Literary Review of “Night”
The autobiography that I choose to review was Night by Elie Wiesel a story of a holocaust victim who survived the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Night centers on a young Elie, who is fifteen years old and living with his orthodox Jewish family in Sighet, Transylvania (common day Romania). The story begins with the German-Hungarian Army invading Sighet and forcing all Jews unable to prove their residency to ghettos. Ghettos were essentially living prisons that were designed to segregate and label Jews and other undesirables from the general population. Once put into the Sighet ghetto, he and family were sent on a train to Auschwitz in Poland, the most deadly death camp of the Nazi regime. Elie sel…show more content… This review focuses on when the book itself was taken off of the best seller list after it spent eight weeks on that best seller list. Elie’s writing style is simple, considering that the book itself is only roughly one hundred pages, and it recounts his daily life in the camp. Donadio points out that the book itself did not receive notoriety immediately, “But “Night” had taken a long route to the best-seller list. In the late 1950s, long before the advent of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust studies, Wiesel’s account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald was turned down by more than 15 publishers before the small firm Hill & Wang finally accepted it. How “Night” became an evergreen is more than a publishing phenomenon. It is also a case study in how a book helped created a genre, how a writer became an icon and how the Holocaust was absorbed into the American experience.” However long that it took for Night to become a mainstream success, the message of the book is extremely strong and the vivid imagery grasps the attention of any reader. While reading Night, it is easy to picture yourself-side by side with Wiesel in the death camps. Whether or not Night will return to the bestseller list is uncertain, but the enticing story keeps attracting new young readers who are interested in learning about the atrocities of war and educating themselves on