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The Time of the Uprooted
Elie Wiesel
From Elie Wiesel, a profoundly moving novel about the healing power of compassion.
Alfred A. Knopf
August 2005
Featuring: Gamaliel Friedman
320 pages ISBN: 1400041724 Hardcover
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Contemporary
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.
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