The Oath - by Elie Wiesel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The author of more than fifty internationally acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, he was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University for forty years. Wiesel died in 2016.

Legends of Our Time
Written by Elie Wiesel

ISBN (13 digit): 9780307806413
Format: Electronic
Sales Status Code: EL
Web Content - About this Author: ELIE WIESEL was fifteen years old when he was deported to Auschwitz. After the war he became a journalist and writer in Paris, and since then has written more than fifty books, both fiction and nonfiction. His masterwork, Night, was a national best seller when it was republished in 2006 in a new English translation. Wiesel has been awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor's Grand Cross, an honorary knighthood of the British Empire, and, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1976 he has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University.