SOURCE: Green, Mary Jean. “Witness to the Absurd: Elie Wiesel and the French Existentialists.” Renascence 29, no. 4 (summer 1977): 170-84.

In the following essay, Green considers the influence of French existentialism—particularly the work of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre—on Wiesel's fiction.

Elie Wiesel has gained a certain reputation in America as a “Jewish writer,” a survivor of the Holocaust and a teller of Hasidic tales. As the sales of his books in English translation far surpass those of the original French editions, the fact that Wiesel wrote his novels in French is in danger of being quietly forgotten. Yet, although Wiesel first came to France only in his late teens after his liberation from Buchenwald, his contact with French literature and thought had a considerable influence on his novels. In fact, the central concerns of Wiesel's novels reflect those of the French existentialists, principally Camus and Sartre, who...