disagree with "mediocre" label

books:

	• All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs Elie Wiesel Schocken, 1996 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

disagree with "mediocre" label

I found this a very compelling read, lasting over several readings. It's true the author did not stick tightly to chronological order, but anyone who has read his fiction knows his style tends to be very esoteric and rather free-floating (I personally do not care for his fiction, which I admit I do find to go over my head). However, as a reader, I certainly got a feel for emotions he felt throughout different experiences in his life. I found the last scene describing his emotions before and during his wedding to be really profound. It's true that there is a lot of Jewish content in this book, which may cause some of his analogies etc. to be less accessible to someone from a different background. However, for someone who wants to read a first-hand Holocaust experience without very strong graphic details, I do recommend it. (As a side note, just last week I actually attended a speech by Mr. Wiesel, and he is really a personable, funny, self-effacing and sweet man, not the really sad and somber person you might expect from his writings. I was surprised by this, pleasantly so!)

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6 stars?

This is one of the times when I think we should be able to go higher than 5 stars. Elie Wiesel's All Rivers Run to the Sea gave us a more in-depth look to the concentration camp survivor. He really gives us a rich experience in weaving together the threads of his past, from his days in school to the horror in the concentration camps, right up to his days of being a journalist, and ending with him as a groom. You really get a feel for the type of person he is as well - a wonderful, compassionate, and intelligent man. If you've read Night already, you're definitely going to want to check this out.

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My own small word

I would strongly recommend that all readers on Amazon read the review whose title caption is ' Remember'. It is far more extensive and far better than the small remarks I am about to post.
Elie Weisel is the one human being who more than any other has helped the world understand the horror of the Shoah , the Holocaust the Nazi destruction of one - third of the Jewish people six million human beings.
For this he should always have a place in the historical consciousness of both the Jewish people and mankind.
His memoir is at times very moving .For those who know his other work and his masterpiece ' Night' there will be much familiar here, though here the story is enriched by greater detail.
I find myself whenever I am reading Weisel unable to really judge in abstract or purely literary terms. His significance as a human being, as a witness as one who has spoken to me in my own life is so great that my feeling is closer to reverence than anything else.
I read this book with the idea that any additional detail about his life and work, any additional understanding of his thought about Man's relation to G-d would be worthwhile. I read this work as I will read all his future works as an admiring student of a great teacher.
May he be blessed by many more years of great creative work.

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Cascading Memories

Elie Wiesel may be best known as the author of "Night", his harrowing and sparse account of his time spent in the concentration camps. His literary works have focused around the events that shaped Holocaust survivors and the questions those survivors had about their faith afterwards. His life's work is heavily imbued by those events early in his life, his novels vast testaments to making sure the world never forgets the atrocities man inflicted upon man.

Yet there are many sides to this amazing man, which can often be forgotten when one dwells solely on his literary works. The first volume of Wiesel's memoirs, "All Rivers Run to the Sea", is a brilliant introduction and elucidation of the author. He relates quickly his early childhood and his time in the camps, but moves onto and focuses on his path after those events. As he forges a career as a journalist, meeting statesmen and celebrities, he finds himself and what causes he is willing to fight for. As a stateless person, his life is often difficult as he arouses suspicion, and he struggles constantly to make ends meet. Reading about his personal adventures, the reader sees how he is passionate, full of empathy, timid and captivating, a brilliant man with many stories to tell.

For anyone who has read Wiesel's writings, the style of "All Rivers Run to the Sea" will be just as familiar: while it is divided into sections, his reminiscenses are as tangential as his fictional stories. Learning about his real-life adventures, readers can easily see how Wiesel has woven his experiences into all of his fictional works. The praises and accolades he has received are more than well deserved, for as long as he writes, his people will have a testimony to their past and to their faith.

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Memoirs of a a gadol b'Israel

This spectacular memoir of Elie Wiesel, the great author and voice of conscience, begins with his boyhood in the small Transylvanian village of Sighet.

A pious child, with a great thirst for Jewish knowledge, a student of Torah and Talmud, and fascinated with the Kabbalah. Elie is swept into the Nazi ghetto and then death cams where he loses his parents and his beautiful little blond sister Tzipora, all of whom perished in the Nazi furnaces.

He writes in memory of his losses:

"If only I could recapture my father's wisdom, my little sister's innocent grace. If only I could recapture the rage of the resistance fighter, the suffering of the mystic dreamer, the solitude of the orphan in a sealed cattle car, the death of each and every one of them. If only I could step out of myself and merge with them".

Wiesel writes of the prophecy told to his mother by the Wizhnitz Rabbi that her son would become a gadol b'Israel (a great man in Israel) but that she would not live to see it.

Wiesel records some of the horrors he witnessed in the death camps such as live children being thrown into furnaces by the Nazis, and laments the inaction by the Allies to do anything about the extermination they knew was taking place of the Jews- saving Jews was not a priority for the Allies either.

He mentions that most of the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis were intellectuals- not surprising in light of the fact hat most Jews who have thrown themselves into the campaign of hate against their fellow Jews in Israel.

He writes about the liberation of the death camps by the Allies after the war, and how one of the youngest child survivors of Buchenwald was eight year old Israel Meir Lau, later to be the Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of Israel. In his section of his travels around the world as a young man during the early 1950s he writes of his great compassion at the plight of poverty-stricken children in India.

Wiesel records his life in a youth home for Jewish refugees in Paris and the fate of displaced Jews after World War II, his life as a journalist for Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot for whom he covered the Eichmann trial, civil rights struggles, the Six Day War, the 1968 Student insurrections in France, and other world events.

He has always been greatly interested in philosophy and parapsychology and writes of his discussions with such great leaders as Golda Meir and David
Ben-Gurion, as well as the greatest thinkers of the day. He writes of his great love for Israel and it's people for which he has been attacked by the hate-filled bigots of the International Left. He also took a strong stand for persecuted Soviet Jewry during the 1960s and 1970s. Elie Wiesel also writes of his great compassion for humanity as a whole, such as his pain at seeing the suffering of destitute children during his travels in India. But unlike certain Jews of the Left, he does not see a contradiction between this and his great love of Israel and the Jewish people- Ahavat Israel.

He writes with great compassion, passion, anger, sadness and hope.
In a plea for the plight of his own people today, especially the youth and children of Israel today targeted by terror and forces of genocide (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ahmadinejad regime- as well as all who are sympathetic to these anti-Jewish elements) he penned an open letter to President Bush stating: "Please remember that the maps on Arafat's uniform and in Palestinian children's textbooks show a Palestine encompassing not only all of the West Bank but all of Israel, while Palestinian leaders loudly proclaim that 'Palestine extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, from Rosh Hanikra (in the North) to Rafah (in Gaza). Please remember Danielle Shefi, a little girl in Israel. Danielle was five. When the murderers came, she hid under her bed. Palestinian gunmen found and killed her anyway. Think of all the other victims of terror in the Holy Land. With rare exceptions, the targets were young people, children and families. Please remember that Israel--having lost too many sons and daughters, mothers and fathers--desperately wants peace. It has learned to trust its enemies' threats more than the empty promises of 'neutral' governments".
Elie Wiesel is a true voice of truth and conscience.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

From his early years with his loving Jewish family to the horrors of Auschwitz to his life as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Elie Wiesel tells his story. Passionate and poignant, All Rivers Run to the Sea is an unforgettable book of love and rage, doubt and faith, despair and trust, and ultimately, of wisdom. of photos.

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