English II Archives Week of 11/15/04 & 11/22/04

NIGHT by Elie Wiesel

I. A FEW NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR WIESEL, Eliezer 1928-

Elie Wiesel was born on September 20, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania.
His parents owned and operated a store, and his mother was also a teacher.
He credits his maternal grandfather with his love of storytelling.
As a child and adolescent, Wiesel studied the Talmud, Hasidism, and the Kabala.
During the years when he was studying so seriously, he thought it was a waste
of time to read novels.

Just after Passover in 1944, when Wieisel was 15, the Nazis sent all of the Jews
in Singhet to the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He and his father
were later transferred to Buchenwald. He was 16 when the war ended
and he was released. Wiesel traveled to France and was reunited with his
two older sisters. Wiesel studied at the Sorbonne from 1948 until 1951. He learned
the French language and took courses in literature, psychology, and philosophy. He
tutored other students, directed a church choir, and worked as a translator to support
himself. Soon after his release from the concentration camps, Wiesel realized that he
had a duty as a survivor to let others know what had happened. He was encouraged
in this endeavor by Francios Muriac, a Catholic writer whom Wiesel met in Israel.
Wiesel's first book, And the World Has Remained Silent, was published in Yiddish
in 1956. The abridged, autobiographical version, Night, was published in Paris in
1958. Since then it has been translated into eighteen languages and is his best-known
work. Wiesel traveled to the United States in 1956 to write about the United Nations.
He was hit by a taxi cab in Times Square. Since he was unable to return to France to
renew his residency papers, he instead applied for United States citizenship.
He married another Holocaust survivor, Marion Erster Rose, in New York in
1969. In 1976 Wiesel became the Andrew W. Mellen Professor in Humanities
at Boston University. President Carter named him the chairman of the President's
Commission on the Holocaust and the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
Wiesel has received numerous awards and honors. In 1986 alone he was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize, the Freedom Cup Award from the Women's League for Israel,
the Jacob Javits Humanitarian Award of the UJA Young Leadership, and the Medal of
Liberty. He holds membership in many societies including the Authors League, a
lifetime membership in the Foreign Press Association, American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors, and the Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East. He
continues to write and speak for peace and the humanitarian treatment of all peoples.

II. Vocabulary Section 1, pages 1-20 Due Wed.11/24

Using Prior Knowledge and Context Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words appear in the text.
Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with
your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean
on the lines provided.

1. They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life.
__________________________________________________________________________
2. Nobody ever felt embarrassed by him. Nobody ever felt encumbered by his presence.
__________________________________________________________________________
3. He was a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, of seeming invisible.
__________________________________________________________________________
4. I was twelve. I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the
synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple.
__________________________________________________________________________
5. The train full of deportees had crossed the Hungarian frontier and on Polish territory had been
taken in charge by the Gestapo.
__________________________________________________________________________
6. At that time, it was still possible to obtain emigration permits for Palestine.
__________________________________________________________________________
7. With some of my schoolmates, I sat in the Ezra Malik gardens, studying a treatise on the Talmud.
__________________________________________________________________________
8. My father was telling them anecdotes and expounding his own views on the situation.
__________________________________________________________________________
9. At dawn, there was nothing left of this melancholy.
__________________________________________________________________________


III. Determining the Meaning - Due Wed.11/24
Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.

1. surname A. hindered; restricted
2. encumbered B. absolutely; in an unqualified way
3. insignificant C. short, humorous stories
4. profoundly D. leaving one area to settle in another
5. deportees E. sadness; depression
6. emigration F. written discussion of a topic
7. treatise G. a family name
8. anecdotes H. people who are expelled from a country
9. melancholy I. trivial; not important

IV. Study Questions Section 1, pages 1-20 - Due Wed.11/24

1. Describe Moshe the Beadle.
2. Describe Elie Wiesel's father. What was his occupation?
3. Why was Moshe the Beadle important to Elie Wiesel?
4. Summarize the story Moshe the Beadle told on his return from
being deported. Why did he say
he had returned to Sighet?
5. What was the public reaction to Moshe's story?
6. What was the setting and the year for the first section of the book?
What was the world
condition at the time?
7. Describe, in order, the events that happened from the last day
of Passover until Pentecost.
8. How did Wiesel say he felt about the Hungarian police?
9. Who was Martha? What happened when she visited the Wiesel family in the ghetto?