Since 1956 Elie Wiesel, the best-known contemporary Holocaust writer and novelist, has produced (not counting translations) more than forty books, including testimony, novels, essays, memoirs, drama, poetry, Jewish legends, and portraits of biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic figures. Wiesel's novels conform to patterns prevalent in Lazarene narratives of traumatic confinement, in which protagonists struggle to emancipate themselves from the weight of memory of their imprisonment and inhuman debasement. Yet, in his novels, though the Holocaust remains hauntingly omnipresent, Wiesel never returns to the concentration camps. The only exception is his third novel, La Ville de la chance (1962; translated as The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964), in which the protagonist recalls a boy in the camps and the system that perverted his innocence, transforming him into a sadist. Elsewhere, Wiesel's characters find themselves in hiding, involved in partisan activities, or engaged in efforts to survive in ghettos but not in the camps...