Thus we relive life in a prewar Jewish village, the tragic upheaval inflicted by the Nazis, the world of partisan resistance, the founding of Israel and the immigrant experience in America. This leads to a desperate quest to bequeath all his memories to his son – his experiences, his thoughts, his beliefs. Whereas my body will always be free, but…” “Soon I will envy the prisoner: Though his body is imprisoned, his memory is free. The unifying theme is memory: Elhanan realizes that without his memory he ceases to exist.

From that simple premise spring unforgettable characters and subplots. The story concerns Elhanan and Malkiel Rosenbaum struggling with Elhanan’s worsening “amnesia” (apparently the term “Alzheimer’s Disease” was not yet in common use when Wiesel wrote The Forgotten).

The Forgotten is Wiesel at his best, a powerful work that challenges the reader with major issues, combines spirituality with gritty reality and builds a critical link between the generation that experienced the holocaust and all future generations. While the storyline follows (compellingly) Malkiel’s quest to document and recover his father’s fading memories, Wiesel also takes the readers on a journey to the nearly forgotten world of his own youth. In today’s assimilative world, Wiesel is concerned with remembering what it is to be a Jew. But Wiesel’s ultimate concern is the memories of the people and culture of the Eastern European shtetls that were vaporized by the holocaust. The surface reference of “The Forgotten” is to the memories of holocaust survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum, the aging father of the story’s protagonist, Malkiel. Elie Wiesel has provided a title with a double meaning.

The Forgotten by Wendy Beck