The Time of the Uprooted

by Elie Wiesel, David Hapgood (Translator)

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 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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Holocaust, Jewish, Literary Fiction, World War II, Novels

300 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
In his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the apartheid in South Africa, the Bosnian genocide, Sudan, the Kurds and the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people.
He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Wiesel was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.

Reviews

[Argos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Çocukluktan toplama kamına kadar nazilerin yahudilere uyguladığı zulüm ve soykırımı yaşamış birinden daha derinlikli ve etkileyici bir roman beklenirdi. Basit ve monoton bir öykü, dini bilgiler kitabı gibi, talmud'dan alıntılarla adeta yahudilik tanıtım romanı gibi bir yazı çıkmış ortaya. Beğenmedim

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 mü 4 mü versem diye çok arada kaldım :( yani çok iyi bir anlatı, bambaşka yerden sürülmüş yahudilerin birbirlerini buldukları paris'ten amerika'ya giden dostlukları çok değerli ama roman olarak çok kopuk, ana karakteri tam tanıyamıyoruz, yazdığı kitabı anlayamıyoruz. kadınlarla olan ilişkileri ve nasıl onların hayatını mahvettiğine dair romantik ve arabesk düşüncelerle dolu.
ilonka'yla ilişkisi romanın en güzel yanı, müthiş bir hikaye, sonuna dek. ve hastanedeki kadın da öyle. ama aralardaki aşklar filan ne bileyim... çok koparıyor ana hikayeden.
ama bir yahudi ağıtı, hep sürgün kalacak yüreklere dair gerçekten vurucu bir anlatı.

[Chase_E1]

While reading The Time of the Uprooted I saw many people in this story who are generous and giving. My first thought was not many people in this world are generous and give to people who need. For example, a man in this story will never deny a beggar into his home. I realized that there are not that many people in this world who would allow strangers in their home and give them food and money. I think if more people who were like there would be less war and more peace.

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a friend who is taking an "Exiles in Literature" class, and this is one of the required readings. The protagonist—Gamaliel Friedman— flees Czechoslovakia to escape the throngs of Nazis sweeping through the Jewish community. To better his chances of survival, his family entrust him to a young, gracious cabaret singer named Ilonka who looks after him like her own. After many stints around Europe, he finally settles across the Atlantic to New York City, where he tries to make sense of the tattered pieces of his life. In New York, Gamaliel finds solace in small group of exiles who themselves deal with the kinds of troubles indicative of a "stateless" existence. When one of his closest friends in the group—Bolek—uses his rhetorical prowess to land him a job as a ghostwriter, he begins a life that mirrors normality. Although Gamaliel views this as a lucrative career move, its very nature personifies his unrepresented existence.

This book addresses a plethora of issues concerning the post-war life of the refugee; however, its most poignant analysis is the long term effects of being unclaimed, as well as the self-loathing it evokes. Relationships are plentiful in Gamaliel's life, but his emotional faculties are stunted from his past. The details of his life are spewed out in taciturn way, as if the reader was one of his lovers too. In turn, the plot jumps back and forth in time, allowing interpretations to change throughout the book. All of this, nestled in the backdrop of a book he's writing, in which he deems as his magnum opus.

I give this a high 3 stars for a few reasons, one being the inclusion of the book mentioned above and the overly existential and dramatic nature of the protagonist. Also, I realize this criticism is steeped in my own privilege. If I had gone through his experiences, maybe I would siphon every mundane part of my day for some existential meaning too. In defense of the author, I believe it was Elie Wiesel's intention to show a product of unwantedness, and the personality flaws that accompany it.
The nested stories from the individual characters are heart wrenching and shine a light on the repercussions rather than the events. I will definitely be reading Wiesel's autobiographical trilogy.

[Cynthia Egbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! I love Professor Wiesel and his ability to use words so beautifully. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is not only a beautiful story, it is also filled with beautiful words and terrific insight into human nature. Here are a few of the MANY quotes that I found as I read this book...

"I look around for my benefactor. He's vanished. But he was there at the right time, as if he had lived only to appear at my side when I needed an ally. A helping hand from fate? The cynics are wrong; David Hume and Nikos Kazantzakis are right: Everything that happens in our human universe is mysteriously linked to everything else."

"A breeze whispers through the trees without disturbing their branches. Whence does it come? Who sent it? To stir what memories? Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav believed the wind carried messages from unhappy princes to their brides, who had been carried off by the forest spirits. In Hebrew, the word for wind is the same as for breath and spirit. But nowadays, people use the word to express disdain: 'No need to listen to what he has to say; it's just wind." Gamaliel, on the other hand, takes it seriously: if only it would agree to take a message to his daughters..."

"Time and again, she'd told him she believed in miracles, but she always added a warning: 'My boy, if you want the Lord to help you, then you must help Him. It's too difficult, even for Him, unless you help. We mustn't expect Him to deal alone with all the madmen and imbeciles and scoundrels who make trouble in this poor little world of His, where there are so many more sinners than saints. Why should we expect Him to carry all that burden on His shoulders? You have to give Him a hand. You understand?' 'But," he would complain, 'how can a little boy - even a big boy - be any help to God Almighty, who is stronger than all the kings on the earth?' 'I'll show you how,' Ilonka would say; and then she'd hug him."

"To a man born blind, God is blind. To a sick child, God is unfair. To the condemned man in prison, God is also a prisoner. On the other hand, to a free man, God is both the source of his freedom and its justification. To be free is to be made in God's image. Anyone who tries to place himself between the freedom of God and the freedom of man, between the word of man and the thought of God, is only being false to both man and God."

"God alone may use the word "I"; God alone understands its fearful power. That's the sin of pride that comes from idolatry: man putting his own "I" in the place of the Creator's"

"We do better not to believe in luck: Our Lord forbids it. I'm old enough to draw on my own experience: Everything happens in thsi world because of encounters. Meaning that since we are here, you and I, brought together by a force we do not understand, we must act as though everything happened in order to make our encounter take place."

"It may be that we have lived our separate lives just for this moment, this meeting."

"Rebbe Zusya would shout his answer, 'No, a thousand times no! You have no right to give up on life when you feel its hopeless. Each day is a blessing; each moment gives you an opportunity for grace. Haven't I taught you anything?'"

"When men stopped believing in God, it was not because they believed in nothing but, rather, because they would believe in anything." (take off of G.K. Chesterton quote.)

"The enemy's not the one we hate the most; it's someone close to us. It's the friend who lets us down, the brother who betrays us, the neighbor who turns us in."

"A Jewish writer said that 'the silence of God is God.' I say that God is not silent, although He is the God of Silence. He does call out. It is by His silence that He calls to you. Are you answering him?"

"The tragedy of Moses and Socrates, he would often say, was that while they had disciples adn lieutenants, they had no friends."

"So began a singular encounter, one in which two lost souls thought they could rescue one another by calling on the love of those who were gone."

"A word may change in meaning and scope according to its context. The words kadesha, kedosha, and kedusha, in the Bible, are one example among many. Those same words can mean 'whore,' 'saint,' and 'sanctity'. Sometimes we use the same words to glorify what is pure and to denounce what is not. Today more than ever, words transmit violence by describing it. It is when he masters the word that Satan becomes all powerful. Rebbe Zusya often spoke of Galut hadibur, the exile of the word. 'When words lose their way, when they wander off and lose their meaning, when they become lies,' he would say, 'those who speak or write them are the most uprooted of people. And surely the most to be pitied.'"

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another moving book from Wiesel, about people trying to live well in an almost-permanent state of dislocation and tragedy. He offers a reminder of an all-too-common human condition and our all-too-common capacity to disregard this territory of suffering and alienation, and those who live in it. Those whom we might, in fact, be placing in that land through our own actions and inaction.

My only complaint was stylistic, came early, and melted away as the novel wore on. Near the beginning, a child character delivered some stilted dialogue. It felt at first like a bit of puppetry, a clumsy way for the author to wax poetical about some of his ideas. However, as Wiesel familiarized me with the world in which these people lived, I began to imagine why he might have done this -- how this was not puppetry at all, but rather a demonstration of the sorts of tics people might develop when they have been exiled from normalcy, from peace, from acceptance.

Isn't my judgment of a person's strangeness really, in the end, judgment of the fact that they lived through what I am a stranger to? Aren't I rendering petty critiques of the best, awkward thing they could build from what remained to them after what they went through?

A point is made in this book of the power of silence. Not the malicious, willfully ignorant or conspiratorial kind, but rather a different silence of power, ineffability, reverence, mourning, humbleness, careful attention. Maybe, in a strange way, one valid responses to strangeness and suffering is not to do further violence by carrying on 'in response,' but instead to offer this particular, deliberate form of silence.

[Φώτης Καραμπεσίνης · Rating 2 out of 5]

Όχι το καλύτερό του. Μάλλον αδιάφορο, λογοτεχνικά.

[Jane Broadhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Time of the Uprooted, by Elie Wiesel was complicated, sparse, hauntingly beautiful, and heartbreaking. It hollowed out my heart, but in the end, left me hopeful for the possibility of finding peace. There are three excerpts worth noting; (pg 89-90.) "Gamaliel lets himself drift off into memory. He has the painful feeling that his childhood is fading away in the fog of those distant years in Czechoslovakia and even in Budapest. What can he do to save those years? He's overcome with fatigue. Inexplicably, his brief visit to the hospital has left his mind exhausted. His head aches, his heart is racing, and his legs feel heavy. A moment of weakness? He's sweating, though it's still cool. The days are slow, lethargic, but the years are hurrying by. Soon they'll go up in smoke. Yet they, too, weigh on him, and they keep getting heavier. No way to rid himself of them, or to lessen the burden by sharing them with, let's say, a loved one. Age can neither be divided nor multiplied. Time ceases when life ceases. So does everything. Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. There lies the ture mystery: The most beautiful of dreams, the grandest of conquests, all end in the silent, indifferent earth."

(Pg 230-232.) "He expressed what Gamaliel had heard around him: Under God's creation, to paraphrase Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the greatest of the Hasidic storytellers, everything that exists in this world has a heart, and that heart has a heart that is the heart of the world. According to this Sage, sound becomes voice, voice becomes song, and song becomes story. If only we lend an ear, we will hear what is all around us. The leaves of the trees speak to the grass, the clouds signal one another, the wind carries secrets from one land to the next. One must learn to listen; that is the key to mystery."

Pg 300, the last page.) "Bathed in the bluish light of dawn, they felt in harmony. Outside, the seventh day of Creation announced its arrival, glorious in coppery light, ready to enfold the entire world with all its petty stories of love and remorse.
"And yet," Gamaliel murmured dreamily.
"Yes," Lili agreed. "And yet, we must go on, isn't that true?"
Gamaliel reflected before answering. Go on how? Speaking for fear of silence, loving for fear of solitude, or exile, or death: go on stumbling and recovering? Go on knocking on doors that open too soon or too late? Was that what life was about? A matter of trudging on the long, hard road, and acting as guides to those who follow us?"
"Correction," Gamaliel said at last. " 'Go on' is not the right choice of words. I believe there are better ones."
"Have you found them?"
"Yes."
"What are they?"
"Begin again."
They were silent, wtching and marveling at the sun as, after a moment's hesitation, it continued to rise, illuminating the houses of the rich and the poor, the valleys and the mountains, warming the wounded hearts of the uprooted.

[Dilan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ben daha önce kitap hakkında çok etkileyici olmadığını ve insanların daha dramatik bir tablo beklediğini okumuştum. En aşağılık olan ne biliyor musunuz? Zulme uğrayan bir toplumun anlatmaya değer bir hikayesi olması için ne kadar insanın katledildiği ve hangi yöntemlerle katledildiği önemlidir. Bu yüzden bu kitapta geçmiş değil de hayalet dolu bir gelecekte kaldığımız için beklenen ağır tablo süreklilik içermez. Karakterlerin anlatımıyla bazen Holokost dönemine,bazen de işgal sonrası Stalin dönemi antisemitizmine gittiğiniz için kronolojik değil de parçalı olarak tanık olursunuz. Yetmezmiş gibi Gamaliel’in kitabının,geçmişindeki bazı karakterlerle ilgisini çözmeye çalırsınız. Bu yüzden zor bir kitap Sürgünler Çağı. Okuması da,hissettirdikleri de zor. Çünkü bu,Gamaliel’in değil tüm vatansızların,ismini geride bırakan ama yükünden kurtulamayan insanların hikayesidir.

[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.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Tg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a captivating book....extremely deep.....I just started it,
and I cannot put it down....it has an air of despair to it...
The wandering Gamaliel....His always looking for love..
His rejection by his wife and her family ..a very sobering tale to say the least....
His separation from his mother...and the Good Heart of her friend llonka
The hopelessness engendered by the Nazis
The Faith and endurance of the Jewish Nation.......
The faithfulness of the Lord

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stop me if you've heard this story before:  a Jewish widower whose estranged wife committed suicide and whose daughters have entirely rejected him works as a ghostwriter telling the stories of others while working on his own writings and seeking to come to terms with a terrible past that includes passing as the Christian nephew of a Hungarian cabaret dancer in World War II central Europe.  Admittedly, there are definitely some people who I can feel the character resembles in certain ways, but this novel is well within the current of fairly typical Elie Wiesel novels.  The plot is complex, the telling of the story even a bit convoluted, in a good way, and the character comes to terms with a difficult task through writing and thinking and feeling in a way that appears well-earned, and something that the audience should at least be cheering on.  If this book is not particularly surprising if one has read any segment of the author's body of work, the book does reveal the author's penchant for writing well about what he knows, the experience of people whose lives were deeply scarred by the betrayals and traumas of the Holocaust experience and the rootlessness that resulted from being cast aside from one's hometowns and home villages and forced to try to find a new home abroad.

In a way, it is greatly fitting that the author is a ghostwriter, because this book dwells the ghosts of memory that result from the past.  The author tries to understand the fierce letters of his estranged daughters, who wonder if the kindness and love he showed them before leaving France for the United States after the breakup of his marriage was only pretense, without being able to understand the sense of abandonment he felt when his parents left him with a kind but not particular moral cabaret singer who pleasured men while being repulsed by their slimy interest only in her sexuality.  A lot that goes on in this book is repellent, from the bestial hatred of the Jews and those kind to them shown by the Hungarians in the novel to the way that a desire to make someone happy can become twisted into an unhappiness that one cannot shake.  The protagonist writes and thinks and talks and seeks to come to terms with his past as he is faced with an amnesiac from Hungary who is dying from damage received in an accident, and comes to the understanding that one needs to start again and not merely go on after the losses he has suffered.

The book also dwells thoughtfully and at considerable length on the problem of being a refugee.  The author notes, somewhat ironically, the unpopularity that refugees have in other countries, and the way in which statelessness is viewed as a disease and an affliction.  In the French characters' hostility to people gaining a French nationality by virtue of marrying French citizens, one can see the struggles over identity and the place for refugees that is going on in American and European politics at present, where a sense of kindness towards some who have suffered wrongs in their homeland (like Kurds, Assyrian Christians, or persecuted minorities around the world) sits uneasily with a mistrust for those who seek to change the lands they move to and corrupt their host nations with demands for welfare and catering to their own traditions.  If the author is certainly sympathetic with the plight of the uprooted exile, he is also aware of the fact that in order for the exile to find happiness in life there must be a letting go of the past and the desire to start again in a new place.  One can only wish that the author found that sort of peace himself given his own wellspring of suffering as a child of the Shoah.

[Steve Kettmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005:

The Time of the Uprooted

By Elie Wiesel, translated by David Hapgood

KNOPF; 300 PAGES; $25


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elie Wiesel has been a public figure so long that his ideas and warnings have at times taken on a too-familiar air, despite their timeless importance. It has already been 20 years since Wiesel played his most prominent public role, famously imploring President Ronald Reagan not to visit a German cemetery in Bitburg containing the graves of 49 former SS officers.
"Mr. President, I have seen children -- I have seen them being thrown in the flames alive," Wiesel said in 1985. "May I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find another way, another site? That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."

Wiesel's place, it was clear, was always on the side of those victims. He was, as the press accounts never failed to mention, a survivor of the camps, and he was a symbol, never more so than in 1986 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Wiesel has chafed under this familiar role, and in his new novel, "The Time of the Uprooted," featuring a tormented Holocaust survivor named Gamaliel and his close circle of friends (and fellow survivors), Wiesel's anger lashes out in what some might consider surprising directions. "Survivor! " he writes. "For a long time now, Gamaliel's reaction to the word has been that it was cheapened, made a cliche, used in all kinds of situations. Everybody wanted to be one. No need to have undergone a selection at Birkenau or the tortures of Treblinka. It was sufficient to have lived, to have survived, in a Europe occupied or even threatened by Germany after Hitler had come to power."

Wiesel's anger is hot enough to scald.

"How many times Gamaliel had heard some hapless speaker trying to win the audience's sympathy by declaiming, 'We are all survivors. Of course, I was born in Manhattan, but I could have been born in Lodz or Krakow.' Didn't they realize that if everyone is a potential or virtual survivor, then no one is a true survivor? How to explain to them that, confronted with such deception, those who did indeed survive come to be ashamed of having really been there? How to tell them to let 'remembrance' rest in peace, because the dead took its key with them when they disappeared in smoke up the chimney?"

Gamaliel lives in Brooklyn, where he carves out a living as a ghostwriter and searches for meaning under the tutelage of a great man, Rebbe Zusya, whom he first meets years earlier in the Jewish quarter of postwar Casablanca. (Gamaliel is at the time under the spell of Esther, a mysterious palm reader from Morocco he has met on a ship to Israel, and travels in search of her, but in vain.)

Later, Gamaliel meets the rabbi again in Brooklyn, and they continue their dialogue, which makes such an impression on Gamaliel that he uses it to develop a character he calls the Holy Fool for his never-to-be-completed life's work, a novel, bits of which are scattered throughout "The Time of the Uprooted."

Wiesel does a lot of scattering, in fact. Besides Esther, Gamaliel also painfully recalls his ex-wife, Colette, the mother of his (estranged) twin daughters, whose suicide he seems to see almost as a testament to how much she hated him; another former love, Eve, who leaves him for another man, the charismatic but transparently dangerous Samaël; and, most hauntingly, he looks back at the Hungarian cabaret singer Ilonka, who takes him in as a boy in wartime Budapest, despite great peril to herself, and schools the boy on never, ever telling anyone he is a Jew.

Between all this looking back, Gamaliel spends time with a colorful group of friends who work together on behalf of uprooted people. The friends first met in Paris in the postwar years and all are weighted down with stories too terrible to tell, although sometimes they tell them anyway. Gad, the most silent of the group, one day spills a tale of working undercover for Israel's Mossad in an Arabic capital, speaking with a German accent and posing as a wealthy former Nazi, and meeting a woman -- a French journalist -- he could have loved; instead, someone whispers into her ear that he is a Nazi, and she is overcome with the kind of hatred that crackles like a high-voltage line. "I didn't realize that such intelligence and such hatred could coexist in one person," Gad tells the group.

He wants to tell the French journalist that he, too, is a Jew and that "I'm entitled to love you and be loved by you," but his Mossad training is so thorough, he doesn't even blush. Later, the day after he resigns from the Mossad, he travels to Paris and calls the woman's magazine, determined to meet with her and tell her the truth. But he can't speak with her -- she has died of cancer.

Gamaliel has stories he wants to keep quiet about, too, but he is prodded toward exploring his past when he is summoned to a hospital to meet with a mysterious older woman of Hungarian origin who might possibly be Ilonka, his protector in Budapest, whom he has not seen in many years. The woman in the hospital is in poor health and won't speak, thus dragging out the mystery. And Gamaliel finds himself drawn to a female doctor in the hospital. She has painful stories, too, and a bond forms.

It would be unfair to Wiesel to give too much of the story away, as a little suspense helps provide the impetus to keep wading through various digressions, many of them moving and difficult enough to bring tears. Especially unforgettable is Wiesel's evocation of the day the Russian troops arrive in Budapest and show up in Ilonka's apartment to drag her away to be punished as a collaborator. The young boy Gamaliel dares to admit that he's a Jew, and in the process saves Ilonka and himself.

The book does contain one strange lapse. Near the end, the Brooklyn religious leader whom Gamaliel so admires, Rebbe Zusya, summons him to what might be his deathbed. Gamaliel expects to be told something important, but in fact, the rabbi has a request: He calls on Gamaliel to bring to his side Samaël, "this heretic acquaintance of yours." This is a true stunner. Wiesel has set up this odd Samaël as a mysterious figure, a seducer and liar, and the notion of seeing him square off with the wise and learned rabbi carries immediate excitement, a potentially great scene like something out of Hermann Hesse. Thirty-two pages later, the novel ends -- with no further mention of Rebbe Zusya.

The lapse is confusing, but not ineffective. Like the new Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, which is intended to disorient visitors and strip away their preconceptions, Wiesel's novel has both a deceptive ordinariness and a hypnotic quality. He wants to pull the reader in, but also to provoke, and never sacrifices either pursuit in this brave, humbling novel.

Steve Kettmann, a former Chronicle reporter, lives in Berlin.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi...

This article appeared on page F - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

[Paulo Teixeira · Rating 4 out of 5]

(PT) "O Tempo dos Desenraizados" conta a história de Galimel, um judeu de origem húngara que um dia, é chamado ao hospital para ver se conhece uma idosa do qual não se sabe nada, pois não tinha qualquer identificação. O que os une é que falam húngaro. Para Galimel, poderá ser a sua chance de encontrar uma pessoa que se julga ter perdido há muito, muito tempo, e que o salvou de uma morte certa quando os nazis invadiram a Hungria, em 1944.

"O Tempo dos Desenraizados", de Elie Wiesel, é uma história sobre os que não tem uma pátria, e os que não tem um passado. Os solitários, isolados, que velhos e vividos, esperam a morte, sem que haja uma chance de redenção. E pelo meio, lembram da sua religião, de porque estão aqui, da culpa dos sobreviventes, de porquê recordar aos outros para que o Holocausto não se repita. Mas também sobre o amor, a amizade, sobre aquilo que os prende à vida, quando todo o resto se desmorona. E tudo é contado de um modo gentil e calmo, sensível e estóico.

Não é chato, não é cansativo, não cansa o leitor. Faz nos sentir pena das personagens, mas sabemos que eles no final, ficam bem. E essa é a parte interessante, que nos faz lembrar porque ninguém é uma ilha. Recomendável.

[Alismcg · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Then I started laughing to overcome my fear. 'I'm not afraid of pain', I told them. 'I only fear the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But you, you do not fear Him, and that will cost you dearly, I'm telling you'... But one thing's certain, and that is I never stopped laughing. Because I knew whom I was suffering for... did they know why they were making me suffer ? I told myself that in this life sometimes we have to choose between laughing and making others laugh. Well I made my choice. "

One ⭐ fell : I felt teased ; and that I have never cultivated an appreciation for. But 4 ⭐s buried their twinkle in the pain behind my eyes when Mendel left me the light in his 'laughter'.

[Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elie Wiesel is a great author and has won the Nobel Prize. I could not get through this book, and I attribute that to the author writing so advanced in this case, that I just couldn't follow it or get interested in it. I have read his work before and loved it. If one reads the synopsis, it sounds normal, but reading the book isn't, or wasn't for me. After reading about 1/4 of the book, I decided not to finish it.

I'm not sure how to rate that, since it isn't the author's fault.

[Jill S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is very difficult to follow. The plot is barely there, hopping around on different timelines, switching between first- and third-person narratives, and attempting to be profound. The protagonist is clearly a tormented soul (as is the author, who suffered immensely in his life), but the disjointed writing made it very hard to get through. I wanted so badly to like it but reading it felt like a chore, and now I'm just glad it's over.

[Marilyn Sue Michel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat dated, somewhat hard to follow, but the end message is optimistic, as the narrator thinks again about getting involved in a relationship with a female. He seems to have no insight why the other relationships didn't work out, but this may be typical of male thinking. Much philosophical discussion, if you like that.

[Jessica Bailey]

It is rare that I don't finish a book, but I just couldn't spend any more time trying to get through this one. The timeline is back and forth between various different past flashbacks and current day events with a horrible attempt at a fictional novel thrown in randomly. I got through 200 of 300 pages and I still didn't get to the point of the story.

[Kathleen Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this a higher rating and I read way more of it than I should have. The characters and the story did not pull me in as I had expected.

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

* Rating: 2.75 stars

[Bluma Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing story. Interspersed with Chassidic Rebbe guidance.

[Ally Armistead · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars for Elie Wiesel's "The Time of The Uprooted," but really wanted to love it more.

The novel conceit, itself, is beautiful, as the story follows a Hungarian Jewish man as he attempts to resolve his past as a refugee, a loner, and a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. Asked to assist in the identification of an old woman who may have been the saintly maternal figure who saved, hid, and disguised him during Nazi-occupied Hungary, the narrator must come face to face with all the women in his life that have left him, haunted him, and emerge from these ashes anew.

The theme of the novel--of being "uprooted"--is cleverly explored through the narrator's sense of displacement: he works as a ghost writer but not a writer; he has had many lovers but has lost all of them; he once had a land and a country and is forever stateless; he once had religion, but had to disguise it to stay alive. All of these beautifully parallel and echo one another, giving the work a powerful organic feel.

On the other hand, however, the novel was often times a struggle as a reader, as it flits back and forth between time lines and perspectives, where sometimes the reader is in third, and sometimes in first, and while this is an attempt to aesthetically drive home the emotional state of loss and disorientation, it becomes a challenge and has the unfortunate tendency to displace the reader herself. Perhaps that's the point? Still, it made reading a difficult feat, a distancing experience, where (at least for this reader) I could never quite hold onto anything tangible or steady, and felt myself slipping and often distracted by the world around me.

With that said, I would love to read Wiesel's "Night" next, as I've heard it's truly remarkable.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 65 pages of this novel I was wanting to put it down, to put it back on the shelf and admit my mistake. The protagonist is a ghost writer by trade, and the novel contains excerpts from a novel he is writing with the intent of publishing it under his own name. I thought the novel within the novel was terrible, but I am thinking that was how I was supposed to feel about it. I struggled, though, to understand the relevance. It was to be his great accomplishment, the establishment of his own identity. Perhaps that was the point: the contrast between his personal history and what he was trying to accomplish.

Like some other readers, I found the switching back and forth between 3rd person and 1st person distracting and confusing. I like structure that adds to the story or provides the right foundation on which to build the story, not something that is arbitrary. It was probably not arbitrary, but I could not discern the purpose. It felt like an experiment gone bad.

The base story eventually grabbed my attention. The sense of the uprooted was conveyed in many ways, including the decision not to bring many of the subplots to closure. There was enough that was intriguing about this novel to think that I might really enjoy some of his other work.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine my surprise (embarrassment, really) at realizing Elie Wiesel, one of my favorite authors, has written like 40 books...not just Night. Where the heck have I BEEN??

The Time of the Uprooted was beautifully written, painful as it is to read. Gamaliel must face his past and all that happened to him as a survivor of the Holocaust. But as he confronts his past (and he even mentions this in his thoughts), is he really a "survivor"? Did all these Holocaust "survivors" really survive family deaths, traumatic separations, and other terrible things? They, including Gamaliel, endured and relive their pasts over and over again in dreams and even in their present relationships. Their experiences never leave them or let them be - but in the end, Gamaliel learns what it is he has been looking for all these years...and will hopefully have the happiness he's never found.

[TJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read it b/c I like Elie Weisel. Would probably give it a 1.5 stars if I could. It was interesting, but a little too random for me- moving around in time and memory. It didn't speak to me. But not horrible written or anything.

[Hanaan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although really a book about refugees, it was filled with interesting insights into human thought and behavior. In his typical way Wiesel can take a historical tragedy and make it relevant to anyone. I highly recommend it. Very thoughtful.

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uprooted seems to be a continual theme in the books that Mr. Wiesel writes. No one understands or pens better how this changes a person. I was pulled into this story from the start and I left equally as touched as when I read Night years ago. His works and his life are an inspiration.

[Hong · Rating 4 out of 5]

very very engaging. elie wiesel is a fine writer, the way everything connects, how all the stories and the past links together is fascinating.
and i love the part when the ending unfolds, it just made me smile. very well written.