For him, it will be the beginning of a life of rootlessness, disguise, and longing. Gamaliel Friedman is only a child when his family flees Czechoslovakia in 1939 for the relative safety of Hungary. One of Wiesel s strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was when first published in 1973.įrom Elie Wiesel, a profoundly moving novel about the healing power of compassion. For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man s loyalty to the dead confronts head on another s reason to go on living. The community gathers to hear his last words a plea for silence and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town’s last days and nights of terror. Suddenly, an extraordinary man Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. Torn between choosing life or death, Day again and again returns to the guiding questions that inform Wiesel s trilogy: the meaning and worth of surviving the annihilation of a race, the effects of the Holocaust upon the modern character of the Jewish people, and the loss of one s religious faith in the face of mass murder and human extermination. Consequently, most of Wiesel s masterful portrayal of one man s exploration of the historical tragedy that befell him, his family, and his people transpires in the thoughts, daydreams, and memories of the novel s narrator. In its opening paragraphs, a successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps off a New York City curb and into the path of an oncoming taxi. In the other two, it is the I who listens and questions. In Night it is the I who speaks, writes Wiesel. The publication of Day restores Elie Wiesel’s original title to the novel initially published in English as The Accident and clearly establishes it as the powerful conclusion to the author s classic trilogy of Holocaust literature, which includes his memoir Night and novel Dawn. ‘Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man.’ The New York Times Book Review
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