Hostage
A novel
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and author of Night, a charged, deeply moving novel about the legacy of the Holocaust in today’s troubled world and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It’s 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg—professional storyteller, writer and beloved husband—has been taken hostage: abducted from his home in Brooklyn, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don’t explain why the innocent Shaltiel has been chosen, just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling stories—to himself and to the men who hold his fate in their hands.
With beauty and sensitivity, Wiesel builds the world of Shaltiel’s memories, haunted by the Holocaust and a Europe in the midst of radical change. A Communist brother, a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis in a cellar, the kindness of liberating Russian soldiers, the unrest of the 1960s—these are the stories that unfold in Shaltiel’s captivity, as the outside world breathlessly follows his disappearance and the police move toward a final confrontation with his captors.
Impassioned, provocative and insistently humane, Hostage is both a masterly thriller and a profoundly wise meditation on the power of memory to connect us to the past and our shared need for resolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A provocative "what-if" premise propels Nobel laureate Wiesel's (Night) latest novel. In 1975, an Orthodox Jewish man, Shaltiel Feigenberg, is kidnapped from a Brooklyn street and held hostage by two terrorists, an Arab and an Italian, who demand the release of Palestinians and threaten death if their demands aren't met. Shaltiel, a kindly storyteller, ruminates on the blessings of Judaism and recalls the words of Jewish prophets, philosophers, and mystics with nostalgia. He also remembers the moral ambiguity of being hidden in his native Galicia by a Nazi officer while his family labored in Auschwitz. Wiesel deplores ideologies that mislead and betray, including the communism that lured Shaltiel's brother in the 1930s. As Shaltiel's Arab captor spews hatred and his Italian captor speaks for international terrorism, Shaltiel claims that the excesses of Israel's treatment of Palestinians are unavoidable safety measures. While the clock ticks closer to the deadline, Wiesel's narrative skills fail to create tension, and Shaltiel's rescue is perfunctory. Instead of a literary thriller, we get a didactic defense of the Jewish state and its timeless vulnerability.
