Critique of Night

“When Evil Closed In” is a review of Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, written by Gertrude Samuels from the New York Time’s. On November 13, 1960, two months after the book was copyrighted.

Samuels writes about Wiesel’s current jobs. He is “ a United Nation Correspondent for Israel’s newspapers and the NY Jewish Daily Forward.” She then writes how he lost his parents, baby sister, and god. Wiesel was very religious and his experience through the camps took God out of his life. Samuels describes his arrival at Auschwitz and he “heard the words, men to the left! Women to the right!” This was a first instance where he questioned his faith. By the end of his stay at the camps, when his father died, he lost his faith completely. Samuels finishes her review by telling us that “Night” is written in French and English, and should be written in German.

The audience Samuels was targeting was the general population. She assumes that we know about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. Her intentions are to briefly summarize “Night” and emphasize how disheartening and tragic his story is. This review was presented in a manner that