Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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  Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters

  Elie Wiesel

  In these powerful and beautiful stories of Jewish Hasidic masters, Elie Wiesel teaches us to fight depression by deliberately cultivating joy, that we must enjoy life in spite of life, that death is never the answer, and that that life is sacred, so much so that in spite of anything we have suffered we must say yes to this life.

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  The Fifth Son: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  Reuven Tamiroff, a Holocaust survivor, has never been able to speak about his past to his son, a young man who yearns to understand his father’s silence. As campuses burn amidst the unrest of the Sixties and his own generation rebels, the son is drawn to his father’s circle of wartime friends in search of clues to the past. Finally discovering that his brooding father has been haunted for years by his role in the murder of a brutal SS officer just after the war, young Tamiroff learns that the Nazi is still alive.

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  The Forgotten

  Elie Wiesel

  Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late.
  
  Elhanan's story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another.

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  The Gates of the Forest: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  Gregor—a teenaged boy, the lone survivor of his family—is hiding from the Germans in the forest. He hides in a cave, where he meets a mysterious stranger who saves his life. He hides in the village, posing as a deaf-mute peasant boy. He hides among the partisans of the Jewish resistance. But where, he asks, is God hiding? And where can one find redemption in a world that God has abandoned? In a story punctuated by friendship and fear, sacrifice and betrayal, Gregor's wartime wanderings take us deep into the ghost-filled inner world of the survivor.

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  The Golem: the Story of a Legend

  Elie Wiesel

  For Centuries, Jews have remembered the Golem, a creature of clay said to have been given life by the mystical incantations of the mysterious Maharal, Rabbi Yehuda Loew, leader of the Jewish community of 16-century Prague... In this beautiful book, Elie Wiesel has collected many of the legends associated with this enigmatic and eluisive figure and retold them as seen throughn the eyes of a wizened gravedigger who claims to have witnessed as a child the numerous miracles that legend attributes to the Golem.

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  The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry

  Elie Wiesel

  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.”

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  The Judges: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  A plane en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers: Claudia, who has left her husband and found new love; Razziel, a religious teacher who was once a political prisoner; Yoav, a terminally ill Israeli commando; George, an archivist who is hiding a Holocaust secret that could bring down a certain politician; and Bruce, a would-be priest turned philanderer.
  
  Their host—an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself simply the Judge—begins to interrogate them, forcing them to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces that one of them—the least worthy—will die.

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  The Oath: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary man—Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic—steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last words—a plea for silence—and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town’s last days and nights of terror.
  
  For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath—until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man’s loyalty to the dead confronts head-on another’s reason to go on living.

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  The Sonderberg Case: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  Ruminating on his past relationships with the men in his family, New York city theater critic Yedidyah is assigned to cover the murder trial of a German expatriate whose enigmatic plea triggers Yedidyah's own revelations.

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  The Testament: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  On August 12, 1952, Russia's greatest Jewish writers were secretly executed by Stalin. In this remarkable blend of history and imagination, Paltiel Kossover meets the same fate but, unlike his real-life counterparts, he is permitted to leave a written testament. From a Jewish boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, Paltiel traveled down a road that embraced Communism, only to return to Russia and discover a Communist Party that had become his mortal enemy. Two decades later, Paltiel's son, Grisha, reads this precious record of his father's life and finds that it illuminates the shadowed planes of his own.

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  The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  Tormented by feelings of loss and dispossession after spending his life fleeing first the Nazis and then the 1956 Russian invasion of Hungary, Gamaliel Friedman settles in New York, where he meets a fellow group of exiles.

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  The Town Beyond the Wall: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  Michael—a young man in his thirties, a concentration camp survivor—makes the difficult trip behind the Iron Curtain to the town of his birth in Hungary. He returns to find and confront “the face in the window”—the real and symbolic faces of all those who stood by and never interfered when the Jews of his town were deported. In an ironic turn of events, he is arrested and imprisoned by secret police as a foreign agent. Here he must confront his own links to humanity in a world still resistant to the lessons of the Holocaust.

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  The Trial of God (as it was Held on February 25, 1949, in Shamgorod): a Play in Three Acts

  Elie Wiesel

  Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer.
  
  The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: “Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.”

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  Twilight: A Novel

  Elie Wiesel

  A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin’s Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him?
  
  A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphael’s search to the Mountain Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring from the Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedro’s truth and the meaning of his own survival in a novel that penetrated the mysteries of good, evil, and madness.

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  Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters

  Elie Wiesel

  The Nobel laureate shares his insights into a broad spectrum of biblical figures, Talmudic scholars, and Hasidic rabbis, including Sarah, the mother of Isaac, Samson, Isaiah, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, describing how their experiences, triumphs and tragedies, teachings, and faith can transform our own lives.

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  Elie Wiesel: Conversations

  Elie Wiesel and Robert Franciosi

  Elie Wiesel has given hundreds of interviews. Yet his fame as a human rights advocate often directs such conversations toward non-literary issues. Indeed, many of Wiesel's questioners barely address the writer's role that has defined him since the 1950s.

  Unlike previous volumes in which he speaks with interviewers, Elie Wiesel: Conversations collects interviews which set in relief the writer at work. This book focuses on Wiesel the literary artist instead of Wiesel the Holocaust survivor or the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

  Beyond highlighting Wiesel's literary significance, these interviews also correct many faulty assumptions about his achievement. Few American readers know that he writes in French, that he has been favorably compared to André Malraux and Albert Camus. Not many realize that the Holocaust has been the subject of only a few of his forty books. Particularly in his nonfiction, Wiesel's scope is wide, addressing Jewish life in all its religious and historical complexity.

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  The Six Days of Destruction: Meditations Towards Hope

  Elie Wiesel and Albert H. Friedlander

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  Conversations with Elie Wiesel

  Elie Wiesel and Richard D. Heffner

  In open and lively responses to the probing questions and provocative comments of Richard D. Heffner - American historian, noted public television moderator/producer, and Rutgers University professor - Elie Wiesel covers fascinating and often perilous political and spiritual ground, expounding on issues global and local, individual and universal, often drawing anecdottaly on his own life experience." "We hear from Wiesel on subjects that include the moral responsibility of both individuals and governments; the role of the state in our lives; the anatomy of hate; the threat of technology; religion, politics, and tolerance; nationalism; capital punishment, compassion, and mercy; and the essential role of historical memory.

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  Memoir in Two Voices

  Elie Wiesel and Francois Mitterrand

  Near the end of his second term as president of France, Francois Mitterrand decided to talk openly about his life, both personal and political. President for fourteen years, longer than anyone else in the history of the French Republic, Mitterrand was interested not in constructing an elaborate memorial to himself in words but in leaving behind a living testament. He therefore turned to someone whom he knew and trusted, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, a close friend of many years, to join him in a vibrant, vigorous exchange. The topics they discuss in these pages are childhood, faith, war, power, writing, and those moments - however and whenever they arrive - that shape and sometimes define us as people. Mitterrand and Wiesel's dialogue is spontaneous, thoughtful, lyrical, blunt, far-reaching, and candid, whether it involves controversial moments in Mitterrand's political career, Wiesel's memories of Auschwitz, the importance of family and religion in their lives, or simply their favorite books and walks. Here is an unobstructed view into the lives and times of two of the greatest figures of conscience of our century, an inspiring memoir in two voices.

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  A Journey of Faith

  Elie Wiesel and John O'Connor

  A provocative and moving dialogue between two men of faith, two voices of conscience, about the most profound events and issues of our time, based upon, but expanded from, a WNBC-TV broadcast. A book that all who cherish the essential goodness in man will want to read and reread and give to friends and loved ones.

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  Evil and Exile

  Elie Wiesel and Philippe De Saint-Cheron

  A series of interviews between Wiesel and French journalist Phillipe de Saint-Cheron, "Evil and Exile" probes some of the issues which confront humankind today. Having survived the evil of the holocaust, Wiesel remained silent for ten years before dedicating his life to the memory of this tragedy, witnessing tirelessly to remind an often indifferent world of its potential for self-destruction. Wiesel offers counsel in this volume concerning evil and suffering, life and death, chance and circumstance. Moreover, the dialogue evokes candid and often surprising responses by Wiesel on the Palestinian problem, Judeo-Christian relations, recent changes in the Soviet Union as well as insights into writers such as Kafka, Malraux, Mauriac and Unamuno.