Father-Son Relationship in Night by Elie Wiesel - Essay Example

"Night" by Elie Wiesel and the Father-Son Relationship INTRODUCTION There can be no separation between family members if their relationship is based on faith and love. A Jewish friend once told me this and the book "Night" by Elie Wiesel shows the strength of this statement. The Holocaust has been the subject of many books, movies, papers and other media because many people actually survived the horrors of this period of history. When reading the book "Night" readers have to question how anyone could have survived such an ordeal. This is not a book that can be read quickly or easily because it is very detailed as to what happened in the various concentration camps. The story is of courage, love, disillusionment, and finally acceptance of a fate that took many people to their death. Elie Wiesel is now the founder of a humanitarian foundation that is geared towards fighting against injustice. He is married and he is one of three survivors from his family who came out of the Holocaust alive; his two older sisters also survived (The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity). This is not a tale that is embellished in anyway. It is one that takes the reader into the depths of their own souls and makes them ask the question, "Why?" "Why was this an important thing to happen in our history to affect so many different people?" The answer to that question will never be known and this is perhaps the reason why so much is being written about it--people are attempting to understand. THE FATHER AND SON RELATIONSHIP In the beginning of the book, Elie says that his father is more concerned about work than he is about his family. He never really knows his family and he misses out on many special events. He spent time reading the Talmud and making sure that Elie had his studies in it but when Elie wanted to go further into the Cabbala his father cautioned him about it saying that he would not be ready for this study until he was 30 because he needed to study what was within his understanding first (Wiesel 14). This sets the stage that the father is the important aspect like in any Jewish family and he is to be relied upon to take care of the family. Before the Hungarians came, Elie pleads with his father to sell his business and move out of the area to escape the impending situation. His father will not leave saying he is "too old" to continue on and make a new life (Wiesel 18). It would seem that Elie wanted his father to pay more attention to the family, but he was not able to do so at this time. His father was taking care of the family by being involved in the community and by working hard. This was very important for the men in Jewish tradition. Elie finds another father figure for a time in Moché Beadle who was one of the minor characters in the book. Moché Beadle was not only a mentor to Elie but also the "sage" of the town. He found out what was going to happen in the village because he had escaped the Gestapo after having been taken; no one would listen to him. Beadle was also the "savior" of the village and was akin to Jesus in that he came to help and no on listened in the end. Pierre Horne speaks about Moché Beadle I this way: "Moché, who teaches the boy the beauty of biblical studies, is a strange character with a clownish awkwardness, more God’s madman than mentally ill" (1). He describes Moché further as "the clown" a "moving and tragic fool" which is not exactly what this reader would call him. He was someone that was gentle and understood that God was within him, not outside which is one of the reasons that he was able to get away from the Germans it is surmised. The challenge for the Jews in Sighet was that they would not listen to the signs that were coming to make problems for them. To the bitter end of their stay in their homes, they denied that anything could happen to them. When the Hungarian Army and the German soldiers came, Elies father buried their savings in the cellar so that they would not be found. In the beginning his father is a well known person and is respected by everyone in the town. He is the one chosen to go to a meeting where he finds out that the Jews will be deported to Hungary. This first part shows a man who has courage and who is able to withstand most situations while he tries to keep his family safe. Unfortunately this does not last. Once everyone is standing in line and they are told that "women and children" go one way and "men" go in the other direction, Elie stays with his father so that he will not be alone. When they get to the concentration camps, his father changes dramatically as time goes on and the reader can see his spirit leaving. Elie has a myriad of emotions for his father. At first, he is his reason for living and at other times he feels like a burden. In any situation the father and son relationship can be tenuous but having to live through the ordeals of a concentration camp made it even more difficult. Throughout the book Elie shows that he is not attached to his father but he does feel the obligation of taking care of him. At different times in the book it is difficult to remember that Elie is only 15 years old because of the deep anguish he feels at different times in the book. When a boy becomes so driven by hunger that he beats his father to death over a scrap of bread, Elie laments, "My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahous son has done" (Wiesel 97) and he continues to take care of his father. When dead bodies are being thrown off a train, and when it would have been easy to let his father have the same fate, Elie slaps his father until he comes back to consciousness to let him live a little longer. Elies father does die in the concentration camp and this is one of the most poignant scenes. His father gets dysentery and no doctors will look after him. As he is making his last dying breaths Elie is there with him. He falls asleep and in the morning his father is gone and another "invalid" has been put in his place. Elie states: They must have taken him away before dawn and carried him to the crematory. He may still have been breathing. There were no prayers at his grave. No candles were lit to his memory. His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond (116). Elie does not weep for his father and because he did not answer him, he was not able to say Kaddish for him which is the Jewish prayer for the dead. He explains that he could not weep because there were no more tears to cry. This was the end of his relationship with his father and we do not know any more because it is also the ending of the book. ANALYSIS OF "NIGHT" In analyzing "Night" there are many issues. Elie is the central character of the book because it is his story. As he states, "in Night it is the I who speaks" (Wiesel 3) and it is the "I" that must make sense out of the entire process. Throughout the book the reader understands that as his father becomes weaker, he is faced with the filial obligation to keep track of his father and his welfare. Michael Steele states about this situation: The latter is marked by filial love and concern, but also by his own devastating guilt as his father slips inexorably toward death and Wiesel anticipates freedom from his burden of devotion (2). It was difficult for this child to understand the world around him and what was exactly going on. A strong theme in the story is that of faith. Although the young Elie does not realize he has kept his faith in tack for the entire time or he would not have been able to survive. He was told early on by someone in Auschwitz that he must keep his faith. Throughout the book Elie questions it however. He wants to know how he can praise God when he has so many things happening around him. Surely God cannot be caring about them so why should they care about him" he ponders. In his words: Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny Gods existence, but I doubted His absolute justice…(Wiesel 53). He is upset about Gods silence and how they do not appear to be getting answers to their prayers. Silence is another theme and it is important because it is something that is shown throughout the book. It is also known that after the experience, Elie took a 10 year period of silence (self-imposed) in order to study and reflect on the Holocaust (Steele 1). Elie was also able to give us the imagery that was necessary for us to see the depth of the Holocaust. After getting to Auschwitz and seeing the flames that Madame Schächter had seen in her delirium, he comments on the loss of his faith and the loss of hope: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night … Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever … never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust … (Wiesel 43). It is with great difficulty that the reader must continue the story because they are compelled to see what happens. Elie is shattered in his faith because like Job in the Bible, he is not sure why this is happening or how he can make sense of the world where God is supposed to be a savior. He is able to see his own ability for cruelty as well as all the other cruelty and he is not certain what to do with all of this information. The reader also sees fire as a symbol of the cruelty handed down by the Nazis throughout the book. Madame Schächter has the premonition on the train of what they are coming to and Elie sees the babies burning and the final ending place for many in the crematoria (SparkNotes "symbols"). The Bible used fire as a way to cleanse and was used by those who were good and pure, but in the book fire is a symbol for "racial cleansing" that took place during the Holocaust. Another symbol was the idea of "night". In the Bible it was when God created the heavens and the earth out of darkness which was something good. In the book night was always the time when suffering is worse. They always suffered in the camps at night, they were never attended to, and they also arrive at the camps at night (SparkNotes symbols"). LITERARY CRITICISM Many people have written about "Night" and its various images, symbols and motifs. Susan Sanderson focuses on the father-son relationship between Elie and his father Chlomo and shows that Elie has to accept adulthood in a world that does not make sense. He has become an adult largely to take care of his father but in the end he feels that his attempts at adulthood no longer have meaning. "Eliezer experiments with the possibility of becoming an adult while his father gradually slips away, all the while giving his son what space he can to let him try out a new role." (Sanderson last paragraph). Lea Hamaoui writes that in reading "Night" the reader is able to see a historical horror that may not be easy to accept. While reading the books readers are both threatening and disturbing at the same time and that the he "attempt[s] to bring word of the death camps back to humanity in such a form that his message, unlike that of Moshe the Beadle to Eliezer and to the Jews of Sighet, will not be rejected" (120). Rena Korb brings more of the horror of the Holocaust to the reader. She speaks of the facts that were seen in "Night." The fact that forming relationships with people could get one killed. The fact that human dignity was dissolved and people lost their humanity in the rubble. The fact that the concentration camp was a nightmare for the people who lived there and for those who were victims. Another interesting note that she points out is the fact that in the beginning of the book Elie is a member of a loving community, he is healthy and he is very much a normal 15 year old. By the end of the book he is stripped of his childhood and everything else. Elie was sick three days after he was liberated and he decided to look in the mirror: I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. 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 119). CONCLUSION Unless an individual had survived as horrific a situation as this, it is unfathomable to understand how this happened. Mans inhumanity to man is something that our country sees or hears about everyday but we cannot forget the Holocaust. To see that so many people were tortured, starved to death and killed in crematoriums is more than the human mind can understand. Somewhere in the life of Elie Wiesel is a very strong spirit that kept him going as a small boy and helped him write about his experiences in a way that people could not reject and could not ignore. This is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and it is one that goes beyond the ideas of what people experience in the camps. It is written through a boys eyes with vivid images that remind us all that if we are not watchful it can happen again. We cannot believe that Americans are not capable of this as we saw in the Iraq War. American soldiers, in the Abu Ghraib prison did similar things to people from the town because they were told to do it by their superior officers (See "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib"). This means that humanity is capable of these horrors no matter whom they are or where they live. As Ivry Itzhak states, "His [Wiesels] book deserves to be read by everyone who is deeply concerned about the future of civilization" (23), and we all should be deeply concerned. Works Cited Hamaoui, Lea. "Historical Horror and the Shape of Night." Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope. Ed. Carol Rittner New York University Press, 1990. 120-129. Rpt. in Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 120-129. Literature Resources from Gale. 12 May 2009 [Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420021089]. Horne, Pierre L. "Night." Magill’s Choice: American Ethnic Writers Salem Press, Inc., 2000. 09 May 2009. Literary Resource Center EBSCOhost (AN: MOL0209303268). Ivry, Itzhak. "Memory of Torment." Saturday Review. 43.51 (17 Dec. 1960): 23-24. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 165. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 23- 24. Literature Resources from Gale. 12 May 2009 [Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100045445]. Korb, Rena. "Critical Essay on Night." Nonfiction Classics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Nonfiction Works. Ed. David M. Galens, Jennifer Smith, and Elizabeth Thomason. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resources from Gale. 12 May 2009 [Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420043554]. Sanderson, Susan. "Critical Essay on Night". Nonfiction Classics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Nonfiction Works. Ed. David M. Galens, Jennifer Smith, and Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Gale Resource Center, [Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420043556] SparkNotes. "Night: Themes, Motifs and Symbols." 9 May 2009. . Steele, Michael. "Night." Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series, 1989. Salem Press, Inc. 09 May 2009. Literary Resource Center EBSCOhost (AN: MOL9260000177). The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. "Elie Wiesel". 9 May 2009. . Weisel, Elie. Night-Dawn-The Accident: A Trilogy. NY: Hill and Wang, 1985. Read More