Salon.com > Jill Priluck

A conversation with Elie Wiesel

Wed, 05 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The world hasn't been the same since the 1958 publication of Elie Wiesel's "Night," his slim, powerful script of being deported with his family from the Transylvanian village of Sighet to Buchenwald and then Auschwitz. Neither has Wiesel, the celebrated writer, teacher and Nobel Prize-winner who recently published the second volume of his memoirs, "And the Sea Is Never Full."

With millions of readers in some 30 languages, "Night" spawned a generation of Holocaust writings. But "Night" did something else. It gave voice to Wiesel's memory -- and, in turn, to the memory of thousands of genocide victims.

Wiesel, 71, lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a neighborhood dominated by high-rise apartment buildings. We meet in his study -- a separate apartment adjacent to the one he shares with his wife -- which, with books everywhere, resembles a library. Behind Wiesel's desk are volumes of both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud. Above it is a picture of the house in Sighet where he was born. He looks tired, as if he's been working all night, and at times he speaks so softly it's difficult to hear him. Wiesel's deep, brown eyes hold infinite layers of sadness, testament to the darkness he witnessed in the Nazi death camps during World War II.

Professor Neurotoxicity

Fri, 18 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Two weeks after Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold, video gaming outcasts
in a clique-saturated high school, carried out a terrorist-like attack on
Hitler's birthday and killed 15 people, including themselves, Elizabeth Farnsworth, chief
correspondent for "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer," moderated a discussion
among Denver teens about juvenile violence. In trying to understand the
motivation behind the worst juvenile shooting in U.S.
history, high school student Kyra Glore was describing the lingering
resentment she felt from being teased in elementary school.

Farnsworth: So you had some understanding of the kind of anger that Klebold and Harris had.
Glore: I do. Because it rips people up differently ... Something had to be
going on there that really, really pushed the right buttons, you know, to
get them to do this, because you don't just one morning wake up and say,
hey, I'm going to go shoot my classmates; I'm going to go pipe-bomb up the
school. You don't just wake up one morning and figure that out. Something
has to develop over years and years and years. That leads up to something
like that.
Continue Reading...

Battling stag/nation

Thu, 18 Mar 1999 19:31:00 +0000

Mary Daly sits in her one bedroom apartment, surrounded by bookish clutter. A trash can decorated with a map of the globe lies sideways on the floor and a candle drips on the mantle. These are the marks of a hag who doesn't give a rat's ass for convention or appearance.

Two of Daly's students sit on the couch in a sea of mail. "I'm really disgusted," says senior Kate Heekin after reading an unsigned
letter, postmarked Nashville, Tenn. An excerpt: "Phony cunts such as yourself
hyped feminist laws in the past to make a name for yourself, and sell a few
books, but now see that those laws are a double-edged sword and have come
back to bite you in the ass ... Get lost, you old senile cunt! You're just a
fuckin' man-hater because some guy banged your brains out years ago and
then dumped you."

"Wait, here's a nice older male who wrote to the [Boston] Globe,"
Daly offers, reading aloud from the newspaper. "Thank you. How can I help support your cause?"

Heekin and her roommate, Megan Niziol, are wearing navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Where's Mary Daly?!" in white type.