Night Questions

1. Wiesel’s childhood home is in Sighet, Transylvania, near the Transylvanian Alps in central Romania.

2. The Jewish Cabala interprets the Hebrew Bible and Jewish texts as concerning an all powerful, hard-to-understand being that is experienced through the living world.

3. The truths of the world Elie was referring to involve those concerning God and his works – God’s influence on life and the purpose for everything. The truth, I believe, Elie was ignorant of was that things happen for a reason.

4. Moshe the Beadle is a significant character because, aside from being a bum, he was the embodiment of Elie’s childhood dream. He tells Elie that you must ask the right questions to get the right answers, in which lies the truth. Moshe is prescient in his admonition to Elie because it gives Elie a right question to seek the answer to.

5. The people of Sighet ignore Moshe after he returns from escape because they do not trust his total sanity and believe that he has made up a story. They don’t listen to him because they do not believe him, and feel that they have more important matters in life to worry about than a seemingly-fictitious tale.

6. Madame Schachter is a woman that went insane when she was separated from her husband who, on the ride to the camp, envisioned illusions of flames in the distance. She is similar to Moshe that they both had warnings or premonitions to tell about the future that were ignored, in the sense that there were flames at their destination in the furnace.

7. Consider this passage on pg. 32:
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desires to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.

8. The context of this passage is that Elie has realized this situation and with it everything he believed in seems lost and all of his dreams and wishes have fled. Even if he survived the ordeal, things would be different forever and he was never going to be the same. The young Elie’s theology has changed from an enthusiastic youth with plans to study his faith in the future to being a lost soul without hope of any future, especially one with God.

9. Elie’s attitude toward God changes many times throughout the novel. This change occurs as the events in his life worsen or better. He is most angry with God when the little boy is hung and during the Jewish New Year. He isn’t angry at all when the camp is bombed.

10. In Night, night refers to a world without God, as it was in the creation of the earth when on the first day night was cast upon it.

11. Night is such a slim book because Wiesel had written a 900-page text in Yiddish titled Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) which was later shortened and translated to the French La Nuit and the English Night.

12. Night is both a story of tragedy and triumph. Although Eliezer escaped physical torture, he could never gain back the emotional scarring he endured.