Five Biblical Portraits by Elie Wiesel

I read Five Biblical Portraits because I'm interested in what Elie Wiesel had to say about the Bible.  I also wanted to find out more about him. I had read his book Night some time ago.  I know that Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, but can't recall Night. So Five Biblical Portraits is a re-introduction to Elie Wiesel for me. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

                                   

The introduction by Ariel Burger tells us that Wiesel refers to the Holocaust as "the Kingdom of Night" which is poetic and doesn't sound anything like the soul destroying trauma that the Holocaust must have been for survivors.  Yet perhaps Wiesel needed to distance himself from his experience by using a euphemism like "Kingdom of Night". 

 I am a generation removed from the Holocaust, and my parents weren't themselves Holocaust survivors.  So most of my knowledge of the Holocaust comes from classes I have taken or books I've read. 

 In the "Joshua" essay, Wiesel claims that Jews have no tradition of writing songs to celebrate war.  It definitely seems to me that the Song of Deborah  from The Bible is a celebration of  war. Here is the actual text. 

I have to say that I have never been a fan of Saul.  He seems to have been the kind of king who only cared about maintaining his own power.  Wiesel obviously sympathized with him, but I don't find him persuasive.  Wiesel's portrayal of Saul convinced me that he may have been psychologically unstable.

 Wiesel wrote about the massacres at Babi Yar in the "Jeremiah" essay.  I had heard of Babi Yar, but my teachers never taught us where it's located.  I now know it's in Ukraine.

(A search for Babi Yar led me to the website of a Holocaust denier who is definitely a member of the lunatic fringe. I felt I needed mental floss after reading his fulminations.)

I will now get back to what has been written about Babi Yar.  When  author Anatoly Kuznetsov was born in Kiev, it was in the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union no longer exists. Kiev is now the capital of Ukraine.  Kuznetsov wrote a novel called  Babi Yar  that dealt with the massacres. I am hoping to read this novel by a Ukrainian in the not too distant future.    

I have to say that I'm not overly fond of any of the Biblical personages in Five Biblical Portraits.   I will give this book three stars on Goodreads.