Wiesel's collective memory

I've been reading all of Patricia Hampl's "I Could Tell you Stories" for my final, and what I read today coincides with what Wiesel (and most of our authors, really) is trying to do with his stories in Night. She is talking about writers of the Eastern Europe persuasion, but I think it could be said that non-American writers fall into this category, as she later goes on to explain.Hampl is discussing the idea of memory and continuity in writers who have had to remember not only for themselves but for a whole era, a whole nation. That is definitely Wiesel.

"Remembrance in these writers is less strictly personal than it is in most American autobiography, through the uncanny and formative moments remain, as in any memoir, the basis of the work. But for these writers the past is the nation's finally, not the family's as it so typically is in American memoir. The brush strokes are of history, rather than autobiography" (83).

Hampl is calling attention here to the scope and intent of a memoir; she is saying that for American writers, whose lives and stories are shaped largely by and of their personal experiences and go on to reflect such things, scope and intent is not so all encompassing as it is for other non-American memoirists. Americans have always had a can-do, self-reliance sort of mentality, and even though other societies and individuals have this mentality too (Wiesel certainly does pull him self along), other people don't necessarily focus on the self quite to the point that American writers might. It is the difference between memoir and autobiography, she says.

For Wiesel, who must remember and write for whole countries, families and nation/states, the luxury of focusing on the self has disappeared with the past. Although Hampl is writing about the author Czeslaw Milosz and not Elie Wiesel, what she writes of the former could be said of the latter.


"[He] hinges the personal to the history of the nation. The fusion of these two narrations--one intimate, the other public--creates a powerful call and reply which achieves poetic form. It is a relationship--that bruised word of our own relentlessly psychological culture, reclaimed by the impersonal method [he] suggests" (86).


Wiesel's attempt at creating both personal and public narratives and histories in Night serves a purpose as a historical work, but it goes deeper than that in also capturing the stories of several "smaller" lives. The things he's chosen to include support his scope and intent to make this a literary work; each scene, each individual, each location works with this quality of memoir to highlight and foster discussion about "the greater truth" or the greater truths that must come of such a book.