SOURCE: Rosenfeld, Alvin. “A Commitment to Memory.” New Leader 82, no. 15 (13 December 1999): 24-5.

In the following review, Rosenfeld emphasizes the role of memory in And the Sea is Never Full.

In this second installment [And the Sea is Never Full] of Elie Wiesel's memoirs, following All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), memory extends beyond the personal to matters of history, politics, ethics, and religion. So while this is a book of often vivid autobiographical reflection, it is also something more—an anguished probing of the links between memory and traumatic event, memory and justice, memory and the quest for a common morality.

Readers of Wiesel's previous works will have no trouble recognizing the source of his intense commitment to the preservation and transmission of memory. From the publication in 1958 of his first book, Night, Wiesel has taken upon himself the sorrowful burden of being a moral witness to the...