I Just Called to Say I Love You

Before the atrocities within the Holocaust take place Wiesel's relationship with his father is distant and cold. Ellie writes “My father wept. It was the first time I had ever seen him weep. I had never imagined that he could”(Wiesel 16). By stating that he couldn't imagine his father cry, it hammers home the idea of how removed Elie was from his father's emotions. There is an emotional disconnect between them; expressing emotion wasn't prevalent. This allows for a harsh contrast to the emotions felt by both Wiesel and his father after they arrive at Auschwitz. When Wiesel describes his father at the beginning of the book he describes him by stating “My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. There was never any display of emotion, even at

In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel spoke about his experience as a young Jewish boy in the Nazi concentration camps. During this turbulent time period, Elie described the horrifying events that he lived through and how that affected the relationship with his father. Throughout the book, Elie and his father’s relationship faced many obstacles. In the beginning, Elie and his father have much respect for one another and at the end of the book, that relationship became a burden and a feeling of guilt. Their relationship took a great toll on them throughout their journey in the concentration camps.

He wants people to step away from their technology and go out into the real world and have real world experiences. He wants people to take risks, but most of our world is afraid of that, because of the fear of rejection. Franzen states, “The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.” He’s admitting that love is hard and it comes with its own risks, but in the end, it is definitely worth it.

It can cause shock in the beginning but that makes it even stronger. He manages to instill the idea that we are all special, everybody in their own way and the person sitting next to us deserves as much respect and appreciation as we do. He also demonstrates that we need to live life for the better of ourselves and others equally because that will bring us true satisfaction.

There were also several negative father/son relationships found in the book. One such relationship is that of a young pipel, and his father. Wiesel writes, “I once saw one of them, a boy of thirteen, beat his father for not making his bed properly. As the old man quietly wept, the boy was yelling, ‘If you don’t stop crying instantly, I will no longer bring you bread. Understood?’” This is an example of how life in the concentration camp causes a boy to throw aside his relations for the sake of his own survival. A second example is that of Rabbi Elihou and his son. While Rabbi Elihou cared deeply for his son, the Rabbi’s son viewed his father as a burden and left him behind. Shortly following the passage about the Rabbi looking for for his son, Wiesel writes, “But then I remembered something else: his son had seen him losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the column… A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father?” The third example of a poor father/son relationship occurs in the cattle car. A worker throws bread into the cars causing immediate desperate fighting. An old man manages to grab a piece of bread shortly before this passage, “Stunned by the blows, the old man was crying: “Meir, my little Mier! Don’t you recognize me… You’re killing your father...I have bread... for you too…. for you to…but the other threw himself on top of him. The old man

If God helped the ones who were suffering, millions of lived could have been saved. Therefore, he believes it was judicious of him, to get angry at God. Mr. Wiesel also represents his relationship he had with his father, in the start. Mr. Wiesel does not regret choosing to go with his father, rather than his mother. He shows he loves his father, as much as he loves his mother. This is where Mr. Wiesel starts to build a strong bond with his father. This interview showcases three main themes: the consequence of human judgement, loss of faith in God, and father-son relationships.

Many people today can’t bare life without their fathers. But when your whole family dies except for two of your sisters, that really hurts(Berger). Sometimes people take family for granted our family. They think “Nothing will happen to me and my family”, till something happens to a loved one. Weather it is a disease or cancer, or even death. It can change you life forever.

Wiesel also felt the same because he recounts “My hand shifted on my father’s arm. I had one thought: not to lose him. Not to be left alone” (27). This was the first step to them strengthening their ties to one another and their dependence on each other only grew stronger from this point on. His father shows more concern for Wiesel emotionally than he ever has before. He explains to Wiesel “‘It’s a shame… a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother[...]’ [...] His voice was terribly sad. I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son. [ …] He was weeping. His body was shaken convulsively” (30-31). The father is only expressing his sorrow for his son, not that he himself will also be burned to death in that situation, or so they thought at the time.

Throughout the novel, we can understand that in the beginning, the relationship between Elie and his father was not the best because Elie believed his father cared more about the Jewish community than him. However, by the time the father and the son only had each other, they were depending on each other. Elie was only living for his father because he knew his father would not survive without him. They were both helping each other in a ways surviving. For example, Elie gave his father lessons in marching step, to help him survive (55). Also, Elie became less and less emphatic toward his dad during the concentration camp days. The Nazi sabotages the wonderful bond a father and a son had together. Elie could see his own father get beaten up and even than; he had no emotion or anger (39). Once his father got beat up with an iron bar, and Elie did nothing to help him, he just stood there (54). Even thought he had no emotion, even when his father past away, Elie said “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...

Soon after he and his father were split off from his mother sisters, be began to focus more on his own life rather than others. Occasionally he tried to help his father, but his father refused his offers. Towards the end of the story, Wiesel began worrying that his father would be killed for his feebleness. As stated in the book, "Whose was it? Mine? His? I said nothing. Nor did he. Never before had we understood each other so clearly” (Page 68). Wiesel and his father at first had separated thoughts, each in their own world; at this point, they both share and agree on the same thoughts, without even needing to speak to each other. The book would soon foreshadow the death of both of his parents when Wiesel stated, "How kindly they treated me. Like an orphan. I thought: Even now, my father is helping me” (Page 75). When Wiesel stated “Like an orphan”, he foreshadows the fact that his father would die. His mother would already be considered dead by him, so the death of his father would ultimately make him an orphan. However, Wiesel tried his best to keep his father alive, even though on many occasions, his father would offer his soup and bread to him. When selection came, Wiesel worried that his father would not survive. As he stated in the book, "I tightened my grip on my father's hand. The old, familiar fear: not to lose him” (Page 104). The relationship between the father and the son has grown strong,

The relationship between a father and son is one of the strongest relationships between family members. A son looking after his father might seem unusual, but in unusual circumstances, relationships are often forced to adapt. The father is the mentor and the son should look up to the father for support and guidance. This relationship plays out in Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, through the concentration camps. Hitler and the Nazi’s have been deporting Jews to concentration camps and eventually killing them. Wiesel travels through the horrible circumstances. In 1944, Elie Wiesel lives in Hungary with his parents and his three sisters, but they deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and is split up, but remained with his father. Wiesel describes his experiences traveling through different concentration camps with his father, Shlomo. Wiesel tells about the different people he meets and events that happen. Wiesel meets other fathers and sons, whose relationships are not going well. Elie and his father stick together as they face many challenges. As time went on in the camps the fathers became weaker and their chances of survival decreased. The sons helped their fathers go on, but this would slow the sons down. In his Holocaust memoir Night, Elie Wiesel uses the motif of father-son relationships to show that while there are benefits to having a strong connection with someone amidst extreme circumstances, there are also disadvantages because the other person may become a burden.

When the Blockalteste told him that he couldn’t help his father anymore, Elie thought, “He was right” (111). In the end, Elie’s father died and therefore cutting their relationships even more. Another example is when Mier killed his father over a piece of bread. The need for survival in the Holocaust made people even kill their family. Meir and his father’s relationship was torn up because of the Holocaust. Elie noticed that “Sons abandoned the remains of their fathers without a tear” (92). This shows the inhumane behavior the Holocaust evoked between sons and fathers. Towards the end of the book, people were ready to kill anyone to survive, even their family. Last but not least, when they all were running in the snow so that the Russians would not find the prisoners, Rabbi Eliahu’s son abandoned his father. Rabbi Eliahu and his son’s relationship was broken right when his son felt the need to abandon him. Elie had saw him intentionally run faster than his father and described the son’s actions as “letting the distance between them become greater” (91). This can have a literal and a figurative meaning behind it. The son running faster than his

Love is one thing that helps people’s spirit to go on. “Mother does not eat her meal she gives it to me instead” (Doc. A). This quote from Document A shows that Dora’s mother loves Dora unconditionally without saying words such as “I love you”. Document C is about a Jewish man and a family that kept him in hiding, the document shows love in it by keeping a Jewish man in their basement to hide from the Nazi’s.

Elie’s father was a unsentimental man. He had rarely ever showed his emotions or what he was feeling at the time even when he was with his family. Elie’s father was a well known and looked upon man in the community of Sighet, he held the highest honor as leader of the people; he would often advise the public. Elie wanted to further his studies in their religion trying to learn Kabbalah but, his father was not supportive in his passion for their religion saying “There are Kabbalists in Sighet” (Wiesel 4). Once they had gotten to the camp of Auschwitz, they had both seen the fire that Mrs. Schachter had been screaming about

While people are often able to identify when they feel the emotion love, love itself seems to defy definition.  In her polemic “Against Love”, Laura Kipnis argues that love cannot exist as traditional expressions of love such as marriage, monogamy, and mutuality.  However, in her argument, she defines love incorrectly by equating love to expressions of love. This definition lacks a component essential to understanding the abstract concept of love: emotion. Recognizing love as emotion helps us realize that, contrary to Kipnis’ argument love by nature transcends all expressions of love. Love is subjective and exists in any and all forms. In her argument that love cannot survive as conventional expressions of love, Kipnis ignores the nature of love as emotion in favor of equating love to different expressions of love. Love is a force which exists above expressions of love; a true understanding of love can only come from an assessment of how individuals, not societies, respond to the emotion.