A Beggar in Jerusalem

Name: A Beggar in Jerusalem
ISBN: 9780805210521

A Novel

Elie Wiesel

When the Six-Day War began, Elie Wiesel rushed to Israel. "I went to Jerusalem because I had to go somewhere, I had to leave the present and bring it back to the past. You see, the man who came to Jerusalem then came as a beggar, a madman, not believing his eyes and ears, and above all, his memory."

This haunting novel takes place in the days following the Six-Day War. A Holocaust survivor visits the newly reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall he encounters the beggars and madmen who congregate there every evening, and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present. Weaving together myth and mystery, parable and paradox, Wiesel bids the reader to join him on a spiritual journey back and forth in time, always returning to Jerusalem.

"One of the rare books: a spiritual adventure so profound that it demands to be judged in terms of world literature." —The Washington Post

"Very remarkable, indeed, outstanding." —The New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps the first major novel to bring to bear on the destiny of the Jew all the resources of modern European literary experience combined with the storytelling techniques of the Hasidic masters." —The Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) was a Romanian-born Jewish writer, teacher, and human rights advocate whose work became a defining literary witness to the Holocaust. Born in Sighet, a Hasidic community in the Carpathian region, he was deported to Auschwitz at fifteen with his family and later imprisoned at Buna and Buchenwald. His mother, father, and younger sister did not survive. After liberation, he studied in Paris and worked as a journalist before publishing Night (1956), his spare, devastating memoir of the camps. Rooted in the world of Jewish piety he had known as a child, the book wrestles with faith, silence, and the collapse of a once-vibrant community, and it has become one of the most widely read testimonies of the twentieth century.

Across more than fifty books written mostly in French and Yiddish, Wiesel returned again and again to the questions of Jewish memory and covenant: the struggle to believe after Auschwitz, the moral duty of remembrance, and the inheritance of Talmudic debate and Hasidic storytelling. His novels, plays, and essays, including Dawn, The Gates of the Forest, and The Trial of God, as well as his portraits of Hasidic masters and biblical figures, as in Souls on Fire and Messengers of God, and his advocacy for Soviet Jewry, give voice to a tradition that questions even as it endures. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee honored him as a messenger to humanity. His other honors include the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He taught for many years at Boston University and, with his wife Marion, founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.