The Time of the Uprooted

The old man Gamaliel Friedman lives in New York City, works as a ghostwriter for a pompous French artist and hangs out with a small band of fellow refugees swapping stories and memories. One day he is mysteriously summoned to a hospital to attend to an old Hungarian woman, near death, who cannot speak. Friedman suspects the woman may be his long-missing savior, but he has ample reason to believe it cannot be. So he waits. As do we, as we read Elie Wiesel's uneven new novel.

Interspersed with the hospital story is Friedman's history. Hidden away by his mother during the Nazi's rampage through Europe, young Friedman found himself in the home of a sympathetic Hungarian cabaret singer. Through her craftiness and sacrifice, he survived the death camps, though his parents did not. Eventually, he immigrated to Paris, where he found work, married and had twin daughters. Mysteriously, his wife grew to despise her guilt-ridden husband, turning their daughters against him and abruptly committing suicide. At a loss, Friedman fled to New York, wondering what had become of the people he once loved—particularly the cabaret singer who saved his life.

Wiesel's emotionally expressive storytelling gifts provide for some wrenching passages, but the book has an overabundance of grandiloquent dialogue. His characters' theatrical speech often reads like rhetoric: Bloated adjectives and expansive generalities make the reader an observer rather than a participant. Wiesel is more intent on drifting through themes rather than creating a work that draws them out. The refugees tell amusing stories, but they primarily serve as a device to expose the themes Wiesel favors: memory, the nature of hatred and a person's need to give testimony as a defiant stand in the face of a silent god. Wiesel is a skillful author with a unique ability to write thoughtfully on human trauma, but ultimately his style as a mystical professor makes it difficult to truly engage with this book.—Jay Reed