Summer Reading Packet:
Tenth Grade English
We look forward to a productive and challenging year together. Between now and the beginning of school in September, please read the following novel: Night by Elie Wiesel. The author survived the Holocaust and relived the horrors associated with this experience so that the world would never repeat such atrocities.
Although you may talk to your classmates about the readings, this is not a collaborative assignment. All work is to be original. Please bring your novel to class, along with your assignments, on the first day of school.
Please complete the following assignments:
A. Read the novel.
B. As you read, check the list of Jewish terminology that we provided to increase your understanding of the text.
C. Answer the following questions about the text:
1. Night focuses on a single year in Eliezer’s life. Identify some of the internal and external conflicts he faced that year.
2. In the next to the last sentence in the book, Eliezer says that when he looked in a mirror after liberation, he saw a corpse gazing back at him. He ends the book by stating, “The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” What does he mean by that statement?
3. How did the relationship between Eliezer and his father change in the course of the year on which the book focuses? How do you account for that change?
4. What is the meaning of the title, Night?
5. Explain what Eliezer’s story means to you.
6. Visit the website for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and see what you can find out about the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (www.ushmm.org/). In a paragraph explain what you learned from visiting this site.
Other assignments will follow when you return to school, so please be prepared for the first day of class. Start the school year right!