Moment Magazine Book Club

Welcome to the Moment Magazine Book Club!

The January-February selection is Night by Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night was published in 1956, 11 years after he had been liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Originally published as the 117th volume in a series of Yiddish memoirs, the first draft ran over 800 pages. A subsequent 121-page edition reduced the story to its elements, bringing its horrifying but ennobling testimony to the attention of the world. Night has sold six million copies in the United States and has been translated into 30 languages.

Wiesel begins Night with his childhood as an Orthodox Jew in a Romanian town, then reports with steely simplicity the roundup of his family and their neighbors, the train cars packed with people, the gas chambers and the slave labor, the cruelty and death. His mother and beloved young sister were gassed but Wiesel, his father and two older sisters survived to endure humiliation, violence, terror and starvation, first in Auschwitz and then in Buchenwald. His father died just before liberation, which came when the author was 15 years old.

Night has not lost its power; it is read in schools and was recently selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. To read Night “is to lose one’s own innocence about the Holocaust all over again,” writes critic Ruth Franklin. The book is so economical, deliberate and devastating that it remains the eyewitness account that teaches each generation to remember these terrible events.
—Susan Willens

Study Questions for Elie Weisel’s "Night"

Why read this book again? Why now?
How does it seem different than when you read it earlier in your life?
In the beginning of the book, you might experience a terrible suspense or dramatic irony, in which the reader knows more than the characters. Discuss the impact of Moshe the Beadle’s warnings, the loss of freedom, the roundup into the ghetto and then the transport to the camps.
Choose one paragraph about Auschwitz or Buchenwald. Discuss the tone of the telling. If Wiesel had ranted or begged for sympathy, how would such emotion change the impact of the narration?
Central to the story is Eliezer’s closeness to his father. What does he tell the reader about this? How does he respond to his father’s death?
At the end Eliezer sees his reflection in a mirror. He has become “a corpse,” a dead man who has lost his faith in God. How does this book speak to the beliefs of the writer? Is it hopeless? Is it beautiful?

About Your Book Club
Why form a book group? After your school years end, it gets harder to find the time and energy to read. So there’s this absence—less reading-for-enjoyment and less conversation about books. It's a good time to form a book-discussion group.

You and some friends may decide to get some other friends together for a book group, at first just to see whether it will work for you. Right away, you’ll be asking the usual questions: who? when? where? and what?

In this edition of the on-line Moment Magazine Book Group, we’ll talk about “who,” that is, which friends and acquaintances will make the best members of the group.

While you can form a good nucleus from the friends who first thought of making a book group, your group will be more interesting if you reach out beyond your best buddies. Each ”founding father and mother” might suggest one person the others do not know well.

Think about people at your synagogue or Hillel, your children’s school, your office, or health club. Unexpected opinions brighten up conversations about what you read on your own.

You are looking for someone who:

likes to read what the group has decided to focus on—like fiction, history, poetry, science writing
speaks his or her own mind with confidence
lets other people speak
learns from what others say with an open mind
is different from the core group in some way—older or younger, differently educated or of a different profession.

You do NOT want a nonstop talker, a bully, a lover of the sound of his or her own voice, someone so sure of everything that he/she kills the conversation. All others should be welcome in your book discussion group. You may be surprised that friends change their personalities when they get together in a reading group. Men defer to women; spouses think independently of each other. A quiet person sparkles. If the group works, the book opens before you and so do the members.

More next time on-line about when and where to meet, and whether to hire a leader. Good reading!

“How to Start a Book Group and Keep It Interesting” by Susan Willens Arbor Seminars 1990.