The world's most renowned writer of Holocaust literature, Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel seems forever on the cusp between devout Jew and agnostic existentialist. From his pen pour the repeated why's, a demand for response from the silent God whom Elie revered from childhood as the guiding figure of his being. The grandson of rabbis and only son and third of four children of grocers Shlomo (spelled "Chlomo" in Night) and Sarah Feig Wiesel, he was born September 30, 1928, in the shtetl, or village, of Sighet, Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains, a thriving Judaic cultural center for 15,000 Jews which was later absorbed by Hungary. Shy, somber-eyed, and introspective at age three, Elie attended classes under a revered rabbi and learned the Hebrew alphabet, recalling in later years the simple classroom repetition of aleph, beth, gimel (A, B, C). A scholarly child, he preferred chess to soccer and followed the orthodox Hasidic traditions by wearing peyes, or side curls, and donning tefillin, the traditional leather phylacteries that bound scripture to his forehead and arm before morning prayers; on Fridays, he honored the Sabbath with prayers, meditation, devotional readings, and chants. He picked apricots on his grandfather's farm, was blessed at age eight by the revered Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz, challenged friend Itzu Goldblatt in a match of piety and self-discipline, and attended high school in Debrecen and Nagyvárad with the intention of becoming a writer.
Wiesel had superb role models. His maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, a white-bearded farmer, told lively stories and shared the camaraderie of the family prodigy, who, in early childhood, was obviously preparing for a life of piety and scholarship. Elie's father, a shopkeeper and revered community leader and counselor, served the town as a mediator for Jews and a saintly humanitarian to the needy. Himself a victim of torture and jail for aiding Jews to escape persecution in Poland, Shlomo urged Elie to trust in human goodness and to study modern Hebrew, Freudian psychology, and astronomy. In contrast to Shlomo's aims for his contemplative son, Wiesel's mother, a high school graduate who was the voice of tradition throughout his childhood, quoted Goethe and Schiller and guided him toward traditional Judaism through study of the Torah, Talmud, and cabbala, the Hasidic mystical lore that he studied with Moshe the Beadle, a synogogue caretaker. While Elie entered his teens and studied for a life of orthodoxy, Nazi soldiers under the command of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler were introducing the deadly poisonous Zyklon B to death camps, where they efficiently gassed exiles from Russia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia in large numbers before disposing of their remains in camp crematories.
