 First US edition (1966) | |
| Author | Elie Wiesel |
|---|---|
| Translator | Neal Kozodoy |
| Published | Holt, Rinehart & Winston |
Publication date | 1966 |
| Pages | 143 |
| OCLC | 000408687 |
The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry is a 1966 non-fiction book by Elie Wiesel. The book is based on his travels to the Soviet Union during the 1965 High Holidays to report on the condition of Soviet Jewry. [1] The work "called attention to Jews who were being persecuted for their religion and yet barred from emigrating." [2]
For two weeks in September 1965 during the Jewish High Holidays, Wiesel visited five cities in the Soviet Union to learn about the condition of Soviet Jewry in the post-Stalin era. Wiesel "concludes that despite the remorseless propaganda and harsh exactions of the government, soviet Jews still feel they share in the purpose and destiny of the Jewish people." [3] At the end of the work, Wiesel elucidates the meaning of the book's title with his admonition of world Jewry's lack of advocacy on behalf of their Soviet coreligionists: "What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today." [2] [4]
In 1966, excerpts from the book were published in L'Express and The Saturday Evening Post . [5] [6]
The original edition had a 34-page "Historical Afterword on Soviet Jewry", written by the book's translator Neal Kozodoy. [7]
In The New York Times , Isaac Bashevis Singer praised the book as "one passionate outcry, both in content and style." [7] In Commentary , Max Hayward wrote, "after reading this book nobody will be able to deny that the state of Russian Jewry remains a legitimate cause for concern in the outside world." [1]
According to Glenn Richter, the former national coordinator of the American organization Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, The Jews of Silence helped galvanize the Soviet Jewry Movement. [8] The Jews of Hope , a 1985 book by Martin Gilbert, was described as the spiritual successor to The Jews of Silence. A 2001 conference in Moscow entitled "From the Jews of Silence to the Jews of Triumph" discussed the triumph of the movement with the term "Jews of silence" used "to describe the state of affairs prior to the emergence of [the] movement". [9]
Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-American writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
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Jacob (Yaakov) Birnbaum was the German-born founder of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and other human rights organizations. Because the SSSJ, at the time of its founding, in 1964, was the first initiative to address the plight of Soviet Jewry, he is regarded as the father of the Movement to Free Soviet Jewry. His father was Solomon Birnbaum and grandfather Nathan Birnbaum.
The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, also known by its acronym SSSJ, was founded in 1964 by Jacob Birnbaum to be a spearhead of the U.S. movement for rights of the Soviet Jewry. Small, medium, and 6-digit-size demonstrations, at important locations, spread the message: Let my people go.
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Erev is a 1983 novel by Eli Schechtman. Erev's first edition is the beginning of Eli Schechtman's novel that was written in USSR and contained four books. The novel was published in in magazine version - from 1961 up to 1968 and in book - in 1965. The novel tells about the life of Russian Jews of the early twentieth century. The full Erev written and published in Israel in 1983 contain seven books. The novel tells about the life of Russian Jews of the early twentieth century until the end of World War II.
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