“The Time of the Uprooted” by Elie Wiesel; 2007, Shocken Books, $14.
Six decades later, Holocaust still frequent topic for Jewish writers
Recent fiction
By Compiled by Deborah Moon
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Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel’s 2005 novel is now available in paperback.
Called Wiesel’s “most satisfying and successful work of fiction in years” by the Los Angeles Times, “The Time of the Uprooted” follows the life of Gamaliel Friedman who flees Czechoslovakia with his parents in 1939. Entrusted to a Christian cabaret singer in Hungary, Gamaliel survives the war but parts painfully from Ilonka to escape communism in 1956.
After a failed marriage, he works in New York as a ghostwriter where he falls in with a group of exiles, including the mystic Rebbe Zusya. The rebbe’s belief in the potential for grace in everyday life counters Gamaliel’s feelings of loss and dispossession.
Asked to help draw out a disfigured Hungarian woman barely able to communicate, Gamaliel begins to understand that real life in the present is possible only if he reconciles with his past.
This collection of stories about the contemporary lives of the children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators explores the burden of history.
Written in the first person, each of the four stories is a journey of self-discovery. One woman returns to Germany to find her childhood home; another woman flees Germany and becomes an Orthodox Jew; a third woman’s harrowing experiences leave her with a perfect daughter; and the final woman becomes convinced she shares a disturbing history with her psychiatrist.
Israeli author Meir Shalev’s novels have been translated into more than 20 languages.
In “A Pigeon and a Boy,” Shalev interweaves a powerful love story between two pigeon handlers during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence with a contemporary love story of a middle-aged tour guide and the woman he has loved since childhood.
While leading a bird-watching tour, Yair first hears the story of the boy who dispatched a pigeon carrying a love letter to his girl just moments before dying on the battlefield. Though fascinated by the tale, Yair doesn’t realize the pigeon also carried the key to his own birth and his family’s complicated legacies.
“Intuition” explores the emotional, moral and ethical qualities of a group of ambitious young scientists working in a prestigious lab. Each is desperate for a ground-breaking discovery that will propel them to fame and fortune.
When an experiment seems to point to a cure for cancer, one young scientist has doubts about the data. The resulting investigation reveals the character of each scientist in the passionate drive to succeed.
This novel for teens tells the story of Maurice, a Jewish boy growing up in the poor area of Warsaw where fighting is a way of life. Turning his penchant for self-defense into an amateur boxing career, Maurice is still unprepared for the biggest fight of his life when he is sent to Auschwitz.
“The Fighter” explores life, death and the moral choices people make when basic human rights have been stripped away.
Newlywed Emma Bau’s husband leaves her to join the Jewish resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of Poland. After Emma assumes a new identity as a gentile to also join the resistance, she catches the eye of a high-ranking Nazi official who insists she become his personal assistant.
She is unable to refuse becoming “The Kommandant’s Girl” with its opportunity to access information crucial to the survival of many, including her parents and husband. As she becomes closer to the Kommandant and learns his history, she is forced to redefine her idea of loyalty, attraction, duty and evil.
Former Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx brings her humor to her fictional debut with this comic novel about a woman’s romantic fixation on her first boyfriend.
Marx’s neurotic heroine falls for narcissistic Eugene Obello soon after arriving at Cambridge to write her thesis. Even though her friends hate him and he spends more time with the ever-ill Margaret, she remains obsessed. After she drops out of school and heads to New York to write for an SNL-like TV show, Eugene also shows up in New York with his wife in tow. The affair resumes until Eugene’s untimely death.
Felix Hoffman’s hunger is both physical and emotional. A Dutch diplomat sent to Prague in the 1980s for his final posting, Hoffman feeds his bulimia while spending his insomniac nights visiting the traumas of his past.
A child survivor of the Holocaust, Hoffman finds tragedy again as an adult when one of his twin daughters dies of leukemia and the second becomes a heroin addict and commits suicide. His quest to feed his physical hunger and his emotional search for truth spirals into political and emotional mayhem when a Czech double agent gets into his bed.