Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sieget, Romania. He writes mainly in French. He received a Jewish religious education. The youth experienced the horrors of the Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buchenwald concentration camps . After World War II, he lived in Paris for several years, where he graduated from the Sorbonne, then moved to New York. Most of the works of E. Wiesel is associated with the theme of the Catastrophe of European Jewry ("And the world was silent", 1956; "Dawn", 1961; "Day", 1961; "After a generation", 1970), perceived by him as a terrible and unforgettable mystery. In 1972, a collection of "Literary portraits of the leaders of Hasidism and legends about them" was published. The book offered to the reader includes two novels “Legends of Our Time” (1966) and “The Poor Man of Jerusalem” (1968). The theme of these stories is the relationship between man and God; the search for new answers to the eternal questions of being.