On May 14, 1955, François Mauriac, Nobel-prize winning French novelist and biographer of General Charles de Gaulle, encouraged Wiesel to speak for the survivors of the Holocaust. Mauriac advised Wiesel on the publication of Night, a humanistic documentary which the author and his publisher pared down from a more than 800-page Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) to a manuscript one-eighth of the original, a spare, intense first-person account of his incarceration by the Nazi SS. The book was translated from Yiddish into French, retitled La Nuit, and dedicated to his parents and his little sister. It garnered weak response from potential publishers, who doubted that so pessimistic a story would find a ready audience. Meanwhile, Wiesel's journalistic career took him to Spain, Tangiers, Morocco, eastern Europe, Canada, Brazil, India, and Israel, where he observed the early years of Jewish statehood. While translating for the World Jewish Conference in Geneva, he followed the emergence of David Ben-Gurion, the bold Israeli leader, and met the great political, philosophical, and military figures of the era: General Moshe Dayan, Hannah Arendt, Pierre Mendès-France, Golda Meir, Nikita Khrushchev, Sir Anthony Eden, General Dwight Eisenhower, and Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
After moving to the United States in 1956, Wiesel lived alone at a hotel and wrote a spy novel under the pseudonym Elisha Carmeli while he reported U. N. activities for the Morgen Journal, a popular newspaper for immigrant Jews. In July of that year, he was hit by a speeding taxi in the heart of New York City. The first hospital where he was taken rejected him because he was considered too poor and not likely to recover. His injuries put him in a full-body cast and confined him to a wheelchair for a year. During his lengthy recuperation, he applied for United States citizenship, which he finally received in 1963.
On April 2, 1969, in the Ramban synagogue in the old sector of Jerusalem, Wiesel married Austrian-born writer and editor Marion Erster Rose, a survivor of the Holocaust and mother of a daughter named Jennifer. Wiesel lives in New York with his wife and their son, Shlomo Elisha, born in 1972, a Yale graduate specializing in computer science. Currently, Marion oversees the translation of her husband's works and joins with him in overseeing work of the Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, a consortium that studies the source and impetus of hate groups.
