Word: wiesel
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...ELIE WIESEL 235 pages. Random House...
...observes Elie Wiesel, "feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbor." Analyzing like a good modern, revering like a good Jew, Wiesel portrays in these essays the majestic figures of the Old Testament rather as if he were writing a memoir about beloved but salty grandfathers and great-uncles from the East Side. Certainly Moses and Cain and Abel and even Adam seem as pungently real to him as the Jews he knew as a child in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In returning to the first Diaspora, the first murder, the first exile, Author Wiesel appears...
Approaching his Old Testament archetypes the way they approached God, more or less as equals-at least in matters of conversation-Wiesel does not hesitate to judge their characters. When push comes to shove (and it often does in the Old Testament), he tends to like his piety muscular. He goes so far as to prefer Esau to Jacob, referring to Jacob (as well as Adam) as "a weakling." What he interprets as Job's bland "resignation" to God he calls "an insult to man." Job, he remarks, "should have continued to protest...
...days. Only after Adam's expulsion from Eden, only after Joseph's imprisonment do they qualify for his term of respect: "a tragic figure." Happiness, he concludes, is more corrosive than misery. "Work," "strive," "suffer," "begin again" are the verbs of history and the concepts that inspire Wiesel. In the honorable survival of those who have believed, he finds the examples he needs in order to behave and survive today. Messengers of God, finally, is as simple and direct as that...
...Elie Wiesel New York City