SOURCE: Diamond, Denis. “Elie Wiesel: Reconciling the Irreconcilable.” World Literature Today 57, no. 2 (spring 1983): 228-33.

In the following essay, Diamond surveys the defining characteristics of Wiesel's body of work.

Artists are praised when what they have created is described as their world. Elie Wiesel would defy anyone to write of “Wiesel's Auschwitz.” And yet, nobody has made that place more present than he, or has done so more relentlessly, more remorselessly, more persistently. That being the case, it becomes impossible to expect his work to do what he has said cannot be done: to concretize the mystery.

One generation later it can still be said, and must now be affirmed: there is no such thing as literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be. … Those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely. … The very attempt to...