The Judges: A Novel

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