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The Time of the Uprooted

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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 ([...])

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

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.

The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

"But it must be recognized that a refugee is a different kind of being, one from whom all that defines a normal person has been amputated. He belongs to no nation, is welcome at no one's table. A leper. He can achieve nothing unless others help him."

This book is one that will make you think. I cannot understand the history of the author, I was born in 1951. Because of that, I can also not understand the history of the characters as much as I would like... I can only imagine, and I don't always like what I see.

Gamaleil, the protagonist (sp?) speaks of what it means to be a refugee, and a stateless person. His words are powerful.

He also speaks of other persons who he met....some funny, some tragic and some religious. And, most important to me in this book, he spoke of where he did not belong.

Something I took from this book, and the reason that I would recommend it is...well...two things

first, and foremost....we must try do do the best we can, especially if we can do so with a sense of humor (after all, Gamaliel and friends named their group with humor, macabre though it was).

But also, we need to work together for good. The past is horrific, let's all work on the future.

Mr. Wiesel's book gave understated hope for our future.

It is a book well worth reading.... take your time... your time will be well spent.

From May 25-28 2006 a pope from Germany, Benedict XVI, visited Poland, in part to honor the memory of his predecessor, John Paul II, in part to call upon the religious faith of this largely Roman Catholic nation to revitalize the Christian roots of Europe. During his visit to Auschwitz -- which called forth memories of my own visit on October 31, 1987 -- the pope noted that the Holocaust was an attempt to slay the God of Abraham.

Truly this is "The Time of the Uprooted." Any endeavor to identify the Christian roots of Europe must begin by uprooting the historic roots of that which renders us oblivious to the obvious, the three faiths of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. How do we at once recognize and acknowledge one another's sameness and otherness? Is each faith set "apart from" the others for its own sake? Or is each faith "a part of" a Divine Providence to which Abraham chose to respond?

Apart from an uprooting of all that which sets us apart from one another, we are refugees on fragile planet that offers no refuge.

Pondering the "silence" of God during the Holocaust, I find refuge, during this, his centennial year, in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, noting that both Wiesel and Levinas studied under Mordechai Chouchani. One-anothered into existence, we never cease one-anothering one another into the fullness of our humanity, a one-anothering that entrusts us with the responsibilities of Historical Providence.

I find that this novel is about a loser in life and I cannot stand reading about losers. Simply, the main character Gamliel had a "mild" experience as compared to others who survived the war. And yet for some reason Elie enjoys writing about losers in life who are searching for love, never happy, busy or accomplished. There is more to life than that and certainly more to Judaism.

Elie is at his best when he writes non fiction about real people such as in Souls on fire, Sages and Dreamers. It is a real shame that he wrote more novels than non fiction works and yet there is still time to rectify that... and yet...

BG