Resumo de The Time Of The Uprooted

Elie Wiesel tells us that for someone uprooted ?once a refugee, always a refugee. He escapes one place of exile, only to find himself in another; Nowhere is he at home. He never forgets the place he came from; his life is always provisional. Happiness for him is a moment?s rest. Love never ending is the blink of an eye. For such a one, the end is always near.?

Such is the life of Gamaliel Friedman, whose father is imprisoned and whose mother entrusts him to a cabaret singer named Ilonka so that he can survive in World War II Budapest. He never sees his mother again. After the war, he ends up in Paris. He marries Collette and they have twin daughters, Sophie and Katya. Gamaliel meets others who have been uprooted during the war and maintains this circle of friends through the rest of his life. One friend, Bolek, a Polish survivor, finds Gamaliel work as a ghost writer.

When we meet Gamaliel, he is going to a hospital in Brooklyn because the staff needs assistance in understanding an unidentified woman who speaks Hungarian. He thinks it may be Ilonka. Gamaliel has earned his living as a ghostwriter for others, but he is also working on his own novel, The Secret Book, about interactions between a Jewish mystic and a Hungarian Archbishop. Collette has committed suicide, and his grown daughters stopped speaking to him years ago, blaming him for their mother?s depression and death. He has met the mysterious Esther, but cannot find her again. He and Eve have ended their relationship so she can marry Samael to save Bolek?s daughter Leah. His circle of friends meets frequently and debate politics and philosophy. The woman in the hospital dies before Gamaliel can speak with her, but her personal effects include two white candles (to light for the Sabbath), so Gamaliel thinks this woman could have been Ilonka or his mother.

Gamaliel is not a particularly endearing character, and all of the references to medieval philosophers, Kabbalah and other literary works dispersed through a novel that weaves through characters and places and times makes it that much harder to read. The ending, while probably appropriate for Gamaliel, leaves the reader unsatisfied: Gamaliel never talks to the unidentified woman and ends up having sex with her doctor, supposedly the beginning of a love affair.

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