The Oath

Name: The Oath
ISBN: 9780805208085

A Novel

Elie Wiesel

When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary man—Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mystic—steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last words—a plea for silence—and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the town's last days and nights of terror.

For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oath—until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one man's loyalty to the dead confronts head-on another's reason to go on living.

One of Wiesel's strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was when first published in 1973.

"Wiesel had taken his own anguish and imaginatively metamorphosed it into art." —Saturday Review

"This book is as fiery as hot coals. In full possession of his art, Elie Wiesel continues to sing on a Hasidic theme, sometimes joyous and sometimes sad, the symphony of being Jewish." —Le Monde

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.