Elie Wiesel’s Night, which first appeared in French as La nuit in 1958, may well loom as the archetypal Holocaust survivor narrative. But it was only in 1994, in his memoirs, that the author addressed the fact that Night is part adaptation, part translation, of a Yiddish work he originally published in Buenos Aires in 1956: …Un di velt hot geshvign (…And the World Was Silent). Critics have read discrepancies between the two versions in various ways: favorably, as resulting from appreciation for the distinct literary idiom of each language; provocatively, as the consequence of Wiesel’s desire to cast the Holocaust in Christian, rather than Jewish, terms; and disparagingly, as part of a strategy to hide ideologically unpalatable, ethnocentric attitudes from a wider audience. This article reviews the merits and flaws of these interpretations of differences in versions of Night. Further, it offers a new approach that involves a re-examination of Wiesel’s relationship with François Mauriac, the towering writer who encouraged his entry into French letters. January 2014: Alan Astro is professor of modern languages at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of over thirty articles on writers as varied as Bashevis, Baudelaire, Beckett and Borges. Astro is the editor of Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing (University of New Mexico Press). His entry on Yiddish has just appeared in a social history of languages in France, published by the University of Rennes. |
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