Dawn by Elie Wiesel.
A brief meditation on the nature of 'justice' and 'vengeance', Dawn is Wiesel’s attempt to reconcile how a Holocaust survivor might decide to spend the rest of his life. Unlike Wiesel, the protagonist Elisha joins the paramilitary forces committed to securing an independent state if Israel from British colonial control.
The novella's plot is straightforward: 18-year-old Elisha will shoot a British officer at dawn, in retribution for the British execution of a colleague. From here, we explore the inner tumult that this task has produced.
This is an oddly quiet book. Although set in the immediate post-WWII period (1948), it was published in the shadow of the Eichmann trial of 1961. At its heart, it gives some sense of the brutal logic that Israel uses to maintain their repression of the Palestinian people (who are noticeably absent in the text).
Our protagonist is quite aware that what he is asked to do is to will irrevocable transform him into what he once hated (a murderer, much as the Nazis murdered his family). The questions addressed in the author’s preface – How are we ever to disarm evil and abolish death as a means to an end? Can terror coexist with justice? Can hate engender anything but hatred? – cannot be adequately answered in the text.
Or perhaps, alas, Wiesel has answered those questions. In the end, Elisha concludes,
This seems a depressing and devastating conclusion but explains what has happened in the region since. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and continues that fine tradition of recipients who subsume universal humanitarian values to political expediency. Primarily remembered as a witness to the Holocaust, the hardness of heart evidenced in Dawn has become solidified in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the brutality that comes with that occupation.
It’s no small irony that those Palestinians looking for their own liberation no doubt channelling their own inner Elisha, justifying murder in response to murder and hate in response to hatred, with the wheel turning slowly on. Death upon death. Broken people along the way.
★ ★ 1/2
A brief meditation on the nature of 'justice' and 'vengeance', Dawn is Wiesel’s attempt to reconcile how a Holocaust survivor might decide to spend the rest of his life. Unlike Wiesel, the protagonist Elisha joins the paramilitary forces committed to securing an independent state if Israel from British colonial control.
The novella's plot is straightforward: 18-year-old Elisha will shoot a British officer at dawn, in retribution for the British execution of a colleague. From here, we explore the inner tumult that this task has produced.
This is an oddly quiet book. Although set in the immediate post-WWII period (1948), it was published in the shadow of the Eichmann trial of 1961. At its heart, it gives some sense of the brutal logic that Israel uses to maintain their repression of the Palestinian people (who are noticeably absent in the text).
Our protagonist is quite aware that what he is asked to do is to will irrevocable transform him into what he once hated (a murderer, much as the Nazis murdered his family). The questions addressed in the author’s preface – How are we ever to disarm evil and abolish death as a means to an end? Can terror coexist with justice? Can hate engender anything but hatred? – cannot be adequately answered in the text.
Or perhaps, alas, Wiesel has answered those questions. In the end, Elisha concludes,
“Murder will not be our profession but our duty. In the days and weeks and months to come you will have only one purpose; to kill those who have made us killers. We shall kill in order that once more we may be men…”
This seems a depressing and devastating conclusion but explains what has happened in the region since. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and continues that fine tradition of recipients who subsume universal humanitarian values to political expediency. Primarily remembered as a witness to the Holocaust, the hardness of heart evidenced in Dawn has become solidified in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the brutality that comes with that occupation.
It’s no small irony that those Palestinians looking for their own liberation no doubt channelling their own inner Elisha, justifying murder in response to murder and hate in response to hatred, with the wheel turning slowly on. Death upon death. Broken people along the way.
★ ★ 1/2
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