In the decade following Wiesel's introduction of a verboten topic, few people — even outraged Jews — clamored to hear his grisly, heart-rending narrative, which he typifies as "the truth of a mad-man." However, critics began reexamining the contribution of Wiesel's shared memoir and elevated the brief nightmarish narrative to the level of a twentieth-century jeremiad:
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For the work's graphic recall of an imponderably monstrous scenario, critic Robert Alter compares Wiesel to Dante, the visionary author who traverses Hell in his Inferno.
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Daniel Stern, reviewing for the Nation, proclaims the book "the single most powerful literary relic of the Holocaust."
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Lothar Kahn compares Wiesel to an Old Testament prophet and draws a parallel between Wiesel's restless travels and the ceaseless journey of the mythic Wandering Jew, who is said to live forever in spiritual torment.
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Josephine Knopp pairs Wiesel's questioning of God with the biblical rebellions of Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah.
Subsequent works by Wiesel maintain his attempt to inspire moral activism and his fear that future generations will forget the lessons of history or turn their backs on preventable horrors.
At the pivotal point in Wiesel's career, he was transformed from a spare, insecure after-dinner speaker to America's Holocaust superstar. Awards continue to pour in from B'nai B'rith, the American Jewish Committee, the State of Israel, Artists and Writers for Peace in the Middle East, the Christopher Foundation, and the International Human Rights Law Group. Foundations have established honorariums for humanitarian Holocaust research and Judaica at the University of Haifa, Bar-Ilan University, and the universities of Denver and Florida.
