The Jews of Silence: a Personal Report on Soviet Jewry, by Elie Wiesel; Translated [From the Hebrew] by Neal Kozodoy

Wiesel, Elie

ISBN 10: 0853030057 / ISBN 13: 9780853030058

Published by London, Vallentine, Mitchell, 1968

About this Item

Fine copy in the original gilt-blocked cloth. Corners sharp with an overall tight, bright and clean impression. Uncommon in such positive condition. ; 160 pages; Description: 160 p. 23 cm. Bibliography: p. 159-160. Subjects: Wiesel, Elie (b. 1928) --Travel --Soviet Union. Jews --Persecutions --Soviet Union. Soviet Union --Description and travel. 1 Kg.

Seller Inventory # 148342

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Jews of Silence: a Personal Report on Soviet Jewry, by Elie Wiesel; Translated [From the Hebrew] by Neal Kozodoy
• Publisher: London, Vallentine, Mitchell
• Publication Date: 1968
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0853030057
• ISBN 13: 9780853030058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis

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 falseâ 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.”
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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 peopleâ 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 giftâ a Russian-language translation of Night, published illegally by the underground. “â My God,’ I thought, â this man risked arrest and prison just to make my writing available to people here!’ I embraced him with tears in my eyes.”

About the Author

ELIE WIESEL was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The author of more than fifty internationally acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, he was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University for forty years. Wiesel died in 2016.