What does it mean to be a Jew today -- in America, in Europe, in Israel? Elie Wiesel, whom both the New York Times Book Review and Le Monde have called "one of the great writers of this generation," addresses himself to the question from the unique perspective of one whose whole life has been informed by the sense of his Jewishness -- from his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania, when he lived through Jewish history with each year's holidays and learned that "to be a Jew meant creating links, a network of continuity," through his adolescence in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where to be a Jew meant to be marked for extermination, to the present, when some people are already denying the reality of the Holocaust and when Israel inspires both ultimate fear and ultimate hope. This wide-ranging book weaves together all the periods of the author's life, presenting unforgettable portraits of some of the people he has known along the way who have, in different ways, been important to him. - Jacket flap.