Marion Wiesel, who translated many books written by her husband, Elie Wiesel, including the final edition of Night, and who "encouraged him to pursue a wide-ranging public career, helping him become the most renowned interpreter of the Holocaust," died February 2, the New York Times reported. She was 94.
The Wiesels met in the late 1960s and married in 1969. Elie Wiesel had already achieved acclaim with his memoir Night (1960), which was originally translated from French by Stella Rodway. "Friends, relatives, and writers all attributed the moral stature he achieved partly to the quiet influence of Marion," the Times noted.
"In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant," Joseph Berger wrote in Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence (2023). Berger noted that of the 10 million copies of Night that have had sold, three million came after her 2006 translation, which was also promoted by Oprah Winfrey and became a widely assigned book in high schools.
Like her husband, Marion Wiesel was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. One of her major impacts on his career was through translation. She "shared her husband's cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture and fluency in several languages. She quickly began translating his writing from French to English, ultimately working on 14 of his books," the Times noted.
Her own literary career included editing To Give Them Light (1993), a collection of Roman Vishniac's photographs of Eastern European Jewry before World War II. She also wrote and narrated Children of the Night (1999), a documentary film about children killed during the Holocaust.
She advised her husband as he made public appearances and became a voice in world politics. Using money from Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Prize, the couple founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Marion Wiesel managed the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, which provide schooling and other support to Jewish children of Ethiopian origin who have faced challenges integrating into Israeli society. She also served as the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Describing Marion Wiesel as her husband's "most trusted adviser," Ileene Smith, the couple's editor, observed that "as his translator from the French, Marion pored over every sentence of Elie's work with astonishing insight into his interior world, his literary mind."