The Testament: A Novel

"The history: On August 12, 1952, Russia's greatest Jewish poets and novelists were executed by Stalin. They vanished without a trace; nothing is known of how they behaved in prison, what they told their interrogators, how they confronted their executioners. Stalin deprived them even of their deaths. 'I began working on The Testament in 1965, during my first visit to Russia,' Elie Wiesel tells us. 'I knew l would not meet my character Paltiel Kossover there: like the real-life Jewish poets and novelists, he was executed in 1952. 1 have written this novel to restore their deaths to them and to imagine what their lives might have been.' In this astonishing and fully realized work of fiction, Elie Wiesel has gathered the lives of these martyrs into one--the life of Paltiel Kossover, born in Russia before the Revolution, and converted from Judaism to communism by a fellow student in the House of Prayer. He travels, first to the decadence of Berlin in the 1920s, then to the turmoil of Paris in the 1930s (and a secret mission to the country then called Palestine), to the disillusionment of the Spanish Civil War, and to Paris again. But now it becomes clear that Hitler will turn on France, and Paltiel returns to the Russia he barely knew--to service in the Red Army in World War Il, marriage, and finally to a prison cell where he is permitted to write the testament which forms the heart of this novel. Paltiel Kossover is Elie Wiesel's most remarkable character, a poet (but not too good a poet), an innocent who sheds his innocence year by year, a charming, funny man whose seriousness deepens as he comes to understand the world he has helped create. And others too: Grisha, his son, who has made himself mute; Raissa, his wife, who was once his commanding officer; David Aboulesia, a messianic wanderer who emerges whenever Jews are persecuted; Zupanev, familiar with the workings of Paltiel's prison; and the Citizen Magistrate who sits in judgment. The Testament is a deeply moral work, summing up the events and passions of a turbulent century."--Dust jacket.