The Forgotten

by Elie Wiesel

A profoundly moving novel about a Holocaust survivor's struggle to remember both the heroic and the shameful events of his past, and about his American-born son's need to assimilate his father's life into his own. "A book of shattering force that offers a message of urgency to a world under the spell of trivia and the tyranny of amnesia."--Chicago Tribune Book World.

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

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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

[Timothy McCluskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wiesel reminds us what can happen if we refuse to come to terms with our past. It is a good book to refer to when listening to Cheney, Obama, and pundits claim that we must move forward. One cannot move forward by not holding ourselves accountable for our past. As painful as it might be we must have an accounting.

[Tg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book about Symbolic and actual things--The love of a son for his father and vice-versa..
Beautiful Jewish prayer at the beginning of the book...Beautiful love interest for the son..
How death is always observing us over our shoulder....
Well told tale captivating , invigorating, and plain special
Wisdom form unlikely People and Circumstances
How the faith of an Ancient People sustained them in the most dire of circumstances.....
"The Heavens declare the Glory of the Lord, Night after Night they pour forth speech" The Psalms

[liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost like across between Milan Kundera and Jonathan Safran-Foer. Thematically interested in exile, exiles; with a little bit of that Jewish magical realism thrown in. (My apologies, I read it forever ago).

The truth was that Malkiel's father had never known any woman but his own wife. A matter of fidelity? Not even that: only love. Which write said that you could love two women but you could only be faithful to one? Malkiel's father might have known an occasional surge of love, but he had loved only one woman.

[Milly Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siento que tengo una deuda con Elie Wiesel. Que debí leerlo antes. Que debo honrarlo, no sé bien por qué.
Lo he estado escuchando en diversas entrevistas que dio antes de morir y después de leer su Witness y su Open Heart, lo amé más. Un tipazo.

Este libro es melancólico y triste, y también me pareció complejo y confuso por el manejo del tiempo. Lo disfruté mucho y en momentos lo quería terminar ya.
Extraño.
Como lo es mi relación amorosa con el autor.

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

there is nothing new I could ever find to say about any of Wiesel's works. Each one is epic.

[Arianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a terrific ending! Great characters, rich history, and heart wrenching struggles. It was a little slow here and there, but overall a fantastic read.

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will not go into detail about this book other than;n to say it is a lesson on how to give love and how to receive love. Don't we all wish we had a father like Elhanon?

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one thing you would think that a holocaust survivor would want to retain is memory.

The central character in this book is losing his. His son is determined to preserve his father's memories, his legacy, and his posterity for him, somehow.

An unforgettable image in the book is that of the holocaust survivor dying alone with no family, no posterity, forgotten.

This is a very moving tale. Well written and compelling in its sincerity.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hauntingly beautiful and terrifying. This is one of my must-read books. Highly recommend!

[Chana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my second reading of this book. I hadn't remembered it at all, which is rather ironic considering memory and memory loss are what the book is about.
I wanted to think it was good but I found it very boring. I would perk up when we would be learning history and doze (often quite literally) when we got back into the fictional parts of the story, even as I felt it was not truly fictional but a story that lives in the minds of all the Jewish people. Sometimes I just want to throw it all off; the responsibility, the weight of history, the grief. And yet, you can't let the ancestors down. You can't let your children down.
So the book was very true, very deep and very boring to read.
Delayed reaction: crying. It hurts.

[Hugo Pineda O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quiero ser como Malkiel, un hombre que puede amar a su pueblo sin odiar a ningún otro.

''Dios no puede ser cruel hasta el punto de borrarlo todo para siempre. Si lo fuera, no sería nuestro padre, y nada tendría ya sentido. Y yo que te hablo, no podría seguir hablando, porque..........''

[Yifat]

I cannot 'rate' a holocaust novel, fictitious or true... impossible

[elodie · Rating 4 out of 5]

la fin juste ciel

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elie Wiesel has provided a title with a double meaning. The surface reference of “The Forgotten” is to the memories of holocaust survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum, the aging father of the story’s protagonist, Malkiel. But Wiesel’s ultimate concern is the memories of the people and culture of the Eastern European shtetls that were vaporized by the holocaust. In today’s assimilative world, Wiesel is concerned with remembering what it is to be a Jew. While the storyline follows (compellingly) Malkiel’s quest to document and recover his father’s fading memories, Wiesel also takes the readers on a journey to the nearly forgotten world of his own youth.

The Forgotten is Wiesel at his best, a powerful work that challenges the reader with major issues, combines spirituality with gritty reality and builds a critical link between the generation that experienced the holocaust and all future generations. The story concerns Elhanan and Malkiel Rosenbaum struggling with Elhanan’s worsening “amnesia” (apparently the term “Alzheimer’s Disease” was not yet in common use when Wiesel wrote The Forgotten). From that simple premise spring unforgettable characters and subplots. The unifying theme is memory: Elhanan realizes that without his memory he ceases to exist.

“Soon I will envy the prisoner: Though his body is imprisoned, his memory is free. Whereas my body will always be free, but…”

This leads to a desperate quest to bequeath all his memories to his son – his experiences, his thoughts, his beliefs. Thus we relive life in a prewar Jewish village, the tragic upheaval inflicted by the Nazis, the world of partisan resistance, the founding of Israel and the immigrant experience in America. Wiesel moves us forward and backward in time as we return to Feherfalu, the Romanian village of Elhanan’s youth (and presumably patterned on Sighet, the Romanian village of Wiesel’s youth), both in Elhanan’s recollections and in Malkiel’s visit at the request of his fading father (a visit which finds Malkiel unsure what exactly he is looking for and introduces us to an unforgettable Jewish gravedigger who somehow has remained a resident of Feherfalu since before the war).

Elhanan, raised a devoutly Jewish youth of the type found in prewar East European villages, goes on to dramatic and often heartbreaking experiences, first as one of the partisans harassing the Nazis as the war neared its end and the Russians closed in and, later, in the life-or-death struggle for Israel’s survival after its Independence in 1948. Two pivotal events shape Elhanan’s life: first, on the day of Feherfalu’s liberation he is a witness to (and in some ways a participant in) an event (which I won’t reveal here) which haunts him until the day his memory is gone; later, in a camp for displaced persons, he meets the woman who becomes the love of his life. Elhanan believes the fact that he was destined not to spend his life with the only woman he ever loved represents God’s punishment for his behavior during the earlier, traumatizing, episode.

But The Forgotten is about more than Elhanan Rosenbaum’s memories. It is about the urgency Wiesel places on remembering the holocaust, remembering Jewish traditions and teachings, remembering what it is to be a Jew. Elhanan imagines himself asking his son,

“Will you tell [your son] I did my best to reach you, in the name of my parents and ancestors? To remain a Jew? Never to abandon the memory of his forefathers?”

As we come to expect, and value, in Wiesel’s writings, we find the stories of the rabbis, the lessons from the Torah, the teachings of the Talmud. But these are not biblical abstractions; these are the wrenching dilemmas of human existence. The partisans must deal with their real and understandable urge for revenge:

“We do not make one human being suffer for the sins of another. Jewish morality forbids it. Vengeance is God’s alone. King David reminds us of that in his psalms. Had Itzik repudiated King David? Had he hurled his Bible into the trash? The sons shall not be punished for the sins of their fathers, nor the wives for the sins of their husbands.”

Although the Forgotten will reward readers of all ages, faiths and cultures, the main beneficiaries are the descendants of those who survived or perished in the holocaust. They will find The Forgotten to be an essential resource for understanding the Jewish way of life in Eastern Europe before it was burned off the face of the Earth.

[Nancy]

This is a book about memory and forgiveness. Probably good, but just too wordy and heavy for me to read at this pandemic time.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

For what is a Jew without his memory? It connects him back to Moses, Abraham and Rabbi Akiva. A heartbreaking journey of a son who must carry the memories of his father's, the heroic and the shameful, as it dims very quickly. The remembrance of the resistance during WWII up to the founding of Israel, the next generation carries all these to the next.
>>
Only memory matters. Mine sometimes overflows. Because it harbours my father's memories, too, since his mind has become a sieve. No, not a sieve: an autumn leaf, dried, torn. No, a phantom which I see only at midnight. I know: one cannot see a memory. But I can. I see it as the shadow of a shadow which constantly withdraws and turns inward. I hardly glimpse it, and it vanishes in the abyss.
>>
Oh, to recover faith! And the innocence of before. To live in the moment, to hold desire and fulfillment in one's grasp, to fuse with someone else, with oneself; to become infinity.
>>
We're the only ones who know what death is all about. And the earth itself. Just let somebody try to muscle in on our work, and the earth will swallow him up like that, believe me. The earth is kind to us gravediggers. It doesn't complain, it lets itself be worked over. It accepts what we give it. It endures the assassin's arrogance and the victim's tears. It's open to everybody at any moment; the great conqueror is the earth, for it is the earth that raises the dead and feeds the living.
>>
To learn is to receive, and then it is to give, and then it is to give again.
>>
Melt down the fat. Cut the cosmetics and coloratura. The classic rule of good journalism: honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective.
>>
God does not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.
>>
Wasn't forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it. Life would be intolerable, wouldn't it? Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiva.
>>
It's a laugh that comes from beyond happiness and sadness. From beyond faith and anger. It's a laugh that only the dead can appreciate.
>>
Men are wrong to think that the blind cannot see. The truth is that they see, but differently. I would even say that they see something other.
>>
And what do you take care of?
What people throw away, what history rejects, what memory denies. The smile of a starving child, the years of its dying mother, the silent prayers of the condemned man and the cries of his friend: I gather them up and preserve them. In this city, i am memory.
>>
Death alone is invisible. Man's end was the same everywhere.
>>
Forgetfulness was for him the death not only of knowledge but also of imagination.
>>
Forgetfulness was a worse scourge than madness: the sick man is not somewhere else; he is nowhere. He is not another, he is no one.
>>
It is an admission of conflict and separation; these God creates and destroys, by His presence as much by His absence. All is possible with Him; nothing is possible without Him. But the opposite is equally true. Never forget what the ancient taught us: God exists in contradictions, too. He is the limit of all things, and He is what extends the limit.
>>
Our sages teach us that two angels attach themselves to a man at birth and never leave him. One walks before and helps him climb mountains, the other follows in the shadows and pushes him toward his fall.

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good solid book. It is lagging at times and vague at times (both of which might be requirements for me to all a book solid). As Malkiel works through his father's past he discovers things about himself and his own life as well as his history as a descendant of a Holocaust survivor.

Elhanen is a unique character in that he only desires to tell his son (and by extension the reader) his story because he is going to lose it. He is not a sappy character reminiscing through bitterness or a desire for vengeance; he is a man faced with his own mortality and the impending loss of his individuality (after all, what is memory if not our own sense of ourselves) who must convey his thoughts to his son to prevent further loss.

Malkiel is a very attentive (somewhat unbelievably so) son who as a journalist has a remarkable lack of interest in his father's past (yeah, I know Elhanen didn't want to talk about it, but we don't really get a sense that Malkiel ever pushed him) prior to the onset of Alzheimer's.

I liked the juxtaposition of past and present and the hodge-podge nature of the storytelling. It really flows in the way that our thoughts can flow. Sitting here, now, talking to someone will spark memories of the past which then surface during the course of the book.

I also enjoyed Wiesel's commentary on the importance of:
living in the moment: "To live in the moment, to hold desire and fulfillment in one's grasp, to fuse with someone else, with oneself; to become infinity." and "The important thing is to be aware o the present. The moment possesses its own power, its own eternity, just as love creates its own absolute. Hoping to conquer time is wanting to be someone else: you cannot live in the past and present at once. Whoever tries to runs the risk of locking himself into abstractions that separate a man from his own self. To slip out of the present can be dangerous--suddenly man finds himself in an ambiguous universe. In our world, strength resides in the act of creating and recreating one's own truth and one's own divinity."

overcoming fear, especially in relationships: "Do you think I'm not afraid? I'm afraid of growing old, and ugly, and sick; I'm afraid of dying. But as long as I'm young I want my youth to make me happy; as long as I'm beautiful I want my beauty to intoxicate you. Of course everything's ephemeral in this life. But to say that because the future is threatening and death exists we have no right to love, and to life, is to resign yourself to defeat and shame, and I won't do that, ever." and "Malkiel felt a sort of tenderness for her, mingled with dread: she intimidated him and encouraged him at the same time." and "What I love about you is myself. Don't laugh; I love the image you receive of me. In you, thanks to you, I feel purer and more deserving."

revenge: "We do not make one human suffer for the sins of another."

Overall it is worth reading, definitely a different angle on the Holocaust; this is less a story about things happening to a Jewish person during WWII and more about an individual's experience of the war and his life.

[Pippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

He opened his mouth, looked for the right words, found them. “Rabbi,” he said, “I’m going under.”

This book is way too impactful, too heartbreaking, too thought-provoking for how much of a slog it is to get into.

A father losing his memories to a form of dementia unloads his messy and traumatic past as a Holocaust survivor to his son, with messy and traumatic consequences. When this book is philosophical and religious, it drags. It’s when it’s rooted in reality that it shines.

”How should I go about it? The student can teach; the apprentice can become independent. But what can a son do for his sick father?”

“Speak in his place; pray in his name. Do what he is incapable of doing; let your life be an extension of his. Learn, since he no longer learns. Be happy, since he no longer laughs.”

It also, given when it was written, is incredibly nuanced on some really difficult topics. It shines a light on the danger and immorality of vengeance, and on the potential hypocrisy of patriotism.

A man like you, Malkiel, can love his people without hating others.

[Ivy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love books about the Holocaust, but this one was different than most of the ones I have read. This novel is about a man who is losing his memory to Alzheimers and sends his journalist son back to Eastern Europe to uncover his haunted past. For Elhanan, remembering the horrors of the past is the way to honor the victims of the blackest period in history. As his mind desintegrates he falls further and further into depression because he feels he is nothing without his memories. As means of preserving that legacy for his son, Malkiel, Elhanan sends him to Romania to find his grandfather's grave. Malkiel encounters the gravedigger who has his own stories to tell about the man buried in the grave.

This book threw a sheet over me and I was caught by its spell. The narrative is so seemlessly written that it is often easy to miss the transitions from past to present. I often found myself rereading the parts where those transitions took place just to pick up the thread. The Forgotten is about a father's love for his son and a love for his people. It is about honoring the ones who have lost their lives by never forgetting that they suffered and passing on that legacy from genration to generation.

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wiesel’s novels always juggle a number of predictable character types: the survivor, the Zionist partisan, the second generation son wrestling with Jewish history. The themes are always—at least—memory and the imperative to remember, the importance of silence, and a search for meaningful Jewish identity. While this juggle gets predictable reading through Wiesel’s corpus, the balls travel nicely in this one. An aging Holocaust survivor and Zionist partisan, now living as a therapist in NYC, is losing his memory to Alzheimer's. The father’s life is remembered in flashbacks, including his marriage to a Yemenite Zionist activist. For me, the fascinating twist here involve a few short episodes where the journalist son has to deal with Israel’s violations of human rights during the Palestinian Intifada. We also learn that the son had had an affair with an Arab radical in college, as well as a German journalist. As a story, it almost works; more interethnic sex than in any other Wiesel novel.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, nothing like starting off 2025 with Nazis (Elie’s and apparently Elon’s….and others’…). My 10 year old decided to get into the whole war genre as well, so we started reading about D-Day the same day that I started this. And now that I finished it on Sunday and am writing it up on Monday, it’s apparently the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Nice little coincidence.

I thought that I should probably read this and get it off my pile, seeing how it’s been like three years. My wife found a four-pack of Elie’s books somewhere, a garage sale or library sale, with this bundled together alongside the Night/Day/Dawn trilogy – which I already own and have read; so I gave those three to my dad and saved this, thinking it sounded really interesting, but every time I was ready to start a new book, there was always some tempting new release that I went for. And honestly, how many times do you say, “Boy, I’m in the mood for a good Holocaust novel”?

So, this is kind of a hard book to rate. It’s obviously deep, tackling huge subject matter – God, the war, the Holocaust, memory, disease, relationships, the capabilities of man for good or evil. The basic premise is the main character’s father is losing his memory, and then those memories of the German’s / Hungarians in Romania are revealed as the main character goes on a trip to discover what he thinks his father wants him to uncover. Sounds pretty captivating. The problem is the structure and narrative seemed to jump all over the place, and it was kind of hard to get a read on things, then they would change again. There were parts that were repetitive, all of the talk about memory, which – of course – is a huge theme in a book called “The Forgotten” – but it was the constant wording, the tone, the little sentence at the end of a paragraph, again saying, “‘Please, don’t let it be forgotten, son.’ No, father, it must not be forgotten.” I felt like the power of it was lost with the heavy-handedness of it all. I get it, never forget, always remember, the power to bear witness, I’m not minimizing it or diminishing a Holocaust survivor’s lifework, but there was just something about the approach here. Then the narrative would jump and shift focus in a way that just didn’t seem to gel, seemed hard to follow. Some sections would be boring, then some would be gripping, then we’d leave that and head a different direction. There were scenes with the main character talking to his father about his disease, then we’d get a bit about his relationship with a woman, alluding to a fight/split but not understanding why. Then we’d see the main character in Europe and walking with a translator who for some reason is suspected of working for the government, spying, something… I felt like that whole thing was never really explained or portrayed very well. Then there would be a flashback to 1941 and a super captivating 40 page section about the father as a teen going on a mission to discover if the rumors were true, joining the partisans, fighting, coming home to discover what had happened in his absence. But after that – the most captivating section of the whole book, in my opinion – then we were back to the present, then a flashback to the father meeting the mother in a displaced persons camp, then a job the main character had covering the Khmer Rouge, but only briefly, not portrayed or delved into much. There were scenes with a drunken gravedigger who claimed to know everything, who conversed with the dead rabbis, who called them all to meeting at night. So weird. It was easy to get lost in the Jewish terminology, but this element of the supernatural was just a strange inclusion. The main character and father share names with the grandfather and great-grandfather, so I had to keep things in check with the time hopping, the focus of who we were following. The main narrative eventually comes to focus on one incident, a crime the father witnessed but chose not to intervene, a choice that haunts him, and we see that that is the true purpose of the son’s trip. I can appreciate that type of focus and development, but again, the climactic scene didn’t really seem that climactic. So he talks to her? Just to say what? Nothing changes, so just to say he remembers, we should remember, but we see her talking about how important it was for her to forget, and even when he’s talking to her, it’s not like he conveys the haunting and regret his father feels, he’s just throwing horrible details at her… I just didn’t think the scene was portrayed well at all. There’s a chapter about the father joining another fighting unit in newly-created Israel, but I felt like that was under-developed. We never find out why the main character was being surveilled while on this mission… We never find out the purpose behind him investigating gravestones and inscriptions.....

It just seemed like there was so much potential here, but it’s like four different stories are jammed together and each is the lesser for it. I love when novels have rotating narrators, plotlines that have their own independent trajectories that then converge, shifts in tone and chronology that better emphasize the material; but I thought that all of those things here held the story back. Hard to follow, hard to get into at times, ebbs and flows, unanswered questions, a desire for more here, less there – those are the feelings I’m left with.

I guess it sounds like I hated it, but I didn’t. I just had high hopes, love Elie, have taught his speeches, Night, read other works of his… I’m glad I read it. There were definitely interesting parts. The working premise seemed good, but I just didn’t feel swept up and blown away like I was hoping for.

[Jeni Enjaian · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I have found is typical of Wiesel's books, this narrative is depressing and starts off that way. This makes me feel quite sad for Wiesel as a person. His worldview shines through his books and I cannot imagine living life without hope. As to the book itself, it is hard to keep the timeline straight. The narrative alternates, at random intervals, between the memories and current events experienced by the son and the memories of his father. Despite the powerful potential of the subject matter, Wiesel skims the surface making it almost impossible to engage with the protagonists. THe point of the narrative is also lost in the muddle of text. I did not enjoy reading this book at all.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Borrowing from the library

I lied I didn't read this...or I did, just haven't been able to finish this novel. I loved Day, Dawn and Night but this book was just really hard to get into. I am a little disappointed. I have kept this book for about 3 weeks now, and I have finally faced the fact I will not be finishing it! Sorry Mr. Wiesel, I tried.

[Raquel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the fourth book I read by Elie Wiesel, and possibly the last one. Again, I have the impression that the writing is purposely bleak, abridged and empty, but in an ugly and “un-literary” way.
The plot was terribly disjointed, so at some points I didn't know who I was reading/listening to, and felt utterly lost.

[Jillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it. I think he is a great writer and has quite a story to tell. Obviously pretty depressing, but I love that in a book. It was great to see people fight back against the Nazis because for some reason I feel like we don't hear or read about that as much as we should.

[Gerhard Venter · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you subscribe to "write what you know" — and even if you don't — Wiesel is in a category of his own, above Dillard and Buechner and Achebe and — everybody.
You read the whole damn thing with a lump in your throat.
I feel like washing my hands and lighting a candle before reading Wiesel.

[cindy sisson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lyrical weaving of a father's experience in World War II, his global decline, and the need his son has to know his father, and recreate his past. Haunting, relevant.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I'll be honest, I didn't finish the book. I just couldn't get into it. Maybe I'm too mom-brained.

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping and really unforgettable.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel hit surprisingly close to home, but perhaps it should not be a surprise.  Despite the fact that the novel talks about experiences that are far removed from my own background, the emotional terrain of this novel and its look at the burdens that are passed down from generation to generation is something that I can definitely understand all too well, and the main character is a recognizably Nathanish one.  It is remarkable the way in which the author writes about people who are very much like himself as well.  In fact, it is probably not an exaggeration that the author was himself writing about a great deal of his own personal history, or at least that of people he knew, in crafting this novel of the repercussions of one's actions or inactions, and the way that the past is a burden to us all in a way that brings humanity together, at least potentially.  For someone who has been as devoted as the author has been in preserving historical memory, it is without a doubt immensely difficult to wrestle with the question of the loss of memory due to illness, which is one of the greatest losses that someone can suffer in their existence.

The novel itself is a fairly complicated one, skipping forward and backwards in time.  It is mostly about three generations of a Jewish family.  Malkiel is a journalist who has been in a serious and committed, but not married, relationship with another journalist, despite various ups and downs, and his father is a bit unhappy that he has not settled down yet.  Realizing that he is losing his memory in some rare and incurable disease, the father, Elhanan, sends the son back to the area where Elhanan had been born in Hungary to deal with a particularly tragic event in his life.  Through various flashbacks we find out that Elhanan had missed being able to help bury his father, also named Malkiel, who had sacrificed himself as the local ghetto was being liquidated during World War II when Hungary and Nazi Germany were facing defeat against the Soviet Union.  We also find out about Elhanan's life as a partisan and his marriage to a passionate woman who died while giving birth to Malkiel while Elhanan was a prisoner of the Jordanians after the failed defense of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948.  By the end of the story we find out that Elhanan has been haunted by a rape that a fellow partisan had committed against the brutalized wife of a local anti-Semite, and that the woman is still haunted about the incident decades later.

Admittedly, this is not the sort of novel that everyone will appreciate.  Its context is wrapped up in the Jewish life of Europe, Israel, and the United States, and those who are not a part of that life will find the world a bit unfamiliar.  Likewise, the book is wrapped up in the problem of historical memory, in the losses suffered by European Jewry, and in the desires of families for sons to marry and have children of their own, to be fruitful and multiply and carry on the family name and so on and so forth.  If Elhanan seems to be someone whose experiences and losses have made him a bit passive through much of the story, in Malkiel we have someone who struggles with the burden given to him by his father and grandfather, and the loss of his mother for which he might feel at least some degree of guilt given its circumstances.  And yet so long as we live and breathe, there is hope that we can make peace with others and with our own pasts.