The Gates of the Forest

Name: The Gates of the Forest
ISBN: 9780805210446

A Novel

Elie Wiesel

Gregor—a teenaged boy, the lone survivor of his family—is hiding from the Germans in the forest.

He hides in a cave, where he meets a mysterious stranger who saves his life.

He hides in the village, posing as a deaf-mute peasant boy.

He hides among the partisans of the Jewish resistance.

But where, he asks, is God hiding?

And where can one find redemption in a world that God has abandoned?

In a story punctuated by friendship and fear, sacrifice and betrayal, Gregor's wartime wanderings take us deep into the ghost-filled inner world of the survivor.

"A remarkably affecting story." —The New Yorker

"Like a Hasidic tale, The Gates of the Forest becomes one of those stories which man was created to relate . . . Its author is a greatly gifted artist." —Hugh Nissenson

"Profoundly moving . . . In this book, all men are witnesses, all men are Jews. It is the condition of our lives, and the song and dagger of Elie Wiesel's art." —The New York Times

"The novels of Elie Wiesel are a singularly impressive instance of how the creative imagination can surprise our expectations of what its limits should be." —Robert Alter

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.