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Elie Wiesel, 1928–2016

By

In Memoriam

EWiesel

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan at the age eighty-seven. Best known for Night, an autobiographical account of his experience in Nazi concentration camps toward the end of World War II, Wiesel, “more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience,” wrote the New York Times.

When asked in his Art of Fiction interview, published in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review, where his “quest” was leading him, Wiesel responded, 

I don’t know. I know two things. One, I am going in a concentric circle. That I set out to do. I came from the outside and I am going deeper and deeper. I don’t know what I will find there. I know the moment I find the last point, I will stop. Maybe I will never find it. I also know that I haven’t begun. It’s a strange feeling. I say to myself, you have written this and this and this, and you haven’t even begun. That doesn’t mean that I deny my work. On the contrary, I stand behind every word I have written. There isn’t a book I would not write the same way today. There isn’t a story I would disown, not a word. My entire life and entire work are behind every line. At the same time, on the edge you see so much. I haven’t even begun to communicate what I have seen.