Audiobooks by Elie Wiesel

A Rare Recording of Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (September 30, 1928 to July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. In 1986, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being a messenger to mankind: his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity.

Elie Wiesel (Author), Elie Wiesel (Narrator)

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Hostage

From Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and author of Night, a charged, deeply moving novel about the legacy of the Holocaust in today's troubled world and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg-professional storyteller, writer and beloved husband-has been taken hostage: abducted from his home in Brooklyn, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don't explain why the innocent Shaltiel has been chosen, just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling stories-to himself and to the men who hold his fate in their hands. With beauty and sensitivity, Wiesel builds the world of Shaltiel's memories, haunted by the Holocaust and a Europe in the midst of radical change. A Communist brother, a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis in a cellar, the kindness of liberating Russian soldiers, the unrest of the 1960s-these are the stories that unfold in Shaltiel's captivity, as the outside world breathlessly follows his disappearance and the police move toward a final confrontation with his captors. Impassioned, provocative and insistently humane, Hostage is both a masterly thriller and a profoundly wise meditation on the power of memory to connect us to the past and our shared need for resolution. Translated by Catherine Temerson. "Wiesel takes us on a journey through dream, memory, and especially storytelling in Hostage . . . He continues to remind us of the brilliant possibilities of the philosophical and political novel." -Starred review, Kirkus

Elie Wiesel (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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Rashi

From Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, comes a magical audio book that introduces us to the towering figure of Rashi-Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki-the great biblical and Talmudic commentator of the Middle Ages. Wiesel brilliantly evokes the world of medieval European Jewry, a world of profound scholars and closed communities ravaged by outbursts of anti-Semitism and decimated by the Crusades. The incomparable scholar Rashi, whose phrase-by-phrase explication of the oral law has been included in every printing of the Talmud since the fifteenth century, was also a spiritual and religious leader: His perspective, encompassing both the mundane and the profound, is timeless. Wiesel's Rashi is a heartbroken witness to the suffering of his people, and through his responses to major religious questions of the day we see still another side of this greatest of all interpreters of the sacred writings. Both beginners and advanced students of the Bible rely on Rashi's groundbreaking commentary for simple text explanations and Midrashic interpretations. Wiesel, a descendant of Rashi, proves an incomparable guide who enables us to appreciate both the lucidity of Rashi's writings and the milieu in which they were formed.

Elie Wiesel (Author), Walter Dixon (Narrator)

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The Sonderberg Case

From the Nobel laureate and author of the masterly Night, a deeply felt, beautifully written novel of morality, guilt, and innocence. Despite personal success, Yedidyah—a theater critic in New York City, husband to a stage actress, father to two sons—finds himself increasingly drawn to the past. As he reflects on his life and the decisions he's made, he longingly reminisces about the relationships he once had with the men in his family (his father, his uncle, his grandfather) and the questions that remain unanswered. It's a feeling that is further complicated when Yedidyah is assigned to cover the murder trial of a German expatriate named Werner Sonderberg. Sonderberg returned alone from a walk in the Adirondacks with an elderly uncle, whose lifeless body was soon retrieved from the woods. His plea is enigmatic: "Guilty . . . and not guilty." These words strike a chord in Yedidyah, plunging him into feelings that bring him harrowingly close to madness. As Sonderberg's trial moves along a path of dizzying yet revelatory twists and turns, Yedidyah begins to understand his own family's hidden past and finally liberates himself from the shadow it has cast over his life. With his signature elegance and thoughtfulness, Elie Wiesel has given us an enthralling psychological mystery, both vividly dramatic and profoundly emotional. Translated by Catherine Temerson

Elie Wiesel (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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A Mad Desire to Dance

A searing exploration of a man haunted by the horrors of the twentieth century, a man who feels he must be going mad but who finds a way out of the darkness. Doriel is a European transplanted to New York who carries with him a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a resistance leader, survives the war but dies in a car crash with her husband soon afterward. Doriel's longing for his parents, and a longing to know his family's secrets, haunts him and denies him the chance for happiness or intimacy with women. The intense study of Judaism offers him no solace; to the contrary, he comes to believe he is haunted by a dybbuk. His visits to Israel land him in anti-Zionist enclaves where only the coming of the Messiah is important. A child during the war, all he knows of the Holocaust comes from movies, newsreels, and books. But it is enough. Five years of psychoanalysis brings him to a crossroads. Finally he comes to grips with his mother's secret -- a wartime affair -- and the process triggers in him a new understanding that only love can heal the most intimate of wounds.

Elie Wiesel (Author), Kirsten Potter, Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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Dawn

With the coming of dawn is the coming of death for a captured English officer in British-controlled Palestine. Elisha, a young Israeli freedom fighter, is his executioner. Ordered to kill the officer in reprisal for Britain's execution of a Jewish prisoner, Elisha thinks about his past-a sorrowful memory of the nightmare of Nazi death camps. As the only surviving member of his family, he dreamt of a wonderful future in his promised homeland. But instead, he finds himself closer to committing heartless murder with the approach of daylight. Dawn presents a haunting glimpse into the soul of one man and a budding nation.

Elie Wiesel (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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Day

First published in English under the title The Accident, Elie Wiesel's third novel in his trilogy of Holocaust literature has now adopted Wiesel's original title: Day. In the opening scene, a Holocaust survivor and successful journalist steps off a curb in New York City directly into the pathway of an oncoming cab. As he struggles between life and death, the journalist recalls the effects of the historical tragedy of the Holocaust on himself and his family. Like the memoir Night and the novel Dawn, Wiesel again poses important questions involving the meaning of almost an entire annihilation of a race, loss of faith in the face of mass murder and torture and the aftermath and effects of the Holocaust on individuals and the Jewish people.

Elie Wiesel (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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Night

An enduring classic of Holocaust literature, Night offers a personal and unforgettable account of the appalling horrors of Hitler's reign of terror. Through the eyes of 14-year-old Eliezer, we behold the tragic fate of the Jews from the little town of Sighet. Even as they are stuffed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, the townspeople refuse to believe rumors of anti-Semitic atrocities. Not until they are marched toward the blazing crematory at the camp's "reception center" does the terrible truth sink in. Narrator George Guidall intensifies the emotional impact as blind hope turns to utter horror. His performance captures the profound agony of young Eliezer as he witnesses the suffering and death of his family and loses all that he holds sacred.

Elie Wiesel (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

In this first volume of his two-volume autobiography, Wiesel takes us from his childhood memories of a traditional and loving Jewish family in the Romanian village of Sighet through the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the years of spiritual struggle, to his emergence as a witness for the Holocaust's martyrs and survivors and for the State of Israel, and as a spokesman for humanity. With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs. "From the abyss of the death camps Wiesel has come as a messenger to mankind--not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement." --From the citation for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize

Elie Wiesel (Author), Elie Wiesel (Narrator)

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A Beggar in Jerusalem

Elie Wiesel's tale is of the days following the Six-Day War, when a survivor of the Holocaust visits the reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall in the Old City, he encounters the beggars and madmen who congregate there every evening and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present.

Elie Wiesel (Author), Frederick Davidson (Narrator)

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The Judges: A Novel

A plane en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers: Claudia, who has left her husband and found new love; Razziel, a religious teacher who was once a political prisoner; Yoav, a terminally ill Israeli commando; George, an archivist who is hiding a Holocaust secret that could bring down a certain politician; and Bruce, a would-be priest turned philanderer. Their host - an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself simply the Judge - begins to interrogate them, forcing them to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces that one of them-the least worthy - will die.

Elie Wiesel (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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The Forgotten

Elie Wiesel (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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