I am a huge fan of Elie Wiesel so was very happy with this book, since I read "Night" and saw his interview with Oprah Winfrey, I was hooked.Rarely has a such a short novel made me think as much as this one, usually its the 500 page sledgehammer that creeps into your dreams as you absorb it over a few weeks, in barely 80 pages Elie Wiesel burrows into the subconcious,into the darkest part of the soul.The setting is Palestine, 1947ish, the brits are still running the mandate. Palestine is home to...

Every so often, I read a book that makes me wish I was back in grad school, so I could write a paper about it. This is one of those books. The only problem I have with it is that it's too short. I wanted to read more of Wiesel's beautiful and moving prose. I love his style of writing and was caught up by the characters and their stories. The plot is about a young Jewish man named Elisha who is chosen to kill an English soldier named John Dawson. Elisha is part of the resistance movement in Pales...

It's a novel. The author wrote this after his true account of his experience during the holocaust (Night). It's kind of a what if? He definitely sees himself in the main character. It's a deep look at war, death and hate. A man faces the reality that at dawn he must murder a man. I didn't expect to like it as much as I did when I found out that it was fiction. Some great one liners in here.

I'm sorry, this book pushed all the wrong buttons for me. It only evoked the resentment I feel for the modern state of Israel and its policies, and I simply couldn't shake off the feeling. Wiesel's point is that we are the sum total of everything that has ever happened to us and everyone who has ever loved us or given us their time. An interesting point, to be sure. But all the reasoning behind Elisha's acts couldn't convince me that trying to justify your monstrosity by blaming your enemies for...

3 and 1/2 starsThough this is a novella, it's sometimes marketed as part of a trilogy with the nonfictional Night. I can see the relevance, as Wiesel himself says in this book's introduction that he imagined what might've happened if he'd been recruited after his Holocaust experiences to become a terrorist in Palestine. And while I didn't find this as affecting as the memoir Night, it is still relevant, imagining the kind of young person that might become a murderer for a cause and the toll that...

Dawn is a beautifully written but disturbing novel about an Israeli terrorist waiting to assassinate a British officer in retaliation for the hanging of an Israeli. This novel evokes a great deal of thought about stopping violence with violence and hate with hate. Reflecting on the persecution the Jews have suffered, the young assassin Elisha says: "Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity of the art of hate." However, the novel seems ultimately to say that hatred must b...

Dawn (The Night Trilogy, #2), Elie WieselDawn is a novel by Elie Wiesel, published in 1961. It is the second in a trilogy (Night, Dawn, and Day) describing Wiesel's experiences or thoughts during and after the Holocaust.Dawn is tells the story of Elisha, a Holocaust survivor. After the war, Elisha moves to the British Mandate of Palestine and joins the Irgun (in the book known as the Movement), a paramilitary group determined to oust the British from the area. One night, he is told he must execu...

In Wiesel's first work of fiction, we spend a long and harrowing night with Elisha, an eighteen-year-old Holocaust survivor who was recruited as an Israeli terrorist to combat the British occupation of Palestine in order to fight for the creation of the Zionist state. When the sun rises, Elisha is destined to execute a captured English officer in retribution for the hanging of a fellow freedom fighter, and Dawn is an unnerving exploration of the anguish and internal struggle Elisha lives through...

Disturbing....

Elie Wiesel, a world famous, highly honored (and sometimes-criticized) Jewish writer and political activist, was born in Romania in 1928. The novella Dawn was his first work of fiction, published in 1960. Together with his famous memoir Night (1958, of the time he spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1944-5) and his next fictional work, Day (1961) it appears in The Night Trilogy. Wiesel died in 2016.The Night Trilogy edition of Dawn (which I read) has a preface, dating to 200...

When I first read Dawn, I found it a very compelling story that encased a perhaps insoluble moral dilemma; upon rereading it, I now find Elie Wiesel's novella a kind of parable attempting to relate the sometimes incalculable difference between good & evil. The brief book hadn't changed & I doubt that I had appreciably changed as well but sometimes (often) taking a 2nd glance at anything reveals aspects that seemed previously less than apparent.An 18 year old named Elisha is assigned to murder a

Perhaps it's my fault for assuming that 'Dawn' was a follow up to Wiesel's brilliant memoir 'Night'. Or perhaps the book was just boring. Well written, but boring.In my view, 'Dawn' should not be packaged as the second part of a trilogy, because I did not get any sense of continuation; there was a lot of philosophising but no real sense of transition from the night that was Wiesel's life in a concentration camp to dawn in the Promised Land. I felt that there were a number of gaps. It has certain...

The GR star system completely fails me with this book. I do not rate it 5 stars because I think it is "amazing" - I rate it that because I don't want one thing I say to keep it off anyone's list. . . anyone who feels moved (for whatever reason) should pull it on to their list and read it.For a long time I made a conscious choice to not read it, because it is a justification / explanation why one human decides to go ahead and kill another based on an order from another - with no personal connecti...

3.5This wasn't exactly like the first book-it only showed one part, and I just learned that it's fictional. I won't say that I agree with the beliefs of Elisha, but his feels and thoughts have been written elaborately. It has a deeper meaning to it-it's about killing our fellow human beings, the excuses we use to justify it, whether they be political or religious, or simply because we hated the other person. The writer has successfully explained the dilemmas of 18 year old Elisha who is to becom...

Excellent narration by George Guidall, who does the accent very well, and very easy to understand.The story is a look into the mind of a holocaust survivor turned Israeli freedom fighter who has been assigned to execute a British soldier in retaliation for the hanging of an young Israeli soldier. The Brit was kidnapped, and his execution was a threat to retaliate. The British thought they would not go through with it, but the Israelis felt that once they made the threat, they had no choice but t...

This book came to me by accident. I was visiting the library at Anatolia High School in Thessaloniki one day and, as is occasionally the case, there was a pile of books on a table outside the door - books that had been purged from the collection, free for the taking. I am wary of such books, as they are often not worth the trouble, either because they are falling apart, or because they are lousy books. But this one caught my eye because I had heard of one of Elie Wiesel's other books, "Night", d...

This book is very different from anything else I've read. It's the follow up to Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, but this time the story is fictional. Because it's fictional, right off the bat it's easier to digest than Night. It revolves around a Holocaust survivor's morals and way of thinking after he becomes part of the Jewish Resistance in Palestine and is ordered to execute a British soldier. Can the victim ever become the murderer? Do the crimes of others make it okay for you to commit the same...

This is a follow-up to "Night", which I found to be a bit odd. It’s not that I didn’t like “Dawn”, I did and it definitely affected me emotionally, but “Night” is much better. It’s the only book in the trilogy that’s a memoir, so obviously the styles are different. I wonder what “Day” will be like. I plan on reading that soon.

Well written, just kind of boring.

Incredibly relevant. While a historical novel, in our post-9/11 world that's cluttered with arrogance and self-righteous politics, this should be required reading. Dawn is unnerving; it shakes you to the core. The lines between "us" and "them" are blurred and the reader cannot possibly walk away viewing the world through the same narrow lens they came in with. Read it.