The Forgotten

Name: The Forgotten
ISBN: 9780805210194

Elie Wiesel

Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late.

Elhanan's story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another.

"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

"A masterful storyteller . . . Wiesel creates a kaleidoscope of images that raise tantalizing questions." —The Boston Globe

"From the abyss of the death camps he has come as a messenger to mankind--not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement." —From the Citation for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize

"Wiesel uses words to craft literary monuments, works that stand as acts of remembrance and as meditations on the nature of remembrance itself." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Unquestionably, Wiesel is one of the most admirable, indeed indispensable, human beings now writing." —The Washington Post

"Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man." —The New York Review of Books

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.