The Night Trilogy

Name: The Night Trilogy
ISBN: 9780809073641

Night, Dawn, Day

Elie Wiesel

The new translation of the bestselling memoir Night in one volume with its companion novellas, Dawn and Day

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1958, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel writes of their battle for survival and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day.

In the short novel Dawn (1960), a young man who has survived World War II and settled in Palestine joins a Jewish underground movement and is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage.

In Day (previously titled The Accident, 1961), Wiesel questions the limits of conscience: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life despite their memories? Wiesel's trilogy offers insights on mankind's attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

“A slim volume of terrifying power.” —The New York Times

“Required reading for all humanity.” —Oprah Winfrey

“Wiesel has taken his own anguish and imaginatively metamorphosed it into art.” —Curt Leviant, Saturday Review

“To the best of my knowledge no one . . . has left behind him so moving a record.” —Alfred Kazin, The Reporter

“What makes this book so chilling is not the pretense of what happened but a very real description of every thought, fear and the apathetic attitude demonstrated as a response . . . Night, Wiesel's autobiographical masterpiece, is a heartbreaking memoir. Wiesel has taken his painful memories and channeled them into an amazing document which chronicles his most intense emotions every step along the way.” —Jose Del Real, Anchorage Daily News

“As a human document, Night is almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism.” —A. Alvarez, Commentary

About the Author

Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) was a Romanian-born Jewish writer, teacher, and human rights advocate whose work became a defining literary witness to the Holocaust. Born in Sighet, a Hasidic community in the Carpathian region, he was deported to Auschwitz at fifteen with his family and later imprisoned at Buna and Buchenwald. His mother, father, and younger sister did not survive. After liberation, he studied in Paris and worked as a journalist before publishing Night (1956), his spare, devastating memoir of the camps. Rooted in the world of Jewish piety he had known as a child, the book wrestles with faith, silence, and the collapse of a once-vibrant community, and it has become one of the most widely read testimonies of the twentieth century.

Across more than fifty books written mostly in French and Yiddish, Wiesel returned again and again to the questions of Jewish memory and covenant: the struggle to believe after Auschwitz, the moral duty of remembrance, and the inheritance of Talmudic debate and Hasidic storytelling. His novels, plays, and essays, including Dawn, The Gates of the Forest, and The Trial of God, as well as his portraits of Hasidic masters and biblical figures, as in Souls on Fire and Messengers of God, and his advocacy for Soviet Jewry, give voice to a tradition that questions even as it endures. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee honored him as a messenger to humanity. His other honors include the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He taught for many years at Boston University and, with his wife Marion, founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.