SOURCE: Wood, Michael. “Victims of Survival.” New York Review of Books 21, no. 1 (7 February 1974): 10-12.

In the following excerpt, Wood offers an unfavorable assessment of The Oath.

Survival. The defensive myth of a long-persecuted people becomes an oblique apology to those who failed to survive, to those who got “lost.” Singer's woman who loses herself is really terrified of losing her child, since she loses everything else. A mother in Elie Wiesel's The Oath does lose a child in the camps, obeys an order to be separated from him and never sees him again. This the central, poignant moment in the book, the source of its anguish and its questions. “I don't understand,” a boy says to his father. “God's role in the camps—explain it to me.” And again: “You. And Mother. Both of you. How did you do it—how did you survive?”

The survivors by their...