The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

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.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.

Starting with Night (1958), Wiesel, who survived the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, has testified against Holocaust atrocities and revealed the collective Jewish experience in more than 40 works of fiction and nonfiction. Recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of oppressed people, Wiesel has become the spokesman for a lost generation. His newest novel, like his other work, raises moral questions about love, faith, survival, politics, and exile. A few critics thought these themes too diffuse; the disjointed style similarly jarred some. But the consensus is that The Time of the Uprooted is an artful, redemptive, and ultimately humbling exploration of the Holocaust’s lasting emotional impact.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.