Yet, both his mother and father urged him to combine modern secular studies with his devotion to Talmud and Kabbalah. Of his mother, he says, "Her dream was to make me into a doctor of philosophy; I should be both a Ph.D. and a rabbi." [7] And his father made him learn modern Hebrew, a skill with which he was later able to make his livelihood as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper. Wiesel remembers his father, an "emancipated," if religious Jew, saying to him, "Listen, if you want to study Talmud, if you want to study Kabbalah, whatever you want to study is all right with me and I'll help you. But you must give me one hour a day for modern study." [8] In that hour a day Wiesel digested books which his father brought him on psychology, astronomy,
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In addition to his sixteen books, he has written a steady stream of essays and articles in a variety of publications, he has given numerous addresses and lectures, and he has been the subject of more than a few interviews and documentary films. Along with all this teaching, speaking, and writing, Wiesel has given generously of his time to a host of projects within the Jewish community. He is a man clearly possessed of a drive to justify every second of his existence.The witness begins with his testimony. In Wiesel's case this testimony concerns the Holocaust. He becomes a true writer when his testimony is a tale, a story. The art of the witness, then, is a rendering of testimony into story. The difficulty of this lies in the attempt to juxtapose past event with present situation in a story which is truly artistic: that is, not merely beautiful, but ethically significant. Wiesel is cut off from the victims whose tale he tells (he survived), and he is cut off from his readers (they have not seen what he has seen). The monumental task which Wiesel has attempted has been to bring together in his tales the disparate worlds of the Holocaust victims in the past and of his post-Holocaust readers in the present. Wiesel lives in both worlds, yet hardly belongs to either. His effort has been to force into an imaginative form, a story, these disjunctive worlds. The result has been something of a literary anomaly: "autobiographical"
In addition to his sixteen books, he has written a steady stream of essays and articles in a variety of publications, he has given numerous addresses and lectures, and he has been the subject of more than a few interviews and documentary films. Along with all this teaching, speaking, and writing, Wiesel has given generously of his time to a host of projects within the Jewish community. He is a man clearly possessed of a drive to justify every second of his existence.The witness begins with his testimony. In Wiesel's case this testimony concerns the Holocaust. He becomes a true writer when his testimony is a tale, a story. The art of the witness, then, is a rendering of testimony into story. The difficulty of this lies in the attempt to juxtapose past event with present situation in a story which is truly artistic: that is, not merely beautiful, but ethically significant. Wiesel is cut off from the victims whose tale he tells (he survived), and he is cut off from his readers (they have not seen what he has seen). The monumental task which Wiesel has attempted has been to bring together in his tales the disparate worlds of the Holocaust victims in the past and of his post-Holocaust readers in the present. Wiesel lives in both worlds, yet hardly belongs to either. His effort has been to force into an imaginative form, a story, these disjunctive worlds. The result has been something of a literary anomaly: "autobiographical"