Page 134 - SpringBoard_ELD_Grade8_Flipbook

interpret the Text Using Close reading
Learning Target
• Apply understanding of how speeches are structured to comprehending the text.
• Explain how word choice produces effects on the audience.
• Draw and support inferences.
• Analyze theme and how it is communicated.
• Use word structure and context clues to understand unfamiliar words.
Read and Annotate
Read the excerpt from the speech and annotate the text as you read.
■ Use the My Notes area to write questions or ideas you have about the speech. ■ Underline the sentences that reveal the author’s main idea.
■ Put stars next to events that the author uses to illustrate his ideas.
■ Place an exclamation mark by the call to action.
■ Circle unknown words.
from The Nobel Acceptance Speech Delivered by Elie Wiesel
in Oslo on December 10, 1986
1 I am moved, deeply moved by your words, Chairman Aarvik. And it is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor—the highest there is—that you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know your choice transcends my person.
2 Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense their presence. I always do—and at this moment more than ever. The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence of my teachers, my friends, my companions ...
3 This honor belongs to all the survivors and their children and, through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.
4 I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
5 I remember he asked his father: “Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?”
6 And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
aCTiViTY 2.3
My notes
Speech
Unit 3 • The Challenge to Make a Difference • Part 2: from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech 111
humility: modesty
mutilated: damaged beyond repair
anguish: agonizing pain deportation: removal to another country
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