The Time of the Uprooted Description:

The Time of the Uprooted review:
4 stars (A deeply moving meditation on hope and despair) - 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 ([...])
5 stars (excellent but desolate look at humanity) - 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