In his latest novel, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel confronts the plight of all stateless individuals as he explores the life of a Jewish boy forced into exile just prior to World War II.

Gamaliel Friedman is less than six years old when his parents leave occupied Czechoslovakia, following the infamous 1939 Munich Agreement, for the short-lived freedom of neighboring Hungary. There, for his safety, his mother entrusts him to the care of a young Christian woman, a Budapest cabaret singer named Ilonka, with whom he lives under an assumed identity as her nephew from a far-off mountain village.

Since Gamaliel is a biblical name the boy inherited from his grandfather, Ilonka renames him Peter Kertesz. "Peter was my childhood," he tells readers. "For you, childhood means playing with a ball, rolling a hoop, pony rides in the park, birthdays and holidays, vacations at the shore or in the mountains. My childhood was in a nightclub."

Because of Ilonka's loving care (in later years Gamaliel calls her a "saint") and their ability to conceal his Jewishness, he survives the terror of the war. And later, when Soviet tanks roll into Budapest following the Hungarian uprising of 1956, he flees to Vienna, then Paris and eventually lands in New York where he earns his living as a ghostwriter by writing other people's stories because he loves hearing them.

While in Paris during the 1960s, he meets other "once-stateless men" at a reunion of Jewish refugees. Eventually, they individually immigrate to the United States and meet up again in New York city.

There's Diego, a "gutsy little Lithuanian-Jew Spaniard" and Spanish Civil War veteran; Bolek, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto; and Gad, a former Israeli intelligence agent. There's also a victim of Stalinist communism and a rabbi in the group.

Wiesel uses their life experiences and individual evocations of despair to underscore his premise that "once a refugee, always a refugee."

"Yes, I live in a wonderful country," Gamaliel tells one of his female intimates. "Yes, I have a passport in my pocket. But in my heart of hearts, I'm still a refugee."

The author, born in Romania in 1928, has published nearly 40 books whose themes involve the Holocaust, Judaism and the human responsibility of tolerance. His Night, published in 1958, is one of the most renowned expressions of the collective Jewish experience during the Holocaust.

As a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, among other concentration camps as a teen, his life's mission has been to assure that humanity never forgets what Jews experienced prior to and during World War II. Consequently, parts of this latest literary work are autobiographical - his stay in Paris, for example. Wiesel lived in a French orphanage after the war and later studied at the Sorbonne.

Although the novel is often difficult to follow because Wiesel switches time and place without warning, it's engrossing. The author's eloquent use of language is a strength, as well as his ability to abandon sentiment and go directly to the heart of the matter.

"He had so examined his past that he could no longer look at it with enough detachment to tell what was true and what wasn't," Wiesel writes.

"In any case, he had bungled his life. Bad husband, bad father, bad lover: failure all along the line . . . All the springs were broken. No more light anywhere . . . Everything he had tried to build had fallen apart. The little good he had done had resulted in fiasco. Whose fault could it be other than his own? . . . And anyone will tell you that if God Himself cannot undo what happened, still less can man."

When, in his later years, Gamaliel is connected with a hospitalized Hungarian woman who has difficulty communicating, he suspects she is his sainted Ilonka. Their unexpected reunion compels him to understand that a justified present life emerges mainly from a reconciliation with one's past.

As Gamaliel comes to terms with his past self, he also realizes that ever since his family was forcibly separated, his ongoing, if subconscious search, was for his lost mother's love. In the end, he determines not merely to "go on," as a friend suggests, but to "begin again."

Frank L. Kaplan is a retired CU professor. Throughout World War II, he and his family lived in occupied Czechoslovakia. They became stateless for several years when their homeland became part of the Soviet Commonwealth in 1948. He now lives in Wheat Ridge.