Night

Elie Wiesel’s Night is an extremely sobering book. In my book there is a preface by Wiesel and he begins it by saying, “If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one” (Wiesel, vii). I think that one sentence shows how much weight this book carries, and how important it is that we read texts like this one. I think one of the most important things about Night is that it shows our history in an incredibly raw and real way; it makes you stop and think about humanity in so many ways. This book is heavy, it’s terrifying, and it’s powerful. As teachers we need to understand how to best equip ourselves and our students with the tools to deal with heavy topics, and I think one of the best ways to do that is through literature. Teaching students books, like Night, will help them gain a better understanding of our human history, a better understanding of harsh topics like genocide or persecution, will help them better understand how to brave the world, and hopefully help them better understand how to fight for what they believe in and fight to prevent injustice in the world.

I would definitely teach Night in my classroom, but I personally don’t feel like I would be able to do so in my first few years of teaching because of how heavy the book is; I think it would be pretty stressful. When I do get around to teaching it in my classroom, I think it would be great to teach the book in a Holocaust unit in conjunction with a history teacher. I think I would try to find other texts about the Holocaust to have a wide variety of material for students to gain insight from, whether it’s a novel, a biography, a memoir, a graphic novel, etc. One text that I’ve read that I think might work well with Night would be Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.