Elie Wiesel's Character Analysis

The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel contains the stories and haunting memories of a Holocaust survivor named Elie Wiesel. Because Wiesel was a young Jew boy during the reign of Adolf Hitler, he and his family along with other Jews were brought to concentration, death and labor camps. As a result of his experiences during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel changes from a religious, sensitive little boy to a spiritually dead, unemotional man.

As a child Elie Wiesel was a very faithful young boy who was raised in a very religious Jewish home. Wiesel grew up in a little town called Transylvania. As a child he had aspired to become a Kabbalist. Elie had asked his father to find him a master who would guide him in his studies of Kabbalah. But his father told him “‘You are too young for that, Maimonides tells us that one one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend.” (Wiesel, 4) His father also often told him that there were no Kabbalists in Sighet (where they lived at the time). But this didn’t stop Elie’s drive of studying Kabbalah. He even eventually found a master himself and that master was Moishe the Beadle. To prove even more of how Elie Wiesel was very faithful in his religion was that while most kids his age were playing Elie was
“The Bible commands us to rejoice during the eight days of celebration, but our hearts were not in it. We wished the holiday would end so as not to have to pretend.” (Wiesel, 10) At this particular time they were living in the Ghettos. Then the passover happened when the Jews were in the concentration camps. Usually their tradition during the Passover they would be to fast. “The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. It this place, we were always fasting.” (Wiesel,