Shadows of God's Dreams

...It further brings to mind a figure, resembling the Wandering Jew, emblematic of Wiesel's own vocation...

...Le Temps des déracinés, is bound to recall the nationalistic and anti-Semitic Les déracinés of Maurice Barrés, who denied that Jews had, and could have, roots in Europe...

...Can they separate from the dead...

...They name themselves ironically the Elders of Zion, and they include Gamaliel, a writer, or rather ghostwriter...

...Wiesel, who knows how deeply the uprooted had been rooted, implies that a greater force than chance is needed to restore community or whatever else can be retrieved...

...As Eve observes, "Sometimes you're off somewhere far away with a ghost...

...Given the author's love of storytelling, we might have expected a framing device, as in Boccaccio 'sDecameron...

...Its harmfulness is disclosed only by his unconscious effect on others, especially those he loves...

...The Time of the Uprooted begins, for example, with a folkloric variant of what in Biblical studies is termed a commissioning scene, in which God summons the prophet to prophesy...

...Realism falters when Ilonka, who mothered and saved him, seems to reappear...

...I want words, I want faces...

...Like his friends, Gamaliel has survived many times over...

...Gamaliel's connection to women, including his lost adoptive mother, takes up a major part of the book...

...Why does he fear he is turning into a fictional character...

...Reviewed by Geoffrey Hartman Professor of English and comparative literature emeritus, Yale University...

...Such self-questioning is double-edged: It disturbs Gamaliel but is also relevant to an author who knows his creations to be unreal...

...He goes to Paris and later settles in New York...

...A ghostwriter writing himself into the Book of Life, he remains a ghost to himself, and therefore to others...

...can the uprooted overcome ahaunting sense of their own unreality...

...Yet a postmodern reflexivity is not what is motivating here...

...A mystical vein enters, even if it mingles uneasily with conventional realistic expectations...

...Gamaliel is asked to persuade ahospitalized Hungarian woman to abandon her elective muteness and identify herself...

...this novel points to what troubles the survivors intrinsically...

...Ordinary fictional coincidence, therefore, that at once helps to bring people together and generates suspense, is not adequate...

...project director, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies One of the remarkable things about Elie Wiesel's latest novel is how it avoids suspense yet holds our interest...

...We are plunged into a fascinating mix of memories, tales of adventure and suffering, Hasidic parables, incisive moral anecdotes, dreams, an interpolated Secret Book of religious secrets, and expressions of doubt about the value of words...

...The encounter impresses on the young writerto-be the convergence of two responsibilities: the task of listening to and preserving stories, and the moral duty of heeding the law of hospitality...

...He has the allure of a messenger, like angels of old...

...They have an archival or anthological value...

...In his loneliness, Gamaliel is attracted to three women very different from one another: Esther, Eve and Colette...

...He does not refuse experience, but neither does he actively pursue it: Basically he is passive and reactive, as in his behavior with women...

...The Time of the Uprooted is a capacious vessel of anovel, not a well-wrought urn...

...Throughout The Uprooted one feels the author's sorrow in having to describe the Holocaust and past inhumanities, instead of using his imaginative and didactic gifts to transmit other aspects of the Jewish collective memory, like the portraits and dicta of the great midrashic masters and Hasidic wonder-rabbis...

...In the French original, the novel's title...

...It starts out in the retro atmosphere of mystical romance, but toward the end depicts Gamaliel's anguish in powerfully realistic episodes detailing how he loses Eve...

...A melancholy, fiery-eyed stranger—conceivably a tramp or a madman—comes to the then very young narrator's home...

...I travel the world looking for people's stories," says the stranger...

...His parents fled from Czechoslovakia to Hungary...

...In previous Wiesel novels, women as lovers tend to be primarily sensual presences, stylized by the task of seducing the Holocaust survivor from death immersion back into life...

...None of the relationships last, and his one marriage, to Colette, ends tragically when her love turns mysteriously into hate, leading to the alienation of their two daughters from Gamaliel, and to his wife's suicide...

...The mysterious mutation of Colette's love into hate, for instance, can be explained, if at all, only by despair over her failure to make Gamaliel happy...

...Is Gamaliel even convinced of his own existence...

...He mobilizes fiction, a dreaming with open eyes, for that purpose...

...After the War he is uprooted again, escaping from Communism to Vienna—but Ilonka fails to join him...

...He tries again and again to discern Ilonka in her...

...The novel's main action, though, is realistic enough...

...But he fails: There is no recognition scene before she dies and extinguishes his dream...

...This time there is more nuance, more development, even if Gamaliel characterizes Eve as "the key to unlock the nocturnal gates to her body and his soul...

...One wonders at that gendered dichotomy, yet it reveals something crucial about the hero...

...People exist to recount stories that do more than individuate the tellers: They flesh out the past of each person and seem as well to belong to that past, a time when more listening took place...

...Wiesel's portrait, subtle in its psychology, depicts the survivor drifting toward melancholia, depression, death...

...Dreaming, Gamaliel's tragic flaw, is also his greatest virtue...

...So it is not surprising that one can read The Time of the Uprooted and not be surprised...

...But then, didn't Henry James call the novel as a genre a baggy monster...

...IT may BE that writers who are Holocaust survivors are especially prone to a radical doubt about their art...

...Although this paradox has become commonplace, Wiesel offers in his new novel much more than its compulsive repetition...

...Wiesel 's subject matter, moreover, remains the Holocaust and its aftermath...

...For Gamaliel remains a romantic and a dreamer in spite of everything he has undergone, in spite of everything he knows about a murderousness without mercy or limit...

...We recognize the unceasing flow of story upon story, story within story, and the familiar voice that passes effortlessly from the omniscient narrator to each character's own thought or speech without any desire to use a modernist type of estranging distance...

...Dreaming, Wiesel seems to say, is itself the responsibility, in a world that leaves little room for it...

...Piotr Rawicz," we read, "tasted ashes as he was writing 'The End' on the last page of his novel Bloodfrom the Sky...

...Through many books of fiction and of commentary on some of the most terrible events of our time, not to mention his memoirs and his distillations of ancient rabbinic wisdom, Wiesel has created a taste that has won him wide appreciation...

...What moves me most about this novel, and Wiesel's work generally, can be expressed as a modification of Yeats' insight...

...Thus an epic rather than dramatic rhythm prevails...

...The novel's lack of suspense is also related, in good part, to its busyness...

...In addition, it reveals two cruel, accusatory letters from his alienated daughters...

...Gamaliel suspects "thatman isjust the restless and mysterious shadow of a dream, and that dream may be God's...

...It centers on a small international cohort of survivors who have been through an assortment of disasters called the 20th century...

...Here, however, uprooted people are described whose time lost is irreparably lost...

...Dreaminess, in fact, becomes his tragic flaw...

...In dreams begin responsibilities...

...Torn from their habitats, they have no shelter from their horrific memories...

...Boccaccio pretends his storytellers are refugees from the plague and assembles them where they have time on their hands...

...Then, during the Hungarian Holocaust, Ilonka, a Christian cabaret singer, saves him by passing him off as her own child...

...That intimates both the power and impotence of words when the subject involves an experience so extreme that even to recall it is dangerous...

...Tell me, can you still see me...