The Time of the Uprooted [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Elie Wiesel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 2005

From Elie Wiesel, a profoundly moving novel about the healing power of compassion.

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, he survives the war, but in 1956, to escape the stranglehold of communism, he leaves Budapest after painfully parting with Ilonka.

He settles in Vienna, then Paris, and finally, after a failed marriage, in New York, where he works as a ghostwriter, living through the lives of others. Eventually, he falls in with a group of exiles: a Spanish Civil War veteran, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, a victim of Stalinism, a former Israeli intelligence agent, and 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 is barely able to communicate but 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.

Aching, unsentimental, deeply affecting, and thought-provoking, The Time of the Uprooted is the work of a master.

Editorial Reviews

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)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400041724
• ISBN-13: 978-1400041725
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,241,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elie Wiesel is the author of more than forty books, including his unforgettable international best sellers Night and A Beggar in Jerusalem, winner of the Prix Médicis. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, and the French Legion of Honor with the rank of Grand Cross. In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A deeply moving meditation on hope and despair, August 17, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time of the Uprooted (Hardcover)

Elie Wiesel's THE TIME OF THE UPROOTED shouldn't work. With its sudden shifts in point of view, disturbingly eloquent children, truncated storylines and generally convoluted, if scanty, plot, the book should be a disappointment. But the Nobel Prize winner's meditation on despair and hope in the face of both the unthinkable and the mundane is deeply moving.

Wiesel (and his translator, David Hapgood) skillfully controls the mood of the work, immersing the reader in the sadness of Gamaliel Friedman, a man whose life has been a series of struggles. A childhood spent in hiding from the Nazis and an adulthood spent in unhappy romances have left Gamaliel irreparably harmed.

Spiritual issues are pervasive in this book. A ghostwriter, Gamaliel is at work on a story of his own centered on a conflict between a rabbi and a priest. He is also enamored of a rabbi seeking to force the arrival of the Messiah. And he is preoccupied with a woman, near death, who he imagines might be the woman who protected him as a child. Each interlocking piece of his life adds heft to the book's spiritual themes.

Gamaliel's relationships with women, central to the story, are almost cursorily described. Each seems a rich vein of material that Wiesel barely mines. Indeed, the same could be said of many of the plot points.

THE TIME OF THE UPROOTED often feels like a slimmed down version of a potentially more ornately layered tale. Ultimately, however, Wiesel stirs the reader's emotions with economy and power.

--- Reviewed by Rob Cline ([...])

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent but desolate look at humanity, August 11, 2005

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Time of the Uprooted (Hardcover)

In 1939, Germany is cleansing Czechoslovakia of the Jewish problem forcing the Friedmans to flee their home for Hungary. The Nazis soon march into Budapest where they continue to implement the final solution. Hoping to keep their son safe, the Friedmans leave their child Gamaliel with a young Christian cabaret singer Ilonka. She keeps him safe until the war ends. Gamaliel ultimately leaves Hungary and settles in New York.

Though residing in America for decades, Gamaliel feels displaced, a man without a country. Family life failed him as his wife committed suicide and his daughters hate him and he lost all contact with Ilonka years ago when she seems to have vanished. Work is unfair as he ghost writes for others to gain accolades. He has five fellow lost souls, who can tell interchangeable survival tales and only having to substitute names because their stories are identical. His only solace is the manuscript he has written Secret Book; life is miserable as he feels like a drifting refugee with no place to call home until a doctor asks him to talk with an ailing elderly woman who only speaks Hungarian.

Nobel Prize winning Elie Wiesel provides a well written but bleak look at the plight of the nation-less displaced people who once removed from their roots never find homes. Gamaliel is terrific as he reflects back on his melancholy life as a symbolism of all the refugees dislocated and relocated at the whims of the powerful and never knowing when if ever to settle in anticipation of the next dislocation. This is a desolate look at humanity even with a somewhat uplifting climax.

Harriet Klausner

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Left to Wander the Earth, March 13, 2008

By 

R. Chaffey "beckahi" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Time of the Uprooted (Hardcover)

With all of the novels that Elie Wiesel has written, it may seem like a difficult task to write a story with a fresh take on Jewish history and the lingering aftermath of the Holocaust. Yet with "The Time of the Uprooted", Wiesel mangages to do just that, although in a slightly more convoluted and confusing manner than usual. Best known for his time shifting rambles through past and present, "The Time of the Uprooted" lacks a lot of cohesiveness that his other novels have to tie their stories up, not to mention jolting shifts between differing points of view.

The narrator of this tale is Gamaliel, a Hungarian refugee who lost both parents to the concentration camps while he was saved by a Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. The reader gains insight into Gamaliel's distant past bit by slow bit; the majority of the narrative is taken up with the more recent past, and with tales told by his fellow refugee friends. When he receives a call to visit a dying Hungarian woman in the hospital, Gamaliel believes he may finally meet up with his war time savior, but the old woman's face is scared beyond recognition and he may be too late. All of this unfolds in the span of one day, but the quantity of stories that fill these pages distorts that time span.

Eloquently written as always with prose as beautiful as poetry, Wiesel proves yet again why he is a master storyteller worthy of his craft. "The Time of the Uprooted", while definitely not his best novel, is an aching examination of despair and the meager glimpses of hope that get one through life's trials and tribulations. Will Gamaliel finally find what he has been seeking for his whole life and will he recognize it as such when he does so? It is a familiar question often with surprising and difficulty attained answers.