Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:When a Christian boy disappears in a fictional Eastern European town in the 1920s, the local Jews are quickly accused of ritual murder. There is tension in the air and a pogrom threatens to erupt. Suddenly, an extraordinary manâ??Moshe the dreamer, a madman and mysticâ??steps forward and confesses to a crime he did not commit, in a vain attempt to save his people from certain death. The community gathers to hear his last wordsâ??a plea for silenceâ??and everyone present takes an oath: whoever survives the impending tragedy must never speak of the townâ??s last days and nights of terror.
For fifty years the sole survivor keeps his oathâ??until he meets a man whose life depends on hearing the story, and one manâ??s loyalty to the dead confronts head-on anotherâ??s reason to go on living.
One of Wieselâ??s strongest early novels, this timeless parable about the Jews and their enemies, about hate, family, friendship, and silence, is as powerful, haunting, and significant as it was wh