"We begin again- with Night"
WIESEL, Elie Night. Foreword by Francois Mauriac. Translated from the French by Stella Rodney. London: Macgibbon & Kee. 1960.
8vo. Original publisher's black cloth with gilt lettering to spine, ownership signature in blue ink to front flyleaf; red and black illustrated dust jacket with a design by Cowan; pp.[vi], 139, [1]; slight creasing to hinge of title page; light toning and marking to rear wrapper; otherwise a near fine copy.
First UK edition
"A generalised pity is not enough and reality is blurred by statistics. A cry of horror and desoation has gone out from the Jewish heart".
A memoir based on Elie Wiesel's experiences during the Holocaust, Night relays the time Wiesel spent with his father in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald between 1944 and 1945, near the end of World War II. In a concise and yet fragmented style, Wiesel reflects on his growing disillusionment with humanity whilst tracing his journey from the ghettos of his home in Sighet, Romania, to the concentration camps.
Night has been translated into 30 languages and is widely recognised as one of the most, if not the most, crucial, and pivotal, works in Holocaust literature.
The first book in a trilogy—followed by Dawn and Day—that tracks Wiesel’s journey beyond the Holocaust, the sequence forms a subtle movement from darkness to light, an idea which compliments the Jewish tradition of beginning anew at nightfall. Wiesel explained that in Night, he aimed to convey the sense of finality brought on by the Holocaust: the dark closure of humanity, history, literature, religion, and even God. Yet, he noted, "we begin again- with night".
This edition contains an emotional foreword by journalist Francois Mauriac, a huge supporter of Wiesel's work and the man who helped him secure a publisher. In the blurb of this edition, the first meeting of the two men is described as follows; "Francois Mauriac said to the author, 'How often I've thought of these children'. Wiesel's reply was simple and shattering: 'I was one of them'.
#2122055