Reading bliss at Border’s and Barnes & Noble

Edward Hallowell's Shine is one of several books I read yesterday.

I’ll admit it.  I can be a boring date.

When Saturday night rolls around, I’m generally, if not always, up for dinner and a few hours reading away at a local bookstore.

While Dunreith and I very much enjoy frequenting The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, last night we were carless and decided to go in the afternoon to Border’s, and, after a tasty meal at Dixie Kitchen, to Barnes & Noble in downtown Evanston.

At Border’s, I finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s exquisite Half of a Yellow Sun.  I wrote about this book earlier in the week and don’t want to give away the plot, but will say that it provides an unflinching look at the war in Biafra from 1967 to 1970.

In the book’s afterword, Adichie explains that her parents and other family members lived through the devastating conflict, which saw an estimated 1 million people die from death, disease and starvation.

“May we always remember,” she writes in the afterword’s final words before supplying a list of books she consulted for the writing of Half of a Yellow Sun.

Thanks to her magnificent work, that permanent memory is more likely.

For those who want to see and hear the 2008 MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winner, here is her Ted talk in which she draws on her childhood reading experience to discusses the danger of a single story.

I didn’t want to launch right away into another novel, so instead picked through the new arrivals and ended up reading the following books, each of which I may write more about later, at Barnes & Noble:

-Hal and Judy Runkel’s The Scream Free Marriage. In this book the authors argue against the idea of tending exclusively on your partner’s needs, but rather focusing on one’s own feelings and representing them authentically in a calm and connected way.

-Edward Hallowell’s Shine.  Harvard psychiatrist Hallowell, whose previous work Driven to Distraction was a national bestseller, identifies a five-stage process for leaders to get the best out of the people they supervise.

Facing History’s Homophobia Workshop, Resources about Bayard Rustin

Dunreith facilitated a session about Bayard Rustin at Facing History's homphobia workshop today.

Dunreith co-facilitated a workshop about homophobia today for Facing History.

Unfortunately, while America has made fitful if incomplete progress on issues of race, in many circles the hatred of gays, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning folks is still acceptable.

As a former middle and high school teacher and adviser to a Gay/Straight Alliance at Longmeadow High School, I can attest that young people in these categories have their dignity, self-esteem and even physical safety assaulted, sometimes on a hourly basis.

And, even more unfortunately, many times peers, and even other adults, stand by and do nothing.

This silence gives comfort to the abuser and makes the victim feel even more alone.

This is the context in which Dunreith and her colleague Denise Gelb offered the workshop.

One of Dunreith’s sessions focused on Bayard Rustin.

Rustin’s name has become more recognized in recent years, but the architect of the March on Washington still generally is not nearly as well-known as other civil rights luminaries like Dr. King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis or other people from that era.

It’s a shame, because Rustin’s brilliance deserves to be recognized, while the pain he experienced from inside and outside the movement also merits scrutiny.

Dunreith drew on a number of resources for her session, which combined aspects of Rustin’s biography-his youth in West Chester, Pennsylvania, his fearlessness about issues of race, his early commitment to nonviolence and serving time in federal prison for being a conscientious objects are just some of his foundational experiences-with information about his being ostracized because of his being gay.

After being arrested in Pasadena in the early 50s on a “morals” charge, he decided to suppress his sexual desires. One of the biggest betrayals of his life came when Dr. King acceded to his resignation after Adam Clayton Powell threatened to charge that King and Rustin were gay lovers.

After a period of exile, Rustin reconnected with King and other civil rights leaders in time to pull off the March on Washington, and to see the civil rights establishment back him when Strom Thurmond started attacking him.

While many see the March as the high point of Rustin’s public life, he continued to push for nonviolent change, receiving heat starting in the mid-60s for backing the Democratic rather than the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. He later was accused of being out of touch as the doctrine of Black Power ascended later in the decade. 

In addition to working on issues of nuclear disarmament, Rustin did finally find committed and long-term love toward the end of his life.

Dunreith weighed looked at two videos, Out of the Past, which has a self-contained section about Rustin, and Brother Outsider, which is a full length documentary feature about the civil rights strategist.

University of Illinois-Chicago and gay studies pioneer John D’Emilio has written an authoritative biography of Rustin, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.  I also read this week a slender book by Rustin about the movement’s past and future directions.

Whatever resource you choose, please take the time to learn more about this remarkable man, who was born to a teenage mother, raised by his Quaker grandparents and worked tirelessly to help the nation be truer to its word.

Dave Burk’s alleged prejudice, Terrence Roberts’ memoir

 

Terrence Roberts' memoir sheds lights on current issues of race and homphobia.

President Obama’s election last year elicited many assertions that we are now a ‘post-racial’ society.

Would that it were so.

As the flap about Geneva High School teacher Dave Burk’s alleged comment to a class about ‘black fags’ shows, racism and homophobia are far from vanquished in American society.

Student Jordan Hunter, who came out last year, has filed a complaint against Burk, whose lawyer says he is cooperating fully with authorities. 

In some ways, the incident illustrates both how far our nation has come and how much work on these issues yet remains to be done. 

Terrence Roberts’ recently published memoir, Lessons from Little Rock, provides valuable perspective on our nation’s tortured and fitfully forward moving path on race and other issues of diversity as well as riveting detail about the courage he and other members of the Little Rock Nine displayed in their successful effort to desegregate Central High School more than 50 years ago.

Much love and gratitude to Dunreith for getting me a copy of the book.  

At this point, the experiences of the Little Rock Nine have been widely chronicled.  Starting with Melba Pattillo Beals’ Warriors Don’t Cry, several of the nine black students have written memoirs.  Elizabeth Jacoway has written Turn Away Thy Son, a scholarly and personal account of the year.  And many civil rights histories describe the horrific and daily abuse to which Roberts and the other eight students were subjected.  

With such an already crowded field, it might appear that there is little to add to the conversation, but Roberts finds plenty.

His work is distinctive for several features.  To begin, he has a lengthy description of his life and family before his junior year at Central High, painting a loving portrait of his mother and six siblings.  This is an important section because it reminds the reader both of the sources of his strength of character and of the importance of not defining his childhood solely by this single year, as significant as it was.

Roberts also continues the story after the 1957 school year, when Gov. Orval Faubus made the decision to close all Little Rock high schools rather than permit continued integration.  The book contains a depiction of his work 40 years later as a desegregation for the Little Rock public schools, an opinion piece he wrote for a local newspaper in 1997, the text of a speech he gave introducing then-President Clinton and brief descriptions of the other members of the nine.  

I’ve had the privilege and honor of meeting Roberts through Dunreith’s work at Facing History, and he writes very much like he talks, with insight, attention to detail, humor and vision.  He relates in the book anecdotes of survival, non-violence and self defense that inspire, and even awe, the reader. 

Roberts closes the book with the following statement,

“We must continue to find ways to extricate ourselves from the bondage of racism and our tendency to discriminate based on race.  Successful eradication of all vestiges of this cancerous growth on our society will not be easy, nor will there always be obvious road signs on our journey … Do we have the motivation or desire to accomplish this feat?  This is the first question, and it must be answered in the affirmative if we are to realize even one fraction of the goal before us.  Certainly it will not be an assignment for the weak of heart or those with doubt-filled minds.  But if the true visionaries up take up the challenge, we can find a way to make it happen.”

Roberts’ stirring words bring us back to Burk and Geneva High School and Jordan Hunter.  As a former adviser to Longmeadow High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance, I know how much courage it takes for a young person to come out to his peers, let alone take the stand that Hunter is taking in calling for Burk’s removal.

Roberts’ memoir reminds us of America’s dark racial past and fitful progress, while his closing question gives us a way to understand the current situation and Hunter’s courageous action.

Turkey and Armenia’s accord, books about the Armenian genocide.

 

Taner Akcam's book is just one of several about the Armenian genocide-a fact of history that was largely omitted from yesterday's accord between Turkey and Armenia.

 

After close to a century of visceral and often bloody conflict, the governments of Turkey and Armenia announced an accord yesterday. 

Among the highlights: the re-establishment of diplomatic ties after a 16-year freeze and the reopening of borders that have been closed for about a century.

But one major element is missing for many in the Armenian diaspora, many of whom demonstrated before the signing in cities across the globe: a full and frank acknowledgment by the Turkish government of the Armenian genocide.

Marked as beginning in April 1915, during the bloodshed of World War I and the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the genocide led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and the forced expulsion and fleeing of many more. Estimates vary, and the figure of 1.5 million Armenians killed has been accepted by many.

To this day, Turkey denies that it ever happened.  In fact, in Turkey, to say that the genocide happened is a criminal act. 

I wrote in April about Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, a book which tells both the story of his growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s and his grandmother’s harrowing escape and tenacious fight for reparations.  

Here are some other resources for those wanting to learn more about the genocide, to which Hitler infamously referred shortly before invading Poland in 1939: 

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow mentions the genocide throughout the book, by referring repeatedly to homes that used to be occupied by Armenian families.

Turkish historian Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act uses the documentation left by the perpetrators to try to puncture the wall of denial. 

Balakian’s The Burning Tigris focuses on the genocide and the rise of the cause of international human rights movements in the United States. 

David Kherdian’s The Road from Home recounts his mother’s story of survival.

And Facing History and Ourselves, where Dunreith works, has both an extensive chapter in its original resource book about the genocide as well as a stand alone guide dedicated to it.   

 

 

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091010/ap_on_re_eu/eu_turkey_armenia

James Von Brunn, Resources about Holocaust Denial and White Supremacy.

Here is a picture of alleged shooter James Von Brunn and a list of resources about the Holocaust and white supremacy.

By now, I’m sure you have heard about the shocking murder of a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by 88-year-old white supremacist and Holocaust denier James Von Brunn.

It’s a hard time for white supremacists these days.  

Events like Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, his appointment of a diverse Cabinet, and his recent nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be the nation’s third woman and first Latina U.S. Supreme Court justice embody all of what the haters oppose.

A sense of losing a battle often triggers desperate acts.

Von Brunn’s attack apparently was triggered by Obama’s recent visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which he called the “ultimate rebuke” to deniers. 

Here are some resources that can help give context to some of the issues raised by Von Brunn’s alleged shooting: 

To begin, Von Brunn was a failed artist, according to news reports.  Peter Cohen’s Architecture of Doom is an astonishing film that shows that many of the top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, were, too. 

I wrote last weekabout Deborah Lipstadt’s book and blog, as well as  a web site, all of which are intended to counter Holocaust denial.

The Intelligence Report, a publication of the Southern Povery Law Center and where my friend Casey Sanchez works, covers hate groups in America.  The Center more generally is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the issue.

Dear friend and full professor Stephen Kantrowitz’s Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy is a nimbly written and thoughtfully argued description of the re-emergence of white supremacy after the Civil War and into the 20th century as told through the life of South Carolina politician “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman.  

Kantrowitz and other historians who cover this ground are walking in the very wide road carved by groundbreaking historian and Arkansas native C. Vann Woodward, whose classic work The Strange Career of Jim Crow paved the way for other works like Kantrowitz’s to follow. 

For those people interested in the context that gave rise to the Holocaust Museum where the shooting occurred, I recommend Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life.  Novick argues that the events of the Holocaust have gained importance in America more because of the organization of the Jewish community than because of any change in the genocide’s tragic nature.

James Young is one of the leading authorities of Holocaust memorials; his book, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocast in Contemporary Art and Architecture should be required reading for those intrigued by that topic.  

People seeking an overview of the Holocaust could do a lot worse than reading journalist William Shirer’s tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or historian Sir Martin Gilbert’s  The Holocaust:  A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War.  

Of course, Facing History and Ourselves, where Dunreith works and where I am a consultant, does terrific work around prejudice reduction with students all over the world.  While the organization has expanded from its original look at the Holocaust as its primary ‘case study,’ it still has a tremendous collection of print and video resources on the topic.  

Elements of Time, a collection of survivor testimony, is one of my favorites, while readers of Elie Wiesel’s Night should check out The Challenge of Memory, a video that accompanies the book and has complementary testimony for numerous points in the book.

Facing History’s resource book, Holocaust and Human Behavior, also has plenty of useful information, even as it’s more of a menu than a straight historical narrative.

Unfortunately, education and memory has not yet been a completely successful antidote to haters like Von Brunn and others of his ilk.  Still, actions like his only underscore the importance of continuing to inform people about past atrocities and continue to strive for a world in which events that seemingly were impossible, like the election of a black president, eventually become ordinary.

Facing History and Ourselves Dinner, my favorite resources.

Then-future First and Facing History Board Member Michelle Obama at the Chicago office's 2007 fundraising dinner. This year's dinner takes place tonight.

Facing History and Ourselves’ fundraising dinner for the Chicago office is tonight, and I’ll be there.

My wife Dunreith is the associate program director and has, in my opinion, done amazing work in getting Facing History materials, themes and resources throughout the Chicago Public Schools.  She has concentrated on, and been extremely effective in, schools on the city’s South and West Sides.

Dunreith and I met 12 summers ago at a Facing History follow up seminar, so the organization is at least indirectly responsible for my being  a husband and father! 

The organization, though, has been part of my life for 30 years, when I first took a Facing History class as part of my time at Exploration Summer Program at Wellesley College.

For those who do not know, Facing History is an international professional development organization that has students think about their choices, and the moral consequences of their choices, by reflecting on themselves, the past and the connection between the two.  Through examining the Holocaust and other examples of mass violence, students are encouraged to think about how to be active participants in society today.

Facing History’s scope and sequence calls for students to learn first about themselves and then to think about the groups to which they belong.  From that thematic base, they move back in time and place to the historical periods they are studying.

While the focus initially was on Germany and Europe in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the eras now include looking at Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, to name just a few.   During the study of the past, students are making connections between their own lives and the materials they are reading, hearing and seeing.    They are also considering universal questions of human behavior and issues of rescue, resistance, perpetrators and bystanders.

The scope and sequence then calls for students to think about how communities and nations come together after mass violence, deal with memory and legacy and then, as mentioned above, encourages students to think about how to apply what they have learned by contributing to our democratic society.

Through Facing History I’ve had the opportunity to meet many remarkable people like Holocaust survivor and author Ava Kadishshon Schieber, witness to the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp and former educator Leon Bass, Cambodian genocide survivor Arn Chorn-Pond,  South Boston native, author and activist Michael Patrick MacDonald, and Dutch survivor, psychiatrist and philanthropist Ries Vanderpol, to name just a few.

Here are five, but by no means all, of my favorite Facing History resources:

The Lunch Date-This Academy Award-winning film by Adam Davidson explores issues of race and stereotypes through an encounter at a New York train station between a white woman on a shopping expedition and a possibly homeless black man.

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education.  This book by the MacArthur Award-winning scholar Danielle Allen blends an analysis of the infamous picture of Hazel Bryant screaming at Elizabeth Eckford on the first day of school in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas with classical definitions of citizenship and heavy doses of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. 

Strong at the Broken Places-This documentary film by Margaret Lazarus interweaves the sustaining and healing from trauma of four survivors. In addition to Michael Patrick MacDonald and Arn Chorn-Pond, the film also features Marcia Gordon, who survived rape, homelessness, prostitution and a relative’s death by fire, and former U.S.  Sen Max Cleland, who lost both arms and a leg in Vietnam.  Be warned tough: this is a tear-jerker!

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence. Harvard Law School ProfessorMartha Minow, who dedicates the book to Facing History founder Margot Stern Strom, looks here at the moral necessity but inevitable insufficiency of ways to come together after mass violence.  Specifically, she concentrates on trials, reparations and truth commissions (She has a favorable impression of the latter, especially as implemented in South Africa.).

Steve Cohen-No list of Facing History classics would be complete with Cohen, who entertained and educated thousands of teachers during his time with Facing History with his inimitable style of teaching that could best be described as an early Robin Williams teaching history. 

Do you know about Facing History?

How have you connected with the organization?

What resources have I left out from the list?

What are some of your favorite books, videos and speakers that connect to the different parts of the scope and sequence?

Social Studies Methods Class, Warriors Don’t Cry

Melba Pattillo Beals recounts the battle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in this memorable book.

We are in the final week of my Social Studies Methods Class this week, and the timing is auspicious.

Today, Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine-African American teenagers who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957-is in Chicago for the first of a three-day stay in the city.   Roberts, who like the other students endured unimaginable abuse from the resistant white students, will be speaking to students, teachers, administrators and community during a packed visit sponsored by Facing History and Ourselves.

Roberts’ book about his experiences will be published this fall, and it should be a fascinating one.  The genial, lean psychologist and desegregation consultation has intelligence, wisdom and wit.  I look forward to reading his memoir.

For those who want to read more these brave teenagers sooner, I recommend Melba Patillo Beals’  Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High.  A memoir by another of the Little Rock Nine, the book interweaves diary entries from the time with newspaper headlines and Beals’ own memories to create an accessible and emotionally compelling work.

Beals opens the book with her childhood memories of segregation.  She writes, “Black folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules.  Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, ‘Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.’  Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions creep over you, stealing a teaspoon of your self-esteem each day.”

Beals recounts an early awareness of segregation’s power over the adults in her life, thereby setting up the possibility that she could do something to lessen its hold.

The seeds of that opportunity came on May 17, 1954, when the Earl Warren-led Supreme Court unanimously issued the Brown v. Board of Education  decision that declared the 58-year-old doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ unconstitutional. 

Many school districts delayed the mandated integration, including the one in Little Rock. After the second Brown v. Board decision said districts should comply “with all deliberate speed,” the Little Rock district decided to comply.

The result was a year like no other Beals, Roberts, Elizabeth Eckford or anyone else in the community had ever experienced.  Beals recounts the endless death threats, the job loss for her mother and other parents of the nine students, the constant hurling of epithets, the summoning and then departure of the National Guard.

A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Beals writes in clear and direct prose.  And, at times, some of the most moving sections come when she shares excerpts from her diary at that time. 

Beals also writes about famous incidents like when Minnijean Brown dumped a bowl of chili on one of her tormentors’ head and the cafeteria went silent except for the sound of the black workers clapping and her connection with Link, a white student.

Beals has gripping material to work with and makes a lot of it.  Warriors Don’t Cry is a memorable, well-written and accessible account of heroism by nine teenagers, their families and the few people who supported them.

Women’s History and Social Studies Methods Class Converge with Marjorie Agosin

The prolific Marjorie Agosin in a reflective moment.

Ever since her departure to the United States from her native Chile in 1972, shortly before the CIA-sponsored coup that toppled Socialist PresidentSalvador Allende, Majorie Agosin has been writing. 

A lot.

I will write at another point about individual books that this prolific, empathic, socially engaged and generous writer and family friend has produced.

For today, though, I want to talk about her both as an author for Women’s History Month and as someone whose work could be useful to the Urban Teacher Education Program students in my Social Studies Methods classes.

A professor and former department chair of Spanish literature at Wellesley College, Agosin has shown remarkable versatility in the nearly 30 years since she earned her doctorate from Indiana University.  While much of her early work took the form of traditional literary analyses-one of her first books discussed the work of fabled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda-she since has branched out to produce many different types of books. 

Readers who care to can take in a collection of letters between Agosin and childhood friend Emma Sepulveda, an account of her global travels, or more historical recordings of conversations with the mothers who protested their loved ones’ murder at Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo during Argentina’s Dirty War.

Through each of these forms,  and the material about which she writes, Agosin makes statements about what constitutes legitimate forms of self-expression and subjects for scholarly inquiry.

Then there is the poetry.

Above all, Agosin considers herself a poet. Despite being fluent in English and participating actively in the translation of her work, she always writes in Spanish because, she says, that is the language that is closest to her soul. 

Through a profile I wrote about Agosin for Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, I learned that she has several translators with whom she works regularly and does on occasion change how she expresses something in Spanish after talking through the English translation.

A Chilean Jew whose family’s roots are in Eastern Europe, she taps deep into the many veins of her identity. At different points she writes about being Chilean, about being a woman and a mother, about being Jewish, about the experience of exile, and about her family’s origins.  She repeatedly links her experience to those of past generations-one collection is focused on diarist and Holocaust victim Anne Frank, while another pays homage to Auschwitz survivor Zezette Larsen. 

Agosin collaborates actively with visual artists, so many of her books combine her work with that of painters like in the work Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juarez.  In this book Agosin bears witness to the more than 350 women who had been murdered on this border town in Mexico and the consuming grief with which their families must live daily. 

Agosin’s moral vision anchors her work.  She has consistently shown her passionate commitment to human rights-a passion that has been manifested both through the anthologies she has edited and in her work with the arpilleristas she has known in Chile.

The arpilleristas are Chilean women whose sons, husbands, brothers and uncles were “disappeared” during the Pinochet era that followed the 1973 coup. Forbidden by law to speak and protest against these crimes, these women wove their experiences into heart rending tapestries.

As a young woman, Agosin smuggled many of these pieces of art and protest out of the country. She wrote about the women and their work in a number of books.

Facing History and Ourselves, where my wife Dunreith works, has published a study guide authored primarily by Dani Eshet that helps students and teachers think about how to understand the work and transfer the process to where they live.

Agosin has also shown generosity to other artists throughout her career, editing collections of emerging writers so as to give them venues for their work and publications for their resumes.

Having written close to 100 books, Agosin has given interested readers plenty of material from which to draw.  I have read about a dozen of her books and recommend only that you start somewhere.  The chances are high that your first book by this talented and dedicated woman will not be your last.

Sonia Nazario and Alex Kotlowitz in conversation tonight

I wrote yesterday about Sonia Nazario and her book Enrique’s Journey.

She will be speaking tonight at a community conversation with award-winning journalist and my former teacher Alex Kotlowitz tonight at Whitney Young High School.

Facing History and Ourselves, my wife Dunreith’s employer, is the sponsor.

Social Studies Methods Class: Elie Wiesel’s Night

Madoff victim Elie Wiesel recounts his survival of the Holocaust in Night.

Disgraced and now imprisoned financier Bernard Madoff has captured plenty of headlines recently. 

The tentacles of his multi-billion dollar Ponzi Scheme have reached throughout the country and have wreaked financial havoc on thousands of families and non-profit organizations.  In many ways, the consequences of his decption have yet to be fully felt, since they came at a time when the economy was already seriously battered.

Madoff’s actions have caused particular anguish in the Jewish community. He is Jewish and used his membership in the community to exploit his religious brothers and sisters.  Some have expressed concerns that his actions will play into long-held stereotypes about Jews as financiers and lead to a rise in antisemitism, while others have struggled to understand the extent and cause of his duplicity.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel is one of Madoff’s many victims.  He has called Madoff’s crimes unforgivable. 

Themes of memory, forgiveness, belief and humanity also run throughout Night, Wiesel’s slender and classic memoir that provides an authoritative account of Holocaust survival.

Night opens in Sighet, Transylvania in 1941.  A 12-year-old  Kaballah student, Wiesel and other residents of the community are warned of their impending doom by Moshe the Beadle.  However, the townspeople find Moshe’s predictions incredible, instead concluding that he has lost his mind.

A couple of years later, his predictions turn out to be true.

Wiesel, his family and the rest of the community are forcibly removed from their homes and taken by train to the Auschwitz death camp.  His words about that first night have often been quoted, but bear repetition for their stark power:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.

The repetition and insistence of permanence and memory, the allusions to the Ten Commandments, the combination of images and their consequences all give this excerpt its considerable impact.

Night has many such moments.  He talks about how eight words uttered at the camp’s selection-men to the left, women to the right-means that he and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. 

He never sees them again. 

This is only the beginning for Wiesel and his father, though. 

Night details the appells, or hours long roll calls, which begin early in the morning, the paltry rations which slowly starve and reduce the men’s existence to animal instincts of survival, the collective punishment visited on those who try to rebel and other aspects of unspeakable cruelty they endured.

Wiesel’s father does not handle the physical strain well.  Shortly before the book ends, he dies, but not before Wiesel has come to resent and even have feelings of hatred toward him for his inability to weather the abuse.  Other sons respond similarly, with some even abandoning their fathers on the death march. 

The book ends with Wiesel’s liberation at the Buchenwald camp in 1945.  He looks in a mirror for the first time since before his ordeal and ends the book with the following:

I wanted to see myself in the mirror … I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.
The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

Wiesel describes himself in both first and third person, showing again the permanent impact of his experiences, their lethal and dehumanizing consequences, and his struggle to understand his personhood and meaning in the face of the atrocity he has endured.

Night is part of a trilogy-the other two books are Dawn and Day-and is probably the most well known of Wiesel’s many books. 

Originally written in French, the work was pared down extensively from its original version of more than 800 pages.  Facing History and Ourselves has created a study guide and a video, Challenge of Memory, that has clips that accompany specific scenes in the book, which has sparked ongoing discussion about whether it is a memoir or a novel.

In addition to being a prolific writer, speaker and thinker, Wiesel also created The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.  The foundation had  $15.2 million under management by Madoff’s investment firm, and has lost nearly everything.  His life savings have also been wiped out.

And so, now 80, Wiesel faces another challenge. 

While, of course, the financial hardship and betrayal he is grappling with is in no way comparable to his survival more than 60 years ago, what is clear is that Wiesel will meet its with his customary steely resolve and frankness.  He spoken recently about the outpouring of donations from people who learned about the foundation’s plight.  

For those people looking to understand the unspeakable horror Wiesel  and many others endured during World War II, Night is a powerful choice.