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    Elie Wiesel - Childhood

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    Lori
    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania to an observant Jewish family. He recalls spending his Sabbaths with his father and grandmother, observing religious traditions. His grandmother would quiz him on his studies after he ate the buns she baked. Wiesel found learning the Hebrew alphabet magical, as his teacher explained God used the 22 letters to create the world. Studying ancient texts filled Wiesel with awe, as he felt transported to places like the beginning of time with Adam and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

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    Elie Wiesel - Childhood

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    Lori
    102 views1 page
    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania to an observant Jewish family. He recalls spending his Sabbaths with his father and grandmother, observing religious traditions. His grandmother would quiz him on his studies after he ate the buns she baked. Wiesel found learning the Hebrew alphabet magical, as his teacher explained God used the 22 letters to create the world. Studying ancient texts filled Wiesel with awe, as he felt transported to places like the beginning of time with Adam and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

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    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania to an observant Jewish family. He recalls spending his Sabbaths with his father and grandmother, observing religious traditions. His grandmother would quiz him on his studies after he ate the buns she baked. Wiesel found learning the Hebrew alphabet magical, as his teacher explained God used the 22 letters to create the world. Studying ancient texts filled Wiesel with awe, as he felt transported to places like the beginning of time with Adam and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    102 views1 page

    Elie Wiesel - Childhood

    Uploaded by

    Lori
    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania to an observant Jewish family. He recalls spending his Sabbaths with his father and grandmother, observing religious traditions. His grandmother would quiz him on his studies after he ate the buns she baked. Wiesel found learning the Hebrew alphabet magical, as his teacher explained God used the 22 letters to create the world. Studying ancient texts filled Wiesel with awe, as he felt transported to places like the beginning of time with Adam and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 1

    R E ADI NG

    Elie Wiesel’s Childhood


    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, a border town that changed hands between
    Romania and Hungary several times during his life. Sighet was a community with a
    significant population of observant Jews, like Wiesel’s family. Wiesel introduces Sighet
    in the early pages of Night but tells readers much more about his early life there, his
    family, and his faith in a later memoir called All Rivers Run to the Sea:
    Shabbat (the Sabbath) was the only day I spent with [my father]. In Sighet, Shabbat
    began on Friday afternoon. Shops closed well before sundown, stragglers and late-
    comers having been admonished by rabbinical emissaries and inspectors: “Let’s go,
    it’s late, time to close up! Shabbat is coming!” And woe to him who disobeyed. After
    the ritual bath we would walk to services, dressed for the occasion. Sometimes my
    father would take my hand to protect me, as we passed the nearby police station
    or the central prison on the main square. I liked it when he did that, and I like to
    remember it now. I felt reassured, content. Bound to me, he belonged to me. We
    formed a bloc. . . .

    Friday was our special time. I would stop and see [Grandma Nissel, his paternal
    grandmother] on my way home from heder [Jewish school]. “Eliezer, my boy, come,
    I’m waiting for you!” she would call out from her window. She would give me fresh
    buns from the oven and sit and watch fondly, her hands folded, happy and at peace,
    a glimmer in her blue-gray eyes, as I washed and recited the appropriate prayer. . . .
    I would look at her as I ate and, fifteen minutes later, I would get up. “I have to go
    home and get ready, Grandma. Shabbat will be here any minute now.” But then,
    when I was already at the door, she would call me back. “Tell me what you learned
    this week.” It was part of our ritual. I should share a Bible story or, later, an insight
    of the Midrash (commentary on the Bible text). . . .

    [S]tudy became a true adventure for me. My first teacher, the Batizer Rebbe, a
    sweet old man with a snow-white beard that devoured his face, pointed to the
    twenty-two holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet and said, “Here, children, are the
    beginning and the end of all things. Thousands upon thousands of works have been
    written and will be written with these letters. Look at them and study them with
    love, for they will be your links to life. And to eternity.”

    When I read the first word aloud—Bereshit, “in the beginning”—I felt transported
    into an enchanted universe. An intense joy gripped me when I came to understand
    the first verse. “It was with the twenty-two letters of the aleph-bet (Hebrew alpha-
    bet) that God created the world,” said the teacher, who on reflection was probably
    not so old. “Take care of them and they will take care of you. They will go with you
    everywhere. They will make you laugh and cry. Or rather, they will cry when you
    cry and laugh when you laugh, and if you are worthy of it, they will allow you into
    hidden sanctuaries where all becomes . . . ” All becomes what? Dust? Truth? Life? It
    was a sentence he never finished.

    There was something terrifying and fascinating about reading ancient texts,
    something that filled me with awe. Without moving I could ramble through worlds
    visible and invisible. I was in two places at once, a thousand places at once. I was
    with Adam at the beginning barely awakened to a world streaming with light; with
    Moses in Sinai under a flaming sky.1

    1 Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1994), 4, 6, 10–11.

    10 Teaching NIGHT

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