Eliezer Wiesel was born to Shlomo and Sarah Feig Wiesel on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, Romania, a town situated in the Carpathian Mountains in northern Transylvania. The third of four children, Eliezer was the only male child. Two sisters, Hilda and Bea, had been born before him; his younger sister, Tzipora, was born when Wiesel was seven.
The changing political geography around Sighet, which passed from Romanian to Hungarian rule during World War II, provided the background for Wiesel's sixth novel, Le Serment de Kolvillàg (1973; translated as The Oath, 1973), and the town itself is described under various guises in most of his novels. As Wiesel recalled in From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (1990), Sighet was a typical shtetl, "rambunctious and vibrant with beauty and faith," where the inhabitants "spoke Yiddish among ourselves, responded to others in Romanian or Hungarian or Ruthenian, and we prayed in Hebrew." Jews had lived there since the seventeenth century, and by the time of Wiesel's birth the Jewish community possessed a rich infrastructure including synagogues, day schools and yeshivas, and various communal institutions, as well as newspapers. Sighet inspired Wiesel's profound sense of Jewish identity and particularly his belief in the Jewish people and God.
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