...Wiesel’s Changes of Faith The Holocaust brought about many hardships and created severe adversity for its victims that may have created experiences ultimately too traumatic that transformed their lives for years to come, either through starvation and labor in the concentration camps or execution and incineration in the extermination camps. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel tells the story of himself as a young Jewish boy born in Romania, who in 1944, was forced into ghettos with the rest of the Jewish citizens and later deported, along with his father, to the Nazi’s largest killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau. While living through this day-to-day horrifying basis, Elie begins to live with overwhelming fear and total alienation, as well as his increasing loss of faith on God and whether God is even existent or not for His lack of participation in trying to help the Jews. Although Elie manages to survive his long and frightening journey through both labor and death camps, his faith was never at the high-most air-reaching level as it dramatically changed throughout the course of the novel because of his disturbing experiences in witnessing cremated human beings, executions, and the going through the loss of his entire family. Prior to being deported to the camps, Elie’s faith was extremely high as he was well-established with his studies in mysticism and the cabbala and his great involvement with religion through prayers. Elie is finding a great interest in wanting to...
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...A Wave of Human Spirit The memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel, revealed how those who doubt or question God, as does the author, and those who have not doubted, never did lose their belief in God. As long as they keep the faith within oneself, an individual like Elie Wiesel who had experienced such adversities in life may become stronger to be able to get through the situation. A Wave of Human Spirit The Holocaust presented a call to people everywhere to reevaluate the role of God in their lives. The pain and suffering that we know took place is in dark contrast to what we would have thought possible in the presence of our God, and anyone who comes in contact with these horrors will be forever shaken in his present faith. Some have reacted with anger toward God, others with denial. Still others reacted with mistrust of all that God had meant before. But by asking questions, some have grown to learn that God never did things the way people expect Him to, and that fact becomes the cornerstone of the new start to their theology. God does not answer questions unless they suit His purposes. This is what we have learned from Auschwitz and from the writings of Elie Wiesel. We must continue to ask questions, continue to challenge God, until, one day, He Himself will give us the answers. And until then we should never feel so secure in faith as to think that Auschwitz could never happen again. We must make certain, through our actions, which it will never happen again. A Wave of Human...
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...Fiction, Between Inner Life and Collective Memory. A Methodological Reflection. François-Xavier Lavenne, Virginie Renard, François Tollet1 Introduction In the writing of their fictional works, novelists often have to reflect on the functioning of memory, for memory lies at the heart both of inner life and of human experience in general. It is indeed in the works of writers such as Marcel Proust or Jorge Luis Borges that the best exemplifications of the subjective experience of memory are to be found. However, from a strictly mnemonic point of view, literature provides more than a means of reflecting on memory: it is also the site of the rebirth and construction of individual and collective memories, which can then serve as a foundation for the writing of fictional works. Creative writing has a meiotic function and is as such a powerful tool capable of rescuing memories from oblivion and bringing them back to life, thus reconciling the past with the present. The present article seeks to bring to bear new perspectives on the relationship between a novelist’s personal memories, collective memory, and the fictional narratives partially inspired by these two types of memory. In the first section we briefly examine the distinction traditionally made between individual memory and collective memory, which we then try to reconcile so as to arrive at an approach to the mnemonic phenomenon that best fits the needs of literary scholars. In the second section we challenge the conventional...
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...___________________________ LIVING HISTORY Hillary Rodham Clinton Simon & Schuster New York • London • Toronto • Sydney • Singapore To my parents, my husband, my daughter and all the good souls around the world whose inspiration, prayers, support and love blessed my heart and sustained me in the years of living history. AUTHOR’S NOTE In 1959, I wrote my autobiography for an assignment in sixth grade. In twenty-nine pages, most half-filled with earnest scrawl, I described my parents, brothers, pets, house, hobbies, school, sports and plans for the future. Forty-two years later, I began writing another memoir, this one about the eight years I spent in the White House living history with Bill Clinton. I quickly realized that I couldn’t explain my life as First Lady without going back to the beginning―how I became the woman I was that first day I walked into the White House on January 20, 1993, to take on a new role and experiences that would test and transform me in unexpected ways. By the time I crossed the threshold of the White House, I had been shaped by my family upbringing, education, religious faith and all that I had learned before―as the daughter of a staunch conservative father and a more liberal mother, a student activist, an advocate for children, a lawyer, Bill’s wife and Chelsea’s mom. For each chapter, there were more ideas I wanted to discuss than space allowed; more people to include than could be named; more places visited than could be described...
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