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Writing and publishing

1954: Un di Velt Hot Geshvign

From Buchenwald, Wiesel wanted to go to Palestine, but was prevented by British immigration restrictions. Refusing to return to Sighet, he was sent instead to the Oeuvre au Secours aux Enfants (Children's Rescue Service) with 400 other orphans, first to Belgium, then to Normandy, where he learned that his two older sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, had survived.^[9]

From 1947–1950, he studied the Talmud, philosophy, and literature at the Sorbonne, attending lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber. To supplement his $16 a week stipend, he taught Hebrew, and worked as a translator for the militant Yiddish weekly Zion in Kamf, which eased him into a career in journalism.^[9] In 1948, at the age of 19, he was sent to Israel as a war correspondent by the French newspaper L'arche, and after the Sorbonne, he became chief foreign correspondent of the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

For ten years, he kept his story to himself, refusing even to discuss it. In 1979, he wrote: "So heavy was my anguish that I made a vow: not to speak, not to touch upon the essential for at least ten years. Long enough to see clearly. Long enough to learn to listen to the voices crying inside my own. Long enough to regain possession of my memory. Long enough to unite the language of man with the silence of the dead."^[37] It was in 1954, on board a ship to Brazil, where he had an assignment to cover Christian missionary activity in poor Jewish communities, that he started to write. "I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading. I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival ... My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation ... The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully, never participating in the ship's activities, constantly pounding away on my little portable, oblivious of my fellow passengers ..."^[38]

By the end of the journey, Wiesel had an 862-page manuscript that he called Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent).^[39] On the ship, he was introduced by friends to Mark Turkov, a publisher of Yiddish texts, and he gave Turkov the only copy of his precious manuscript.^[40] It was published as a 245-page volume the same year in Buenos Aires, the 117th book in a 176-volume series of Yiddish memoirs of Poland and the war, called Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry, Buenos Aires 1946–66).^[41] Whereas the other books in the series were testimonials to the victims, Ruth Wisse writes that Un di Velt Hot Geshvign stood out as a "highly selective and isolating literary narrative" influenced by Wiesel's reading of the French existentialists.^[2] The book attracted no literary interest and Wiesel continued with his journalism. In May 1955, he decided to interview the French prime minister, Pierre Mendes-France, and approached the novelist and Nobel laureate François Mauriac, a friend of Mendes-France, for an introduction.

1960: Night

Wiesel translated Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, and sent Mauriac a French manuscript within a year. Even with Mauriac's connections, no publisher could be found. They said it was too morbid, no one would read it. "Nobody wants to hear these stories," they told Wiesel.^[42] But in 1958, Jerome Linden of Les Editions de Minuit agreed to release a 178-page French translation retitled La Nuit, dedicated to Shlomo, Sarah, and Tzipora, with a preface by Mauriac.^[39] The same difficulty was then encountered finding an American publisher. According to Wiesel: "Some thought the book too slender (American readers seemed to prefer fatter volumes), others too depressing (American readers seemed to prefer optimistic books). Some felt that its subject was too little known, others that it was too well known."^[43]

In 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang—who Wiesel writes "believed in literature as others believe in God"^[43]—agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance, and published a 116-page English edition in the U.S. in September that year as Night, translated by Stella Rodway of McGibbon & Kee.^[44] Weisel was at the time working as a United Nations correspondent for Israeli newspapers and for the Jewish Daily Forward in New York. The first print run was 3,000 copies, and it took three years to sell them; it sold 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, at $3 a copy, but it attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with literary figures like Saul Bellow.^[1]

By 1997, Night was selling 300,000 copies a year in the United States.^[45] On January 16, 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose the novel for her book club; one million extra paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed carrying the "Oprah's Book Club" logo, with a new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface by Wiesel.^[46] By February 13, 2006, Night was no. 1 in The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction. By March 2006, it had sold six million copies in the U.S., and had been translated into 30 languages.^[2]