel’s approach borders on the blasphemous. Dialogue with God places God on the stand—as Job did Millennia earlier. What else could you expect given what he and the other survivors had endured?

Wiesel’s writing is uncomfortable and true. The miscellany of dialogues, essays, letters, and short reflections in A Jew Today reveal a counterintuitive portrait of the Jewish psyche.

Wiesel, Elie. A Jew Today. Translated by Marion Wiesel. Vintage, 1979.