Early Life
Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains. His parents were Sarah Feig and Chlomo Wiesel. In the home, Wiesel's family spoke Yiddish most of the time, but also Romanian, Hungarian and German. Elie's mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a celebrated Vizhnitz Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Dodye was active and trusted within the community, and in the early years of his life had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped and were hungry.
Elie's father, Chlomo, instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study the Torah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother Sarah promoted faith.
Wiesel had three siblings – older sisters Hilda and Beatrice, and younger sister Tzipora. Beatrice and Hilda survived the war and were reunited with Wiesel at a French orphanage. They eventually emigrated to North America, with Beatrice moving to Montreal, Canada. Tzipora, Chlomo and Sarah did not survive the Holocaust.
Read more about this topic: Elie Wiesel
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didnt, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“... it is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering selfnever to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)