Dawn

Two men wait through the night in British-controlled Palestine for dawn--and for death. One is a captured English officer. The other is Elisha, a young Israeli freedom fighter whose assignment is to kill the officer in reprisal for Britain's execution of a Jewish prisoner. Elisha's past is the nightmare memory of Nazi death camps. He is the only surviving member of his family. His future is a cherished dream of life in the promised homeland. But at daybreak his present will become the tortured reality of a principled man ordered to commit cold-blooded murder. Resonant with feeling, Dawn is an unforgettable journey into the human heart--and an eloquent statement about the moral basis of the new Israel."

Elie Wiesel was born in Transylvania in 1928. When he was still a boy, he was deported with his family to Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister died, and then to Buchenwald, where his father died. Night, his first book, is a memoir of these experiences. After the war he moved to Paris, where he adopted the French language and lived for a decade. His work as a journalist took him to the United States, where he makes his home in New York City. Since 1976 he has been Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. His more than forty books include Dawn, The Accident, The Town Beyond the Wall, The Gates of the Forest, A Beggar in Jerusalem (winner of the French Prix Medicis for 1969), The Fifth Son, and The Forgotten. Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, a three-volume collection of his work, was published in 1985. The first volume of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1995, and the second volume, And the Sea Is Not Full, will be published in late 1999. In 1985 Elie Wiesel received the Congressional Gold Medal, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.