In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, letters and diary entries, weaving together all the periods of the author's life -- from his childhood in Transylvania to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Paris, New York -- Elie Wiesel, acclaimed as one of the most gifted and sensitive writers of our time, probes, from the particular point of view of his Jewishness, such central moral and political issues as Zionism and the Middle East conflict, Solzhenitsyn and Soviet anti-Semitism, the obligations of American Jews toward Israel, the Holocaust and its cheapening in the media.