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From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences
In this "powerful" (New York Times Book review) collection of personal essays and landmark speeches by "one of the great writers of our generation" (New Republic), Elie Wiesel weaves together reminiscences of his life before the Holocaust, his struggle to find meaning afterward, and the actions he has taken on behalf of others that have defined him as a leading advocate of humanity and have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."
Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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274 people want to read
About the author
Elie Wiesel
274 books4,547 followersEliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
In his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the apartheid in South Africa, the Bosnian genocide, Sudan, the Kurds and the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people.
He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Wiesel was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.
In his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the apartheid in South Africa, the Bosnian genocide, Sudan, the Kurds and the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people.
He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Wiesel was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 1, 2019
As is the case with the author's writings in general, there are some very good parts and some more problematic parts to the author's writings. Yet even where the book is less immediately enjoyable, as in the author's efforts to politically influence President Reagan regarding the honoring of German war dead at Bitburg, the book is at least instructive. In this book, and in Wiesel's body of work as a whole, one sees the massive influence of trauma and its aftermath in the writing of the survivor. The horrors suffered by the author and by other Jews serve as a black whole at the center of the author's writings. Some of those writings are about the black hole, a few of them seek to delicately probe into it without being overwhelmed, and many of them concern the orbit around that black hole and the destructive wreckage left behind by that black hole, and so is the case here. To be sure, the author writes about other aspects of faith and history and memory here, but all of them are informed by his experiences, and by his desire that memory, including the memory of so many Jewish dead, triumph over oblivion and destruction.
This book is a short one of about 250 pages and it is filled with smaller essays and other writings (including some chilling dialogues) that are centered around the author's own fragments of memory. In these pages, the author comments on why he writes, whether it is better to believe or not, what it feels like to be inside a library, the portrayal and language used of the stranger in the Bible, a celebration of friendship, and gives a biographical essay on Peretz Markish. After the first set of dialogues the author talks about his own travels to the concentration camps, his returns to his hometown, gives a moving portrayal of saying kaddish for the victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, tries to make the ghosts of memory speak, talks about Passover and gives the text for a speech on meeting again regarding the liberation of the concentration camps. A few of the essays that follow are more political in nature, like one on trivializing memory and an appeal for President Reagan to not go to Bitburg where some SS are buried, as well as the author's testimony at the Barbie trial. The author talks about memory bringing people together, gives some more dialogues, talks about freedom and our fear of peace, and then closes the book with his Nobel address and lecture.
In reading this book one gets a sense of the burden that the author feels as a Jew. For example, the author feels a strong solidarity with other victims as a result of his own personal experience, which was strongly connected to his own identity. He struggles to provide the dead with a fitting memory that serves to dignify them and counteract both the hatred and violence and the sheer indifference and apathy their lives and deaths have made in the world. Wiesel feels as if the horrors of the Holocaust should have been sufficient to permanently ennoble human behavior and put it on a more peaceful and less destructive bent, but this has clearly not happened, and the author finds himself affected by this futility, wondering about the purpose of all of this suffering either at the command or with the permission of a God that he simply cannot understand. Over and over again Wiesel finds himself obsessed with the question of memory and with the fact that life for the survivor is haunted with the ghosts of the past, and with the fact that so many of the places where that past was experienced have become museums or tourist attractions or are inhabited by people who have little interest in what has come before.
This book is a short one of about 250 pages and it is filled with smaller essays and other writings (including some chilling dialogues) that are centered around the author's own fragments of memory. In these pages, the author comments on why he writes, whether it is better to believe or not, what it feels like to be inside a library, the portrayal and language used of the stranger in the Bible, a celebration of friendship, and gives a biographical essay on Peretz Markish. After the first set of dialogues the author talks about his own travels to the concentration camps, his returns to his hometown, gives a moving portrayal of saying kaddish for the victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, tries to make the ghosts of memory speak, talks about Passover and gives the text for a speech on meeting again regarding the liberation of the concentration camps. A few of the essays that follow are more political in nature, like one on trivializing memory and an appeal for President Reagan to not go to Bitburg where some SS are buried, as well as the author's testimony at the Barbie trial. The author talks about memory bringing people together, gives some more dialogues, talks about freedom and our fear of peace, and then closes the book with his Nobel address and lecture.
In reading this book one gets a sense of the burden that the author feels as a Jew. For example, the author feels a strong solidarity with other victims as a result of his own personal experience, which was strongly connected to his own identity. He struggles to provide the dead with a fitting memory that serves to dignify them and counteract both the hatred and violence and the sheer indifference and apathy their lives and deaths have made in the world. Wiesel feels as if the horrors of the Holocaust should have been sufficient to permanently ennoble human behavior and put it on a more peaceful and less destructive bent, but this has clearly not happened, and the author finds himself affected by this futility, wondering about the purpose of all of this suffering either at the command or with the permission of a God that he simply cannot understand. Over and over again Wiesel finds himself obsessed with the question of memory and with the fact that life for the survivor is haunted with the ghosts of the past, and with the fact that so many of the places where that past was experienced have become museums or tourist attractions or are inhabited by people who have little interest in what has come before.
July 29, 2019
When I was in my twenties and taking Holocausttt history classes I could read these books. That was thirty years ago, believe it or not. I'm 53 now so maybe a little less than thirty years but still the passage of time and maybe experience and who knows has made me unable to completely finish one of his books. Maybe our teachers chose the ones we read based on intensity? I've gravitated away from them over time and still I wonder. This book is a series of essays some of which I have read in other collections of his writing. Eli Wiesel never fails in intensity, analysis, and drawing the very last imodican of emotion or analysis. I know I've said that before or at least twice in this review. As usual I need to read his work in small doses. It is, for all understandable reasons very dark. Perhaps the only way that man was able to live sixty plus years after his release from Buchenwald was to write. No matter what book I read of his I'll always submit the same review. And the translation work is superb.
June 21, 2021
Some parts pulled me in entirely, while other parts were more difficult to get through but the whole book made me think about my place (responsibility) within the groups I am part of and the loss I have had in my own life.
I am not a religious person but enjoyed the religious references and explanations to why Mr Wiesel was the way he was and why it is better to show compassion to the people around us.
I am not a religious person but enjoyed the religious references and explanations to why Mr Wiesel was the way he was and why it is better to show compassion to the people around us.
January 2, 2023
Some powerful reflections on the value of hope, memory, and language.
February 12, 2017
I couldn't put the book down. His writing is so beautiful. He inspires you to work towards peace among people. He makes you ask - yet again - why people didn't come to the aid of The Jews and other small groups who were being victimized and killed.
July 5, 2015
I love Wiesel's words. The only problem with reading his books is that I don't want them to end. Even though this is a book of essays and speeches that were published decades ago, they remain telling and topical. After, nothing in history has changed--the Holocaust still destroyed his family--and, sadly, we still haven't learned how to stop hating.
I read this over the course of 7 months because I wanted to savor the words, listen to the stories of his childhood, and absorb the depth of each page. And now I'm done with it; perhaps I'll read it again....
I read this over the course of 7 months because I wanted to savor the words, listen to the stories of his childhood, and absorb the depth of each page. And now I'm done with it; perhaps I'll read it again....
June 13, 2012
My favorite essay out of this collection is "Making the Ghosts Speak." It is a coming-of-age essay that manages to focus on the post-traumatic stress and identity crisis that Wiesel experienced after surviving WWII, but the articulation of his unique experience of isolation, misery, and a yearning for connection are universal. I teach this every year as part of a coming-of-age unit in a nonfiction writing class, and the universality of his sentiment always moves me deeply, and especially because I'm able to witness other people connect with it as well.
December 27, 2014
I started this book in search of literary inspiration. The manuscript I am working on needed some work, and I wanted literary nourishment to motivate and stretch my mind. This piece did exactly what I hoped it would. It is only the third book I have read from Elie Wiesel, but what a rich blessing. The amount underlined in this book makes it look more like a coloring book than a serious work of history, but my pen could not be held back. I would gift this book to anyone in search of something, anything; and I think that is all of us.
April 6, 2012
Holocaust survivor/ Nobel Peace Prize winner Weisel’s collection of essays and speeches is incredibly uplifting. The book covers a range of topics; one of my favorites is the essay “Why I Write”. Wherein he says: “Why do I write? Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness.” I read this book at age 21, each time I revisit I’m astounded by his wisdom. I learned a lot about what’s important in life from this man.
January 10, 2010
Essays by Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, philosopher, and author of Night. (An interesting story: Wiesel, also a Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote to President Carter to congratulate him on winning the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. The letter included the date and time – October 10, 2003, 5:00 AM!)
December 10, 2014
An evocative, poignant collection of writings from our greatest living Jewish writer. This book is often painful to read, but all the same, the reader is grateful that Wiesel survived "the Kingdom of Night" to bring us these words.
February 19, 2008
Love this quote:
Why do I write? Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness. (p13)
Why do I write? Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness. (p13)
November 19, 2016
A collection of speeches that display Wiesel's mastery of the spoken word and singular ability to find light in a broken darkness.
July 18, 2023
Probably one of the best books I’ve read.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews