The Testament A novel [Paperback]

On August 12, 1952, Russia's greatest Jewish writers were secretly executed by Stalin. In this remarkable blend of history and imagination, Paltiel Kossover meets the same fate but, unlike his real-life counterparts, he is permitted to leave a written testament. From a Jewish boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, Paltiel traveled down a road that embraced Communism, only to return to Russia and discover a Communist Party that had become his mortal enemy. Two decades later, Paltiel's son, Grisha, reads this precious record of his father's life and finds that it illuminates the shadowed planes of his own.
        
Passionate and fierce, this story of a father's legacy to his son revisits some of the most dramatic events of our century, and confirms yet again Elie Wiesel's stature as "a writer of the highest moral imagination" (San Francisco Chronicle). A wonderful, huge novel that sings with imagination and great-heartedness.
—The Boston Globe

Reaches a climax of tragic power. . . . [Wiesel] has wrested life out of death.         
—D. M. Thomas, author ofThe White Hotel

A fervent, eloquent, and disciplined account of the moral journey endemic to our times.
—Christian Science MonitorELIE 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.Grisha, my son,
 
I am interrupting myTestamentto write you this letter. When you read it, you will be old enough to understand it and me. But will you read it? Will you receive it? I fear not. Like all the writings of prisoners it will rot in the secret archives. And yet . . . something in me tells me that a testament is lˆ