In the fall of 1965 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent a young
journalist named Elie Wiesel to the Soviet Union to report on the
lives of Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. “I would approach
Jews who had never been placed in the Soviet show window by Soviet
authorities,” wrote Wiesel. “They alone, in their anonymity, could
describe the conditions under which they live; they alone could
tell whether the reports I had heard were true or false—and whether
their children and their grandchildren, despite everything, still
wish to remain Jews. From them I would learn what we must do to
help . . . or if they want our help at all.”
What he discovered astonished him: Jewish men and women, young and
old, in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vilna, Minsk, and Tbilisi,
completely cut off from the outside world, overcoming their fear of
the ever-present KGB to ask Wiesel about the lives of Jews in
America, in Western Europe, and, most of all, in Israel. They have
scant knowledge of Jewish history or current events; they celebrate
Jewish holidays at considerable risk and with only the vaguest
ideas of what these days commemorate. “Most of them come [to
synagogue] not to pray,” Wiesel writes, “but out of a desire to
identify with the Jewish people—about whom they know next to
nothing.” Wiesel promises to bring the stories of these people to
the outside world. And in the home of one dissident, he is given a
gift—a Russian-language translation of Night, published
illegally by the underground. “‘My God,’ I thought, ‘this man
risked arrest and prison just to make my writing available to
people here!’ I embraced him with tears in my eyes.”
關於作者：
Elie Wieselwas awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1986. The author of more than fifty internationally acclaimed works
of fiction and nonfiction, he is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the
Humanities and University Professor at Boston University.
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