Mr. Anderson
English 9A
September 24, 2014
Father-Son Relationships in Elie Wiesel’s Night and My Life
Fathers are often applauded for merely being there. Mothers, however, are given much stricter standards. Apart from this not being fair to mothers, this also isn’t fair and realistic for sons in relation to their fathers. Sons need their fathers to take an active role in their lives, but an active role can also cause negative struggle. It is a difficult relationship to navigate, but it is important. Father-son relationships are a source of great joy and frustrating pain, but are essential to the well-being of both father and son.
At times father-son relationships can be pushed to the limits, which provides chances for both beautiful and heartbreaking acts within the father-son relationship. In Elie Wiesel’s Night he tells the story of his experience of surviving life leading up to and getting through time in the Auschwitz concentration camps during the Holocaust. Most of his journey through this trying time is a journey with his father that contains many heartbreaking and uplifting acts between father and son. What sticks out about their relationship throughout this time is their desire not to see the other suffer. From the start of entering Auschwitz Elie’s father tells his son, “It’s a shame… a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother.” It is not the desire to get rid of his son that drives this comment, which Elie realizes later, explaining, “I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son” (42).
Despite his father’s desire not to see the torture of his son during the Holocaust, the Elie and Shlomo Wiesel struggle together to stay alive and take care of each other. Elie’s father at one point chooses not to eat his ration in order to provide food for his son. Elie continuously drags his father along in instances when the father is near giving up and losing his life. On a run from Auschwitz to another a train over thirty miles away, Elie continuously encourages his father to keep running.
Their experiences with struggle during the Holocaust, however, are not free of actions that cause shame for the son. At one moment, Elie sees his father being beaten, but does not respond heroically. Elie describes the event as,
“I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. What is more, any anger I felt at that moment was directed, not against the Kapo, but against my father. I was angry with him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak” (61).
Elie later felt shame for such an action. He was distraught by his selfishness and anger towards someone who was being brutalized. Not just someone, but his father.
Elie’s shame from this action and his love to keep his father alive later drove him to continue pulling his father along with him on the trip. Ultimately, Elie’s father did not survive, but he was days away from surviving with Elie, only because Elie had pulled him along. Elie’s fight for his father, also, played a role in keeping Elie alive. The young boy gave up after his father died, but he had no need to fight any longer, because the Germans scaled back their harassment in the few days prior to the Allies coming to liberate the Jewish refugees.
Fortunately, I have never had to experience any situations that neared the constant brutality and threats to my life, as Elie and his father faced; however, I have had many experiences that relate to the father-son relationship that Elie and his father shared. The pain and frustration my father and I experienced came in much tamer forms, such as me learning to stand behind my actions and face up to my mistakes.
Just like many other kids, when I was in elementary school and into middle school, I wanted to stay out of trouble, and even when I made a decision that would lead to trouble, I would try to deflect the blame from myself. One winter in middle school my sister and I went outside to play in a giant snowstorm with our neighbors. As reckless middle school boys, my neighbors and I enjoyed rough housing and causing mayhem, so we started a snowball fight. To gain an advantage in the destructive aspect of our fight my neighbor and I turned to a puddle of water to turn our snowballs into ice. Eventually, I tested my aim on my sister who was not involved in the snowball fight, and I bloodied her face. My response, when she went crying into the house and my parents came out yelling, was to deflect criticism. I wasn’t the only one throwing iceballs. It was a snowball fight, so you might get hit. I didn’t know I could throw that far. All of my excuse making infuriated my father. He emphasized that I was being grounded, not because I hit my sister with a snowball, but because he was angry with me for making excuses and not taking the blame for what I had done.
Up to this point in my relationship with my father, he would often frustrate me with not allowing me to go out places and take part in activities that he deemed I was not old enough for. He frustrated me with punishments that I felt were unfair. Our frustrations dealt a lot with my immaturity, but they were strong frustrations in my mind at the time.
Fortunately, these frustrations were not nearly as great as the heartwarming aspects of our relationship that caused us great joy. My father and I spent a great deal of time bonding over sports. Although it is not appear to be of profound importance, the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 was a shared moment of great joy between us that tied to deep bonding between my father and me. The time that we put into watching the Red Sox and discussing their play for years leading up to that victory when I was eighteen years old made for elation. What he taught me of the eighty-six year World Series drought and all of the painful moments of Red Sox history including the ball rolling between Bill Buckner’s legs, were enjoyable bonding moments that helped build up the potential for how much joy we were able to share, when the Red Sox won the World Series. We were not together that night, but I called my father and spoke to him for two hours about the amazing playoff run, the return from down three games to the enemy Yankees, and the end of many years of Red Sox misery.
More deeply, my father helped instill in me a sense of adventure and a desire to explore. Every year my family would go on a vacation. Sometimes it would just be to the beach, but even on these trips, we would go explore the wildlife that we could find on the seashore. Other times we would go into the wilderness of Canada to see a new place. My mother was a great part of this, but my father was the one who would take me for a hike through the woods to venture to see a waterfall or to find ourselves atop the highest mountain top around. To this day I still have a sense of adventure and a desire to explore. Recently I traveled outside of the U.S. to go to Costa Rica, which was the first time I had been outside of the U.S. or Canada. It was a thrilling experience from which I was excited to learn and see completely new parts of life and the world.
Father-son relationships are not all alike. Some father-son relationships are miserable experiences that cause a son to flee his father due to abuse. Other relationships are non-existent due to fathers who have left the family’s picture. These relationships fail to live up to the similarities held my experiences and those of Elie Wiesel and Shlomo Wiesel. I do not find these relationships as quintessential father-son relationships, but they are significant formative experiences that play a part in molding young men.
Based on both my experiences and my readings of novels such as Night I am able to grasp my experiences with my father and experiences of others in a clearer view. It helps me to see what some of my students are missing or what they have. The reading and my experiences help to formulate what type of father I hope to be and give me an understanding of what I can expect, if I become a father. I know that I will have to be prepared for struggle, but I will also be rewarded with joyous experiences, if I foster a relationship to provide closeness between a son and myself.