The Sonderberg Case

The Sonderberg Case
By Elie Wiesel
Alfred A Knopf, 2010. 178 p. Fiction

“Guilty and Not Guilty” -- that is the plea Werner Sonderberg enters when he is placed on trial for the murder of his uncle.

From the Nobel prize-winning author of Night comes The Sonderberg Case by Elie Wiesel. The plot follows two separate threads and Wiesel slowly and circuitously unwinds and intertwines the story of Sonderberg and his uncle (two German men who enter the mountains but only one returns) and the life of Yedidyah, a Jewish theater critic working at a local newspaper given the task of covering the trial. Yedidyah is a complicated soul with a complicated past (and present), but the trial’s impetus will allow him to question and resolve much of his personal angst. And when you finally find out what happened on that mountain, the discovery will leave you reeling.

This is no ordinary legal thriller, but instead a deeply introspective, moral conundrum. Wiesel asks us to examine the legality and the morality of action and consequence, whether or not our personal actions affect the lives of those in our sphere and to what degree we are culpable. With this book our debt to Wiesel increases: for the beauty he creates, for his constant examination of the human character and for his ability to push us to greater levels of consciousness.

DAP