The Jews of Silence - A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry

Zusatztext “One passionate outcry! both in content and in style.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer ! The New York Times Book Review “While all religions survive precariously in the Soviet Union! Judaism struggles against singular oppression . . . Wiesel does not portray a self-pitying Soviet Jewry. Rather! he stresses the indomitable strength of their belief. His most moving images focus on the students! who by all laws of logic should have spiritually vanished into the mainstream of Mother Russia long ago.” — The Christian Science Monitor Informationen zum Autor ELIE WIESEL  was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The author of more than fifty internationally acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, he was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University for forty years. Wiesel died in 2016. Klappentext In the fall of 1965 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent a young journalist named Elie Wiesel to the Soviet Union to report on the lives of Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. "I would approach Jews who had never been placed in the Soviet show window by Soviet authorities," wrote Wiesel. "They alone, in their anonymity, could describe the conditions under which they live; they alone could tell whether the reports I had heard were true or false-and whether their children and their grandchildren, despite everything, still wish to remain Jews. From them I would learn what we must do to help . . . or if they want our help at all." What he discovered astonished him: Jewish men and women, young and old, in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vilna, Minsk, and Tbilisi, completely cut off from the outside world, overcoming their fear of the ever-present KGB to ask Wiesel about the lives of Jews in America, in Western Europe, and, most of all, in Israel. They have scant knowledge of Jewish history or current events; they celebrate Jewish holidays at considerable risk and with only the vaguest ideas of what these days commemorate. "Most of them come [to synagogue] not to pray," Wiesel writes, "but out of a desire to identify with the Jewish people-about whom they know next to nothing." Wiesel promises to bring the stories of these people to the outside world. And in the home of one dissident, he is given a gift-a Russian-language translation of Night, published illegally by the underground. "'My God,' I thought, 'this man risked arrest and prison just to make my writing available to people here!' I embraced him with tears in my eyes." INTRODUCTION     Their eyes—I must tell you about their eyes. I must begin with that, for their eyes precede all else, and everything is comprehended within them. The rest can wait. It will only confirm what you already know. But their eyes—their eyes flame with a kind of irreducible truth, which burns and is not consumed. Shamed into silence before them, you can only bow your head and accept the judgment. Your only wish now is to see the world as they do. A grown man, a man of wisdom and experience, you are suddenly impotent and terribly impoverished. Those eyes remind you of your childhood, your orphan state, cause you to lose all faith in the power of language. Those eyes negate the value of words; they dispose of the need for speech.     Since my return I have often been asked what I saw in the Soviet Union, what it was I found there. My answer is always the same: eyes. Only eyes, nothing else. Kolkhozi, steel works, museums, theaters . . . nothing. Only eyes. Is that all? That is enough. I visited many cities, was shown what a tourist is shown, and have forgotten it all. But still the eyes which I cannot forget pursue me; there is no escaping them. Everything I have I would give them, as random for my soul.   I saw thousands, tens of thousands of eyes: in streets and hotels, subways, concert halls, in synagogues—especially in synagogues. Wherever I went t...

Product details

• Authors: Elie Wiesel
• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.01.1987
• EAN: 9780805208269
• ISBN: 978-0-8052-0826-9
• No. of pages: 144
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 10 mm
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories