Product Description

Gamaliel Friedman is only a child when his family flees Czechoslovakia in 1939 for the relative safety of Hungary. For him, it will be the beginning of a life of rootlessness, disguise, and longing. Five years later, in desperation, Gamaliel’s parents entrust him to a young Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. With his Jewish identity hidden, Gamaliel survives the war. But in 1956, to escape the stranglehold of communism, he leaves Budapest after painfully parting from Ilonka.

Gamaliel tries, unsuccessfully, to find a place for himself in Europe. After a failed marriage, he moves to New York, where he works as a ghostwriter, living through the lives of others. Eventually he falls in with a group of exiles, including a rabbi––a mystic whose belief in the potential for grace in everyday life powerfully counters Gamaliel’s feelings of loss and dispossession. When Gamaliel is asked to help draw out an elderly, disfigured Hungarian woman who may be his beloved Ilonka, he begins to understand that a real life in the present is possible only if he will reconcile with his past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1631049 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-06
• Released on: 2007-02-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .82" w x 5.12" l, .73 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nobel Prize–winner Wiesel (The Judges, Night) considers the cost of exile for a writer and his circle of refugee friends in this meandering yet weighty new novel. Gamaliel Friedman, a Czech Jew, escaped to Hungary as a child during WWII and survived in the care of a Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. As the book opens in present-day New York, Gamaliel calls on a nameless dying woman who only speaks Hungarian, and his numerous visits to her hospital bed are interspersed with stories of his many loves and losses. Gamaliel's statelessness is in some ways at the root of all his misery: Ilonka's disappearance, his wife's suicide, daughters who despise him and his unhappy career as a ghostwriter. His only consolations are his manuscript the Secret Book, and his small, colorful group of fellow stateless Jews. Wiesel entwines their searing memories and present troubles with Gamaliel's, and the novel's structure sometimes represents the refugee experience: buffeted from one place to the next, never sure of the journey's goal. Though the story ends on an optimistic note, this remains a bleak and unsettling novel, an exploration of the power and mystery of stories, as well as their ultimate failure to change the world. (Sept. 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Throughout his long and active career, this well-regarded writer has explored, in novel and memoir form, the contemporary Jewish consciousness forged in the face of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime that not so much stained as branded Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In Wiesel's latest work, a slow-building yet eventually overwhelming novel, he uses one man's life, that of Gamaliel Friedman, who was a boy during the Holocaust and now, advanced in years, resides in the U.S., as a paradigm of the person in perpetual exile: the refugee who never feels as if where the body is at home is where the soul rests comfortably. The novel is also about memory: in this case, Gamaliel's propensity for floating through his personal history, recalling his wife, who committed suicide, and his now-alienated daughters; but in particular there is Ilanka, the polestar of his entire existence, the neighbor woman who took him in and passed him off as a Christian child, removing him, then, from the Nazi sweep of Jews in every corner of occupied Europe. The novel comes to be a disturbing but lesson-filled meditation on identity and the resulting disturbance of the heart and mind when one never possesses a secure one. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“The Time of the Uprooted is perhaps Wiesel’s most satisfying and successful work of fiction in years . . . with his finest talents on full display.”
–Los Angeles Times