The Judges: A Novel - Softcover

Wiesel, Elie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805211217 ISBN 13: 9780805211214

Publisher: Schocken, 2004

Synopsis

From Elie Wiesel, a gripping novel of guilt, innocence, and the perilousness of judging both.

A plane en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers: Claudia, who has left her husband and found new love; Razziel, a religious teacher who was once a political prisoner; Yoav, a terminally ill Israeli commando; George, an archivist who is hiding a Holocaust secret that could bring down a certain politician; and Bruce, a would-be priest turned philanderer.

Their host—an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself simply the Judge—begins to interrogate them, forcing them to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces that one of them—the least worthy—will die.

The Judges is a powerful novel that reflects the philosophical, religious, and moral questions that are at the heart of Elie Wiesel’s work.

About this title

Review:

Distinguished author, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel continues his exploration of guilt, innocence, history, and memory, but with a new twist. Wiesel moves the battle for the human soul from the Holocaust to the rarefied setting of a Connecticut parlor. There, five strangers, stranded during a snowstorm, find themselves manipulated by a sadistic host who calls himself the Judge and declares that one of them will die before morning. Through the long night, the characters take stock of their lives and indentify what inspires them to cling to life. There is George, the archivist who has discovered a dangerously revealing document and whose "ambition it is to evoke the memory of memory"; Yoav, the Israeli commando who believes that "each man was his own executioner and his own victim"; and Razziel, who lost the memory of his childhood to torturers and was on his way to meet the man who could unlock his past. While the characterizations are uneven (Bruce, the playboy, is stock stuff and the Judge's deification of evil is not entirely convincing), Wiesel's philosophical fable is powerful and thought provoking, and increasingly relevant in an age concerned with terrorism and the questions of good and evil. --Lesley Reed

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Schocken
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0805211217
• ISBN 13: 9780805211214
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224