Night
by Elie Wiesel
Table of Contents
Key Facts
Title: Night
Author: Elie Wiesel
Type of work: Memoir
Genre: World War II and Holocaust memoir
Language: First published in Yiddish, under the title Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). An abridgment was translated into French as La Nuit, which was translated into English as Night.
Time and place of writing: Contradictory: Mid-1950s Paris, or on the ship to Buenos Aires following a ten-year self-imposed vow of silence regarding the Holocaust.
Date of first publication: Un di Velt Hot Geshvign was published in 1956 in Buenos Aires. La Nuit was published in France in 1958, and the English translation was published in 1960 by Hill & Wang, with the agent being Georges Borchardt, who remains Wiesel’s agent today.
Publisher: Night: Hill & Wang (United States)
Narrator: Eliezer (the longer name of Elie)
Point of view: First-person omniscient
Tone: Familiar, with philosophical existentialist underpinnings
Tense: Past
Setting (time): 1941-1945, from the start of the Holocaust in Hungary to liberation of the camps
Settings (place): Eliezer’s story begins in Sighet, Transylvania, and continues through several concentration camps in Europe: Auschwitz/Birkenau (Poland today), Buna (a camp that belonged to...
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