Gazing into the Mirror of Wiesel'sNight, Together

Abstract

��� I must begin with a confession. When I last taught Literature of the Holo caust, I cut Wiesel’s Night from the reading list. Teachers are always making hard choices. There’s just too much compelling literature to teach in this class. I teach only texts written by survivors. That narrows the field somewhat — so, no Cynthia Ozick, no Anne Michaels, or Ursula Hegi, or Art Spiegelman. I sneak in Nathan Englander’s short story “The Tumblers” as end-of-semester reading and for the final exam, but that’s a closing flourish. Eliminating Night carries a hint of heresy and a measure of guilt. But with Oprah Winfrey as champion, and 10 million copies sold, Night’s dominance in discussions of Holocaust literature has long been secured. Less pervasive texts, such as Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar, and Imre Kertesz’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child, claim my class’s attention. Perhaps you hear too in the opening of this review of Alan Rosen’s edition of essays on Wiesel’s Night, in the Modern Language Association’s series Approaches to Teaching, the echo of Kertesz’s 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature lecture, “I must begin with a confession” (604). Kertesz’s confes sional, analytical literature tackles the need to understand and even explain the Holocaust, as well as the totalitarian oppression to which Auschwitz