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The Memoirs #2
And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs 1969
As this concluding volume of his moving and revealing memoirs begins, Elie Wiesel is forty years old, a writer of international repute. Determined to speak out more actively for both Holocaust survivors and the disenfranchised everywhere, he sets himself a "I will become militant. I will teach, share, bear witness. I will reveal and try to mitigate the victims' solitude." He makes words his weapon, and in these pages we relive with him his unstinting battles. We see him meet with world leaders and travel to regions ruled by war, dictatorship, racism, and exclusion in order to engage the most pressing issues of the day. We see him in the Soviet Union defending persecuted Jews and dissidents; in South Africa battling apartheid and supporting Mandela's ascension; in Cambodia and in Bosnia, calling on the world to face the atrocities; in refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia as an emissary for President Clinton. He chastises Ronald Reagan for his visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg. He supports Lech Walesa but challenges some of his views. He confronts Francois Mitterrand over the misrepresentation of his activities in Vichy France. He does battle with Holocaust deniers. He joins tens of thousands of young Austrians demonstrating against renascent fascism in their country. He receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Through it all, Wiesel remains deeply involved with his beloved Israel, its leaders and its people, and laments its internal conflicts. He recounts the behind-the-scenes events that led to the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He shares the feelings evoked by his return to Auschwitz, by his recollections of Yitzhak Rabin, and by his memories of his own vanished family. This is the magnificent finale of a historic memoir.From the Trade Paperback edition.
448 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1998
30 people are currently reading
848 people want to read
About the author
Elie Wiesel
278 books4,609 followersEliezer "Elie" Wiesel 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 his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the apartheid in South Africa, the Bosnian genocide, Sudan, the Kurds and the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people.
He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Wiesel was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.
In his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the apartheid in South Africa, the Bosnian genocide, Sudan, the Kurds and the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people.
He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Wiesel was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 12, 2025
The power of the written word allows people to speak and share their stories both posthumously and in the present. I am grateful to be able to experience my esteemed former professor through his publications even after his passing. The most impressive thing I've taken from Dr. Wiesel's openness about his life and experiences is the value of his wife, Marion. She was his wife, muse, life companion, and translator. He always held her in the absolute highest regard.
"Marion's reaction to my good intentions? She laughs." (97)
"As always her answer is simple and clear. 'Write him.'" (262)
I am at a stubborn stalemate in my life in 2017 where I often feel as if love is actually a foreign language. I probably need someone compassionate, earnest, and witty to help me translate and interpret all of my own fervent musings. Dr. Wiesel implored, "The destiny of people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical factors." (59)*
"A writer cannot detach himself from his story: He is responsible for it to end." (82)
I never knew Orson Welles wanted to make an adaptation of Night. Truthfully, I'm still not too keen on Citizen Kane.
Not to ever take anything away from his divergent worldly accomplishments, but I have always preferred Dr. Wiesel as a teacher and writer as opposed to a diplomat.
In reflection of his Nobel Prize, Dr. Wiesel writes: "With a Nobel Prize come quite a few lessons. For one, you learn who is a friend and who is not. Contrary to popular wisdom, a friend is not one who shares your suffering, but one who knows how to share your JOY." (261)
*Edit:
6/5/25 CASHWORDS SCIENCE
98 PEA
MISSING LETTERS: SOLD
99 FUEL (INSTANT $2.00 WINNER)
MISSING LETTERS: NAP
100 DIG
MISSING LETTERS: TEA
"Marion's reaction to my good intentions? She laughs." (97)
"As always her answer is simple and clear. 'Write him.'" (262)
I am at a stubborn stalemate in my life in 2017 where I often feel as if love is actually a foreign language. I probably need someone compassionate, earnest, and witty to help me translate and interpret all of my own fervent musings. Dr. Wiesel implored, "The destiny of people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical factors." (59)*
"A writer cannot detach himself from his story: He is responsible for it to end." (82)
I never knew Orson Welles wanted to make an adaptation of Night. Truthfully, I'm still not too keen on Citizen Kane.
Not to ever take anything away from his divergent worldly accomplishments, but I have always preferred Dr. Wiesel as a teacher and writer as opposed to a diplomat.
In reflection of his Nobel Prize, Dr. Wiesel writes: "With a Nobel Prize come quite a few lessons. For one, you learn who is a friend and who is not. Contrary to popular wisdom, a friend is not one who shares your suffering, but one who knows how to share your JOY." (261)
*Edit:
6/5/25 CASHWORDS SCIENCE
98 PEA
MISSING LETTERS: SOLD
99 FUEL (INSTANT $2.00 WINNER)
MISSING LETTERS: NAP
100 DIG
MISSING LETTERS: TEA
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 2, 2025
Dec 1 ~~ In this second volume of his memoir, Elie Weisel shares events of his life from the time of his 1969 marriage onward.
He knew high ranking, powerful people all over the world, paid close attention to current events, gave lectures at university level, won a Nobel Prize, wrote both fiction and non-fiction books, studied Talmud, and most important of all, bore witness about what he called the Event. He wanted and needed the world to understand, to never forget, to realize that such horrors could easily happen again if we do not pay attention.
I admit I got confused more than once while reading. EW jumped back and forth in time quite often and I had trouble keeping myself where and when I was supposed to be. He also dropped what felt like hundreds of names: some familiar, others not so much. In real life, my brain tends to freeze when faced with too many people all at once, and oddly enough the same thing happens when I read.
For me the most powerful moments of the book were the passages that were less like social registers and more like revealed thoughts and dreams. He tried to process his own history, but the image I was left with was of a man seeking more than anything else to hear an answer to the tortured 'why?' that welled up continuously from within.
"Why is there so much violence, so much hate?"
Why indeed.
He knew high ranking, powerful people all over the world, paid close attention to current events, gave lectures at university level, won a Nobel Prize, wrote both fiction and non-fiction books, studied Talmud, and most important of all, bore witness about what he called the Event. He wanted and needed the world to understand, to never forget, to realize that such horrors could easily happen again if we do not pay attention.
I admit I got confused more than once while reading. EW jumped back and forth in time quite often and I had trouble keeping myself where and when I was supposed to be. He also dropped what felt like hundreds of names: some familiar, others not so much. In real life, my brain tends to freeze when faced with too many people all at once, and oddly enough the same thing happens when I read.
For me the most powerful moments of the book were the passages that were less like social registers and more like revealed thoughts and dreams. He tried to process his own history, but the image I was left with was of a man seeking more than anything else to hear an answer to the tortured 'why?' that welled up continuously from within.
"Why is there so much violence, so much hate?"
Why indeed.
November 6, 2018
These are the second set of memoirs of Elie Wiesel, following up on the first, "All Rivers Flow to the Sea" and covering from the time of his marriage in the late 1960s to the end of the 20th Century.
And to what a 20th Century was Elie Wiesel a witness! As a Holocaust survivor from a small Hungarian/Romanian village, Wiesel had lost practically everything: his home, mother, father, grandparents and golden-haired little sister. One may think that that could lead to a life of hatred and despair, but not in Wiesel's case. He indeed became a witness to the horrors of the 20 Century, and not being just content to write about the Holocaust, he became a voice against injustice in many areas, a voice that shunned turning away silently from those in need.
I feared that this book may fall into a bit of a trap that I noticed in the second half of the first book of memoirs, where Wiesel tends to list the names of almost everyone he met and/or collaborated with, in an overwhelming who-is-who of literary and Jewish scholarship circles. However, I liked the structure that he seemed to adopt in this second book where he choose chapter-themes of his work in the later stages of his life.
Instead of rambling in a mish-mash of chronology where "I worked here, and I was doing such and such, when I met so and so", this book comes alive with chapters that cover a similar ground but in a way where we get a comprehensive picture of a particular aspect of Elie Wiesel's later life as an established writer and Nobel Prize winner. We see how he became a better public speaker even though he was quite shy and nervous. We are taken through his work on the commission to create the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. We learn about the ups and downs of his relationship with Francois Mitterand. We travel with him to the Soviet Union several times to meet the Jewish Community there and see first hand the challenges of the Refuseniks. We are given insight into his reflections of the first Gulf War and the tribulations of the Balkan tragedy in the 1990s. We are even given little glimpses into his private life with his family.
It is a lot of ground to cover, but I enjoyed this tour through the second half of the 20th Century. We get a good sense of how Wiesel's background brought him to be such a central figure in it all, and we discover a man of great principles, of human kindness, and tireless energy that never stopped being a witness until his death in 2016, 20 years after this memoir was written.
I have come away from his memoirs with a deep sense of respect and awe for this little boy, a shy student of the Talmud, from Sighet. May we never forget the lessons he has taught us, especially when now so many seem prone to do exactly that.
And to what a 20th Century was Elie Wiesel a witness! As a Holocaust survivor from a small Hungarian/Romanian village, Wiesel had lost practically everything: his home, mother, father, grandparents and golden-haired little sister. One may think that that could lead to a life of hatred and despair, but not in Wiesel's case. He indeed became a witness to the horrors of the 20 Century, and not being just content to write about the Holocaust, he became a voice against injustice in many areas, a voice that shunned turning away silently from those in need.
I feared that this book may fall into a bit of a trap that I noticed in the second half of the first book of memoirs, where Wiesel tends to list the names of almost everyone he met and/or collaborated with, in an overwhelming who-is-who of literary and Jewish scholarship circles. However, I liked the structure that he seemed to adopt in this second book where he choose chapter-themes of his work in the later stages of his life.
Instead of rambling in a mish-mash of chronology where "I worked here, and I was doing such and such, when I met so and so", this book comes alive with chapters that cover a similar ground but in a way where we get a comprehensive picture of a particular aspect of Elie Wiesel's later life as an established writer and Nobel Prize winner. We see how he became a better public speaker even though he was quite shy and nervous. We are taken through his work on the commission to create the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. We learn about the ups and downs of his relationship with Francois Mitterand. We travel with him to the Soviet Union several times to meet the Jewish Community there and see first hand the challenges of the Refuseniks. We are given insight into his reflections of the first Gulf War and the tribulations of the Balkan tragedy in the 1990s. We are even given little glimpses into his private life with his family.
It is a lot of ground to cover, but I enjoyed this tour through the second half of the 20th Century. We get a good sense of how Wiesel's background brought him to be such a central figure in it all, and we discover a man of great principles, of human kindness, and tireless energy that never stopped being a witness until his death in 2016, 20 years after this memoir was written.
I have come away from his memoirs with a deep sense of respect and awe for this little boy, a shy student of the Talmud, from Sighet. May we never forget the lessons he has taught us, especially when now so many seem prone to do exactly that.
Why is there so much violence, so much hate? How is it conceived, transmitted, fertilized, nurtured? As we face the disquieting, implacable rise of intolerance and fanaticism on more than one continent, it is our duty to expose the danger. By naming it. By confronting it.
August 12, 2011
An amazing memoir written by a man who has devoted his life to the idea that all people deserve respect. Humble and driven, Wiesel, especially in his later years,makes for the perfect role model. Play the Ramones Bonzo in Bitburg after that chapter on Bitburg. It will remind you how horrid that event was.
May 27, 2010
Such beautiful writing and insight into the human condition.
I don't agree with everything he says regarding world issues and politics, but I love his passion for pursuing justice and peace in the world.
I don't agree with everything he says regarding world issues and politics, but I love his passion for pursuing justice and peace in the world.
May 29, 2020
The memoirs of the great Elie Wiesel covering 1969-1999. A voice that is missed, especially today.
January 14, 2019
Sometimes I am puzzled by the point of a book. Elie Wiesel has written a lot of books, some of them nonfictional (like this memoir) and some of them fictional, and all of them that I have read have dealt in some respect with the perspective and experience of Jews. When one deals, as is the case here, with a memoir from an elderly man, there are likely two sorts of pictures that one sees. Some people mellow like fine wine and produce far more irenic writing than was the case during their fierce and tumultuous youths. That is not the case here. What we have here is the case of a somewhat cranky old man trying to settle scores with a wide variety of people, including Simon Wiesenthal, Ronald Reagan, and others more obscure but no less pointedly dealt with here. Elie Wiesel in many ways sees this particular memoir as a way to settle some old scores and correct what he views as misconceptions, and the result is a deep and sometimes sad way of looking at the influence of politics on the telling of a story, even a personal story as is the case here.
This book of slightly more than 400 pages is by no means an easy book to appreciate unless one is a big fan of Wiesel's life and writings. Covering the time period from 1969 to 1999, when the book was published, it looks at Wiesel as an aging statesman but someone still with a great deal of vigor. The author explores his own writings, many of which are referred to here, and the reader is likely expected to be familiar with those writings as well. The author by no means lived an uninteresting life, even if the author's first three and a half decades were more exciting. He marries and leaves Israel when his wife insists that he not be involved in Israeli politics. He has a son and tries to be a good father and maintain his faith and his mission of correcting misunderstandings about the Holocaust. He struggles with the language of the horror suffered by the Jews during World War II and its applicability to other attempted genocides. He writes book reviews and deals with political polemics, helps establish a Holocaust museum, teaches about the subject of the Shoah, and wins the Nobel Peace Prize, trying to toe the line between a cynical pro-Israeli and the stereotypical leftist self-hating Jew, even as he resents the rise of right-wing and left-wing anti-Semitism.
Is this a good book? The author's attempts to settle historical scores and deal with longstanding enmities and ruptured friendships suggests that Wiesel was not the easiest of people to get along with. It also happens that many people he dealt with had some shadows to wrestle with. It is especially telling that the author takes Primo Levi to task, in talking about his suicide, for his view that Holocaust survivors were inevitably gray in some respect, although Levi's view is not so unlike the harshness of Akiba when it came to the obligations of survival. It is impossible to take this particular book at face value as a definitive book. In general, this work is a dialogue with Wiesel's work of encouraging the proper memory of the Holocaust and being a somewhat fierce gatekeeper of what is acceptable discourse about the it. Gatekeepers in general are not necessary always beloved figures, whether they are self-appointed or not. Like a grouchy old man menacing a shotgun and telling people to get off of his yard, this book has more than a little bit of bile in it. If you appreciate the author's perspective and approach though, it is not without at least some sort of worth and enjoyment.
This book of slightly more than 400 pages is by no means an easy book to appreciate unless one is a big fan of Wiesel's life and writings. Covering the time period from 1969 to 1999, when the book was published, it looks at Wiesel as an aging statesman but someone still with a great deal of vigor. The author explores his own writings, many of which are referred to here, and the reader is likely expected to be familiar with those writings as well. The author by no means lived an uninteresting life, even if the author's first three and a half decades were more exciting. He marries and leaves Israel when his wife insists that he not be involved in Israeli politics. He has a son and tries to be a good father and maintain his faith and his mission of correcting misunderstandings about the Holocaust. He struggles with the language of the horror suffered by the Jews during World War II and its applicability to other attempted genocides. He writes book reviews and deals with political polemics, helps establish a Holocaust museum, teaches about the subject of the Shoah, and wins the Nobel Peace Prize, trying to toe the line between a cynical pro-Israeli and the stereotypical leftist self-hating Jew, even as he resents the rise of right-wing and left-wing anti-Semitism.
Is this a good book? The author's attempts to settle historical scores and deal with longstanding enmities and ruptured friendships suggests that Wiesel was not the easiest of people to get along with. It also happens that many people he dealt with had some shadows to wrestle with. It is especially telling that the author takes Primo Levi to task, in talking about his suicide, for his view that Holocaust survivors were inevitably gray in some respect, although Levi's view is not so unlike the harshness of Akiba when it came to the obligations of survival. It is impossible to take this particular book at face value as a definitive book. In general, this work is a dialogue with Wiesel's work of encouraging the proper memory of the Holocaust and being a somewhat fierce gatekeeper of what is acceptable discourse about the it. Gatekeepers in general are not necessary always beloved figures, whether they are self-appointed or not. Like a grouchy old man menacing a shotgun and telling people to get off of his yard, this book has more than a little bit of bile in it. If you appreciate the author's perspective and approach though, it is not without at least some sort of worth and enjoyment.
June 25, 2025
A moving memoir in parts-the whole was a bit disjointed. Lots of notes and accounting of conferences, talks, meetings-like a day planner expanded. Elies dreams of his father are haunting and his despair at seeing his mother and sister walk to the death chamber are absolutely heart wrenching. Here is a soul who has suffered and dedicated his life to telling the story so no one forgets. Hate and murder are real and he speaks powerfully against them.
He starts his memoir off with this verse-very fitting for what he struggles through and attempts to answer in this book:
Ecclesiastes 1:3-8
[3] What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
[4] A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
[5] The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
[6] The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
[7] All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
[8] All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
In the Bible, one generation represents 40 years. But I collected and published the text that composed one generation after 25 years after the Event. That is what I sometimes call the holocaust, for the latter name does not seem adequate.
Some scholars contend that I was the first to give the term holocaust a modern usage by introducing it into our contemporary vocabulary. Why did I choose that word over another? At the time I was preparing an essay on the Akeda, the sacrifice of Isaac; the word ola; translated as burnt, offering, or Holocaust struck me, perhaps, because it suggests total annihilation by fire and the sacred and mystical aspect of sacrifice, and I used it in an essay on the war. But I regret that is become so popular and is used so in discriminately. Its vulgarization is an outrage.
in truth, as I have said over and over, there was no word for the ineffable. Shoah? This biblical term, now officially used in Israel, seems equally inadequate. It applies to an accident, a natural catastrophe, striking a community. As such, it has appeared in official speeches and in the press since rhe very beginning of anti Jewish persecution in Europe, long before the implementation of the final solution. Clearly, the same word should not be used to describe both a pogrom and Auschwitz
Hate-the key word, describes the passions, often contradictory and always vile, that have torn and ravaged the twentieth century. Only the twentieth century? In truth, the word contains and illustrates the full recorded memory of human cruelty and suffering. Cain hated his brother and killed him; thus the first death in history was a murder. Since then, hate and death have not ceased to rage…if there is an area in which mankind cannot claim the slightest progress, this surely is it.
One must wager on the future. To save the life of a single child, no effort is superfluous. To make a tired, old man, smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice, and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope.
He starts his memoir off with this verse-very fitting for what he struggles through and attempts to answer in this book:
Ecclesiastes 1:3-8
[3] What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
[4] A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
[5] The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
[6] The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
[7] All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
[8] All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
In the Bible, one generation represents 40 years. But I collected and published the text that composed one generation after 25 years after the Event. That is what I sometimes call the holocaust, for the latter name does not seem adequate.
Some scholars contend that I was the first to give the term holocaust a modern usage by introducing it into our contemporary vocabulary. Why did I choose that word over another? At the time I was preparing an essay on the Akeda, the sacrifice of Isaac; the word ola; translated as burnt, offering, or Holocaust struck me, perhaps, because it suggests total annihilation by fire and the sacred and mystical aspect of sacrifice, and I used it in an essay on the war. But I regret that is become so popular and is used so in discriminately. Its vulgarization is an outrage.
in truth, as I have said over and over, there was no word for the ineffable. Shoah? This biblical term, now officially used in Israel, seems equally inadequate. It applies to an accident, a natural catastrophe, striking a community. As such, it has appeared in official speeches and in the press since rhe very beginning of anti Jewish persecution in Europe, long before the implementation of the final solution. Clearly, the same word should not be used to describe both a pogrom and Auschwitz
Hate-the key word, describes the passions, often contradictory and always vile, that have torn and ravaged the twentieth century. Only the twentieth century? In truth, the word contains and illustrates the full recorded memory of human cruelty and suffering. Cain hated his brother and killed him; thus the first death in history was a murder. Since then, hate and death have not ceased to rage…if there is an area in which mankind cannot claim the slightest progress, this surely is it.
One must wager on the future. To save the life of a single child, no effort is superfluous. To make a tired, old man, smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice, and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope.
September 23, 2017
I had read some of Mr. Wiesel's books many years ago and forgot how interesting he was. I generally only give 5 stars to books that I think everyone should read as part of the curriculum of being a human being. This book as well as others would be on that syllabus.
June 6, 2021
really good, he talked about carter, reagan, his family, sisters and brother, his friends who died or killed themselves, the gulf war, very informational books
April 29, 2023
This book is full of history. I have enjoyed reading both books.
June 15, 2025
what this man has seen and survived is astronomical. A beautiful snapshot of religion and history.
January 20, 2017
I just couldn't get into it :(
September 15, 2015
Excellent! One of the greatest Holocaust writers of our time!
Read
April 5, 2019The second book of his memoirs. Fascinating. He was a fascinating man. He could have written a 3rd book of memoirs.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews