The Town Beyond the Wall - by Elie Wiesel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Michael--a young man in his thirties, a concentration camp survivor--makes the difficult trip behind the Iron Curtain to the town of his birth in Hungary. He returns to find and confront "the face in the window"--the real and symbolic faces of all those who stood by and never interfered when the Jews of his town were deported. In an ironic turn of events, he is arrested and imprisoned by secret police as a foreign agent. Here he must confront his own links to humanity in a world still resistant to the lessons of the Holocaust.

Review Quotes

"God-tormented, God-intoxicated, The Town Beyond the Wall is a fiction which refuses to be a novel in any usual sense. It is an exemplary tale such as people may in terror and in hope tell one another. It is a legend--archaic, modern, timeless--of an ascent from purgatory to possibility."
--Newsweek

"Elie Wiesel does not describe, he casts a spell. His imagination is in a state of trance. His words are a voice crying in the hideousness of our time."
--Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man."
--The New York Review of Books

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.