SOURCE: Roth, John K. “From Night to Twilight: A Philosopher's Reading of Elie Wiesel.” Religion and Literature 24, no. 1 (spring 1992): 59-73.

In the following essay, Roth delineates the major thematic concerns of Wiesel's oeuvre.

Everything to do with Auschwitz must, in the end, lead into darkness.

—Elie Wiesel

Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard, James, Camus, and Wittgenstein—these great masters of philosophy move me. Philosophically, however, no writer disturbs and provokes me more than one who claims he “never intended to be a philosopher.”¹ Whenever I read a book by Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Holocaust, the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews, I feel compelled to respond in writing of my own. No other author affects me quite that way. For more than twenty years I have been doing a philosopher's reading of Elie Wiesel. On this occasion I write because I have just...