Sylvia Beach—Patron Saint of Bookstores and a Moveable Feast of Ex-Pats

                                    A caricature of Sylvia Beach.

Sylvia Beach made her mark in wildly exciting post-World War I Paris when Americans and other English speaking expatriates flocked to the city for a taste of la vie boheme as a bookstore proprietor, center of social and intellectual life for a generation of writers, and almost accidentally as the publisher of the most notorious book of the 20th Century. 

She was born in a Presbyterian parsonage in Baltimore, Maryland on March 14, 1897. Her father, the Rev. Sylvester Beach, was the son of missionaries to China and the most recent in a long line of Calvinist clergy. The second of three daughters the very bright young girl was raised in every way to be a respectable American lady. And she might well have become one had not her father accepted an appointment as assistant minister at the American Church in Paris and director of the American Student Center in 1901. 

The young girl fell in love with the city and the culture. The family remained in the City of Lights until her father took up new duties as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey in 1905. But she could not be kept home. She returned to Europe on several visits and even lived for two years in Spain. When World War I broke out, she volunteered with the International Red Cross and served in Eastern Europe with its Balkan Commission. 

 

                                                     Beach as a young woman in Paris.

In 1917 as the cannons still roared on the Western Front, Beach returned to Paris to study French literature.Not long after she was naturally drawn to La Maison des Amis des Livres, the unusual bookstore opened by Adrienne Monnier at 7 rue de l’Odéon. At a time when most Paris book vendors were either rudimentary stalls peddling haphazardly whatever came their way or chaotic warehouses of old and used volumes, Monnier had carefully shelved her collection of the best and most forward contemporary work. The store doubled as a lending library—the first in France—so that impoverished writers could read and keep up with the latest trends in literature. She provided comfortable chairs, sofas, and writing desks encouraging visitors to sit and peruse the books—and engage in conversation. She provided coffee and a kind ear.  Since its opening in 1915 the shop had quickly become a home away from home for the most cutting edge writers in Paris. 

When Beach walked through the door, she fell in love. Not only with the shop, but with the proprietor. Monnier was 25 years old at the time—five years younger than the American—an earthy, sensuous woman in cropped hair, a peasant’s shirt, and long, already old fashion skirts. They took to each other immediately and spent their first afternoon together excitedly talking about books and writers for hours. They were soon lovers, life partners, and collaborators—a close relationship that endured until Monnier in ill health committed suicide in 1955. 

Through Monnier and the bookstore, Beach was soon introduced into a circle of the most innovative writers in Paris including André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Jules Romains all of whom staged readings at the shop. Beach was soon inspired to consider opening a branch of La Maison des Amis des Livres in New York City to introduce Americans to modern French literature in much the same way as the famous Armory Show had introduced impressionists, expressionists, cubists, and other modern artists. Her mother supplied her with $3,000 to finance the venture. But rents in New York proved exorbitant and, if the truth be known, Beach could not bear to part with Paris or Monnier. Instead, she took the money and opened her own shop in Paris to complement Monnier’s. Her’s would be an English language bookstore catering the growing expatriate communities filling Parisian cafés taking advantage of the favorable exchange rate for the Franc that made the city one of the most affordable big cities in the world. 

Beach celebrating her bookstore Shakespeare and Company.
 

The bookstore would also introduce French intellectuals to the best contemporary English language writing, especially American writing. Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in November of 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren while she continued to live with Monnier in a fourth floor apartment over the French bookshop. The new store was a success and soon a busy expatriate center. In 1922 Beach was able to move the shop to larger quarters at 12 rue de l’Odéon directly across the street from La Maison. The street the two shops shared also housed a theater and two comfortable and inexpensive cafés making the small neighborhood a hub of Left Bank life. 

Beach with Adrienne Monnier, left,, and Ernest Hemingway at the store after he injured his head in an accident. 

Among those attracted to the store and its generous, engaging proprietor were Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley, James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  Hemmingway spoke for many writers in A Moveable Feast, his memoirs of his days in Paris when he wrote, “She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one I knew was ever nicer to me.” Beach was convinced from the beginning that Hemmingway was an important writer and encouraged him in every way—including letting the impoverished writer borrow freely from her lending library without paying the customary membership fees. She also often fed him and loaned him money. 

French writer Andre Chamson summed up Beach’s importance in the emerging literary scene: 

Sylvia carried pollen like a bee. She cross-fertilized these writers. She did more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined. It was not merely for the pleasure of friendship that Joyce, Hemingway, Bryher, and so many others often took the path to Shakespeare and Company in the heart of Paris, to meet there all these French writers. But nothing is more mysterious than such fertilizations through dialogue, reading, or simple contact. 

Hemmingway may have been a special friend and protégé, but of all the writers who hung out at her shop she cared most deeply about Joyce. The Irish writer had arrived in Paris from Zurich where he had passed the war years in 1920 at the invitation of Ezra Pound who wasted no time in introducing him to Beach. Beach in turn introduced him to Hemmingway and the pair became the most unlikely drinking buddies imaginable. 

Beach with James Joyce in the shop decorated with posters celebrating the controversies about Ulysses. 

Joyce was struggling mightily to get his magnum opus, Ulysses. No English language publisher would touch the supposedly obscene work. Beach with backing by Monnier, decided to publish the book herself under a Shakespeare and Company imprint. It was published in 1922 to both acclaim and alarm. A second English edition by Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist Press was published later that year but was seized by American postal authorities and 500 copies were burned by English customs agents. Beach kept new editions of her imprint in stock despite taking a beating first by bootleg copies in America, then by Joyce who finally got a legitimate publisher in the U.S. in 1932. 

 

                                            A pre-publication announcement of  Ulysses.

The financial losses from the enterprise did not, however, disrupt her supportive relationship with Joyce, who Beach considered with Monnier and Paris to be one of the three great loves of her life. In 1925 Monnier took her own flyer as publisher with her literary magazine, le Navire d’Argent which published not only the most advanced French writers, but translations by English language writers like Hemingway. Beach collaborated closely in the effort. Together the produced the first translation into French of T. S. Eliot’s notoriously difficult The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Another issue of the magazine was devoted entirely of American writers including Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings. Publication of the magazine had to be suspended after only a dozen issues because Monnier could not afford its losses anymore. 

The worldwide Depression, a dramatic shift in exchange rates which made Paris a much more expensive city, and rising political tensions caused many of her expatriate customers to flee the city in the 1930’s. The only Americans coming to Paris now were the wealthy on their Grand Tours or on shopping binges at the city’s fashion houses, people by in large uninterested in literature and disdainful of the Left Bank in general. By 1936 Beach was in despair that she might have to close the shop. 

 André Gide came to her rescue.  He organized a club of writers and called Friends of Shakespeare and Company. About 200 members paid 200 francs a year to attend special readings at Shakespeare and Company by the most famous literary figures of the day. The celebrated authors participating drew great attention to the shop—as well as more French customers. And, as tensions rose in Europe, a parade of American correspondents and writers trooped through the store that had famously nurtured Hemmingway. 

In 1937 Beach was thrilled to be made a Chevalier légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) by her beloved adopted homeland. She considered it the highest honor of her life and proudly wore the ribbon even after German occupation when it was dangerous to do so. Most Americans fled Paris in advance of the Nazis. Not Beach. It was her home and she refused to abandon it, for which her friends and neighbors greatly admired her. But she knew the risks she was taking and that eventually she would run afoul of the occupiers. Still, she kept her shop open even when she was visited with a stern warning for employing a Jewish shop girl. 

She knew her time was running short when the U.S. entered the war. In the summer of ’42 she refused to sell a book to a Nazi officer. She realized that her time was up. Summoning her army of friends, she stripped her store of its books, dismantled the bookshelves, and even painted over the sign in a single day. The books were laboriously hauled to an apartment where they were safe through the war. 

Beach with her long-time lover and business partner Monnier shortly before she had to close down Shakespeare and Company during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

In September Beach and 400 other American women were rounded up and interred at the monkey house of the Paris Zoo, of all places. She did not find the confinement particularly onerous as her many friends could visit and talk with her simply by paying admission to the zoo. But after being held there for more than a month she was moved to much harsher confinement in Vittel. She remained there until the following spring when influential friends in Paris finally secured her release. 

She returned to Monnier who had somehow kept her shop open. Together they endured the hardships of occupation as the Germans cut food and fuel supplies to the city. They were often literally starving. 

On August 23, 1944 Beach was roused by loud shouts from the street. She would recall: I heard a deep voice calling: 

“Sylvia!” And everybody in the street took up the cry of “Sylvia!” “It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway!” Cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs: we met in a crash. He picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the streets and in the windows cheered. 

War correspondent Hemingway had somehow placed himself in command of a unit of the French Resistance and entered the city just ahead of the Allied armies. Before his famous “liberation” of the Bar of the Ritz Hotel, he had rushed to the rue de l’Odéon to personally liberate Beach. 

Beach was never able to reopen her store. She continued to help Monnier at her shop. But Monnier’s health was failing. Despondent, she committed suicide by an overdose of sleeping pills on May 25, 1955. Beach was devastated. 

                                                                        Beach's memoirs of the bookstore and its denizens was published in the U.S. in 1960.
 

Perhaps to relive her life with Monnier, Beach wrote and published her memoirs of the heady days between the wars, Shakespeare and Company, in 1956 with profiles of all the many famous figures she had known. 

Late in life Beach recorded recollections of Hemingway and Joyce in interviews.

Beach remained in Paris until her death on October 5 1962. Her remains, however, were shipped home to be buried with her family at Princeton Cemetery in New Jersey. Princeton University became the repository of her papers. 

In 1964, after Sylvia Beach’s death and on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, American ex-serviceman George Whitman renamed his English language Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Whitman’s only child, Sylvia Whitman, named after Sylvia Beach, began helping her father with management of the bookstore in 2003. She now runs the store with her partner, David Delannet. It remains a monument to Jazz Age literati and a magnate for both aspiring writers and literary pilgrims.

Elie Wiesel—The Nagging Conscience Who Won the Nobel Prize

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, public witness, and novelist died on July 2, 2016 at the age of 86 passed in his adopted home of New York.  The world paused to mourn a figure who came to be identified as one of the secular saints of the modern era with the likes of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Thích Nhất Hạnh—men who embodied a spiritual quest for justice and a challenge for all peoples to rise above the squalor and horror of hate.   It was something he did not aspire to and which he resisted for as long as he could. 

He came to it as Jonah came to Nineveh in the Biblical story after defying the call, being swallowed by the Big Fish and then spit out.  There, the story goes, Jonah at the command of God, called on the wicked people to repent their sins, and repent they did from the mighty king to the lowliest slave.  When God spared the city rather than destroy it as promised, Jonah was angry and sulked until the Lord God rebuked him:

Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night;

and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?

— Gospel of Matthew 12:39-41, New International Version

The sins of the modern world were greater by far than Nineveh’s dalliances with false idols or rowdy impiety.  What had transpired across Europe in the forests and plains of Poland and Ukraine, and in the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald was so horrible it could not be named.  That is until the reluctant prophet gave it one—The Holocaust—transforming the word that once meant a burnt offering that was completely consumed.  Yet Wiesel regretted that this stark image of whole peoples consumed by the rages of bigotry was not big enough accurately express the catastrophe.  But like Jonah this agnostic who had cursed God, came to understand the transformative power of the event if it could be faced fearlessly.   He offered then the hope that Never Again! extended to all oppressed and threatened peoples and that even the hearts of the would-be mass murderers could be turned by the recognition of common humanity.

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the city of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.  The city was near Transylvania, the Hungarian region where, ironically, the world’s only Unitarian King, John Sigmund, had first proclaimed religious liberty.  His family was in the Jewish minority and was principally Yiddish speaking, but could also converse in Hungarian, Romanian, and the German of the former Autro-Hungarian rulers.

A family on the brink of war, Elie bottom left.

His father, Shlomo, was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan humanist who encouraged his son to read widely in great literature and learn Hebrew, the nearly dead language being promoted by the Zionist movement.  His mother, Sarah Feig, came from a prominent Hassidic family, and encouraged her son to study the Torah and be an observant Jew.  He had three sisters, Beatrice, Hilda, and Tzipora.

In 1940 under a forced German and Italian “arbitration” Transylvania and bordering areas were transferred to Hungary, which had a pro-fascist government.  This was a great relief to the Hungarian speaking majority in the region but opened the door to repression by the anti-Semitic Hungarian government.  Things were bad but got much worse when the Nazis occupied Hungary in March of 1944.

Elie at age 15 in the Jewish Ghetto of Sighet, Hungary.

First the family was rounded up the rest of Jewish papulation Sighet, estimated at about 2,500 people and put in one of two ghettos established in the town.  They did not stay there long.  In May local Hungarian authorities under orders of the Germans began shipping Jews from the ghettos to Auschwitz.  Fifteen year old Elie there became simply A-7713, the identification number tattooed on his arm to expedite efficient Nazi record keeping.  Years later he recalled in a powerful poem:

Never Shall I Forget

 

Never shall I forget that night,

the first night in the camp

which has turned my life into one long night,

seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

 

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children

whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke

beneath a silent blue sky.

 

Never shall I forget those flames

which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence

which deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

 

Never shall I forget those moments

which murdered my God and my soul

and turned my dreams to dust.

 

Never shall I forget these things,

even if I am condemned to live

as long as God Himself.

 

Never.

 

—Elie Wiesel

 

The boy was quickly separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have died at there. Elie and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke.  He remained with his father for a year as slave laborers meant to be worked to death.  As the war wound down and Allied troops began to close in they were shuffled between three concentration camps.  On January 29, 1945, just as intended Wiesel’s father died from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and his body was sent to the crematorium few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald. 

Wiesel has been identified as the prisoner in the second row of bunks next to the post by the elbow of the standing man in this famous U.S. Army photograph taken at Buchenwald four days after liberation, but there is some dispute about it.

On April 11, 1949 the camp was liberated by the American Third Army.  Wiesel would always remember that day and held a special place in his heart for the soldiers who saved him and the nation they fought for:

from The America I Love

That day I encountered the first American soldiers

in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

I remember them well.

 

Bewildered, disbelieving, they walked around the place,

hell on earth,

where our destiny had been played out.

 

They looked at us,

just liberated,

and did not know what to do or say.

 

Survivors snatched from the dark throes of death,

we were empty of all hope—

too weak, too emaciated to hug them or even speak to them.

 

Like lost children, the American soldiers wept and wept with rage and sadness.

And we received their tears as if they were heartrending offerings

from a wounded and generous humanity.

 

—Elie Wiesel

Traumatized, dazed, and physically wrecked, Wiesel instantly became a stateless person, as the United Nations delicately phrased it or in the lingo of the American liberators and folks back home a DP—a Displaced Person.  There were literally millions of folks like that across Europe.  Nobody knew what to do with them.  The defeated nations were too impoverished themselves to support them, and the refugees feared for their lives to be put in the bosom of their oppressors.  The Allies were, for the most part, uneager to accept them, especially those pesky Jews.  Only the guilt felt by the public over the horror images of the death camps as they finally became known, pressured reluctant politicians to accept carefully limited numbers. Very many remained in displaced persons camps for years before they found a place to go.

Wiesel was shuffled between camps until he was finally sent to a French orphanage.  There he was reunited with his older sisters Beatrice and Hilda who he had believed had gone to their deaths with his mother and an estimated 90% of the pre-war Jewish population of Sighet.

In the orphanage he quickly learned French and impressed authorities with his quick mind.  They helped to get him a hard-to-come-by permit to live in Paris and study literature and psychology at the Sorbonne.  He attended lectures by theologian Martin Buber and Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher and darling of the French left intelligentsia and was moved and influenced by both.

When the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July of 1946 as part of the campaign end the British Mandate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state, Wiesel, like other bright young Jews still lingering in ruined Europe, wanted to join in their fight.  His attempts to contact recruiters working in Europe somehow failed, something that distressed him at the time but which he eventually recognized as good fortune. 

The Irgun attack and subsequent actions by it and the Stern Gang introduced what would come to be called terrorism into the complex politics of the old Holy Land.  It would be a reminder that your heroic freedom fighters were somebody else’s terrorists.  

Wiesel as a young reporter in Paris, 1948.

By 1948 Wiesel, by then working as a journalist in Paris, contributed articles to pro-Irgun publications but never formally joined the movement.  It was the beginning of a long and complex relationship with the militant Zionists who would give birth to the State of Israel and the new nation that promised safe haven to the world’s Jews.   His commitment to that State was never absolute—despite regularly working for Israeli news papers and occasionally residing in Jerusalem as a correspondent for French publications, Wiesel did not choose to immigrate there himself or accept Israeli citizenship.  However, he has generally defended Israel and especially its “special claim” on an undivided Jerusalem and in recent years as the stark brutality of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank became known to the world, he was slow to criticize the government or speak up in defense of the Palestinian people, as he had spoken up for so many other peoples under brutal occupation.  He did not offer a blanket endorsement of the occupations, but his rebukes on how they were conducted were muted and mild.

Similarly, he had a soft spot for the United States and tended to think that, on the whole, the nation that liberated him was an actor for good in the world.  He could be, and was, more critical of the U.S. than of Israel, vocally denouncing segregation and Jim Crow laws and supporting the Civil Rights Movement and opposing nuclear armament and the War in Vietnam.  When President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in Wiesel wrote in defense of the action in a controversial letter published in the Los Angeles Times:

Under normal circumstances, I might have joined those peace marchers who, here and abroad, staged public demonstrations against an invasion of Iraq. After all, I have seen enough of the brutality, the ugliness, of war to oppose it heart and soul. Isn't war forever cruel, the ultimate form of violence? It inevitably generates not only loss of innocence but endless sorrow and mourning. How could one not reject it as an option?

And yet, this time I support President Bush’s policy of intervention to eradicate international terrorism, which, most civilized nations agree, is the greatest threat facing us today…

… Under normal circumstances, I might have joined those peace marchers who, here and abroad, staged public demonstrations against an invasion of Iraq. After all, I have seen enough of the brutality, the ugliness, of war to oppose it heart and soul. Isn't war forever cruel, the ultimate form of violence? It inevitably generates not only loss of innocence but endless sorrow and mourning. How could one not reject it as an option?

And yet, this time I support President Bush’s policy of intervention to eradicate international terrorism, which, most civilized nations agree, is the greatest threat facing us today.

He took at face value all of Bushes later discredited claims of justification for the war finding it impossible to believe that a nation he so admired could be so duplicitous.  In the letter he cited Western military intervention in the Balkans as an example of how a quick military response may have saved genocidal attacks on the Bosnian and Croats by Serb nationalists and the massacres of the Tutsi in Rwanda as the price on non-intervention.  And, of course, he had always felt that early action by Britain, France, and other Western powers could have prevented the Holocaust. Given that context his support of the war may have been understandable, but it was not, in retrospect, any less wrongheaded.

Similarly, later he as accepted at face value Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claims of an imminent threat from supposed Iranian nuclear arms coming close to endorsing a first strike against Tehran.

For these reasons the pro-Palestinian press and many western leftist supporters were quick to dismiss Wiesel as a hypocrite and denounce his entire body of work as a sham.  They belong to the purist school that believes that the tainted fruit of one branch means the whole tree must be burned. 

But human beings, including Elie Wiesel are much more complex than that and the good that they do cannot so easily be dismissed.

But we have gotten ahead of ourselves.  Back around 1950 the young journalist Elie Wiesel was set on building a new life and career.  He was determined to put his personal past behind him and to bury the memories that were too painful to bear.  He never spoke or wrote about his experiences and shunned those who did. That long period of denial lasted for years.

The former French Resistance fighter, novelist, activist, devout Catholic, and winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Literature François Mauriac became a friend and mentor of the young writer. He recognized him as a tortured soul.  He persuaded the reluctant and resistant Wiesel to finally write about his experience.  When Elie began to set his pen to paper, Mauriac described his as “Lazarus rising from the dead.”

French first editions of La Nuit.

Once he got started, Wiesel wrote furiously in his native Yiddish.  His 900 page manuscript was too bulky to publish and the language too obscure.  An abridged edition was published in far away Argentina as Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent.)  Knowing that the audience who most needed to hear the story would never read it in Yiddish, Wiesel re-wrote a much briefer version in French which was published as La Nuit in 1955.

The book was not an immediate hit.  It sold very modestly to the general public which was uncomfortable with the unpleasant facts of the Holocaust.   The publication of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in French and English translations in 1952 was just beginning to open up wider public interest.  Wiesel’s book first attracted the attention of academics and historians. As interest in the Holocaust grew, the author began to be interviewed by the international press.  Sales of the book slowly grew along with a word of mouth reputation.  The English version, Night, was published in 1960.  By the end of the decade, it was widely read and admired and became an acknowledged classic often assigned as young adult literature in American high school and college classes.

Wiesel found himself unexpectedly famous and called on frequently as speaker on the Holocaust, which he had come to embody. At first he was a reluctant activist but grew to respect the moral authority with which his experience endowed him.  Increasingly, he would not be reluctant to exercise that authority.

The year La Nuit was published in Paris, Wiesel moved from France to New York City as the correspondent of the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot.  He also freelanced articles to French publications and as he rapidly became more fluent in English, in the U.S.  Over the next decades he would write more than 40 books, mostly non-fiction Holocaust books, but also novels, poetry, and memoirs. 

Among the most interesting of these books—and a play he wrote based on it—was The Trial of God inspired by a trial staged by angry Auschwitz prisoners charging God with being oppressive to the Jewish people.

Most of his earliest activism came, naturally, in promoting Holocaust awareness.  His friend Simon Wiesenthal was the face of Jewish thirst for justice and the search for war criminals.  As the Wobbly bard and philosopher Utah Philips would say in a different context years later. “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”  Wiesenthal and his followers felt the same way about Nazis and were willing to track down the names and knock on the doors so that no one would escape justice.  Wiesel was fine with that, but he presented a different tact—exposing the horrors of the Holocaust to prevent its reoccurrence.  He urged recognition of common humanity across racial, ethnic, religious, political, and tribal boundaries.  That experience quickly moved him beyond being a one note drone.  For the sake of simple consistency as well as humanity itself he had to speak out wherever the danger laid, no matter the perpetrator.

Over the years he would speak out forthrightly against Soviet attacks on Eastern European freedom movements and in support of Soviet Jews who wished to immigrate to Israel.  But he also decried the Vietnam War and scolded Israel for it slowness to rescue and accept the Black Jews of Ethiopia.  He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa and called for justice for Argentina’s Desaparecidos.  He defended potential victims of genocide including Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, Rwandan Tutsis, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, among others.  He also blasted Turkey for its refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the first highly organized state-sanctioned mass murder of a minority population in modern history. 

Elie accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 with his son Shlomo Elisha Wiesel.
 

It was this kind of activism that earned Wiesel the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, which only spurred greater action.  In his speech Wiesel said:

… do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf?... I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions…

… I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.

Wiesel was also awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 1984 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992; Grand Cross of the French Legion of Honor, in 2000; and an Honorary Knighthood from the United Kingdom in 2006.  On his first return to his home since childhood, he was awarded the Star of Romania and the Grand Cross of Hungary in 2009 but returned the Hungarian Medal three years later when an increasingly right wing nationalist government began a systematic campaign of denial of Hungary’s role in the Holocaust.

His other awards and honorary degrees are way too numerous to list here.

In 1969 Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, an Austrian immigrant, in New York.  She translated many of his books originally written in French into English.  They had one son, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, named for his father.  The family lived principally in Greenwich, Connecticut.

In addition to his writing and frequent speaking, Wiesel held several teaching appointments at American universities.

Elie Wiesel was survived by his wife and son and by millions of the oppressed whose effective voice he was. 

from Have You Learned the Most Important Lesson of All?

Should you encounter temporary disappointments, I pray:
Do not make someone else pay the price for your difficulties and pain.

Do not see in someone else a scapegoat for your difficulties.
Only a fanatic does that—not you, for you have learned to reject fanaticism.

You know that fanaticism leads to hatred,
and hatred is both destructive and self-destructive.

I speak to you as a teacher and a student—
one is both, always.

I also speak to you as a witness.
I speak to you, for I do not want my past to become your future.

—Elie Wiesel