H. G. Adler

"Told in a ... stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our finest modernist writers, The Wall is the story of Arthur Landau, a Holocaust survivor struggling to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. After the war, Arthur returns to Prague in the hope of finding his parents, works in a museum that collects Jewish artifacts, and eventually crosses the border, leaving his homeland and friends for good. Despite the loss of his first wife to the camps, the love of his second wife Johanna and their two children anchors him amid the chaotic and competitive world of postwar exiles living in London"--

a novel

The wall

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Compared by critics to Kafka, Joyce, and Musil, H. G. Adler is becoming recognized as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century fiction. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote that “Adler has restored hope to modern literature,” and the first two novels rediscovered after his death, Panorama and The Journey, were acclaimed as “modernist masterpieces” by The New Yorker. Now his magnum opus, The Wall, the final installment of Adler’s Shoah trilogy and his crowning achievement as a novelist, is available for the first time in English. Drawing upon Adler’s own experiences in the Holocaust and his postwar life, The Wall, like the other works in the trilogy, nonetheless avoids detailed historical specifics. The novel tells the story of Arthur Landau, survivor of a wartime atrocity, a man struggling with his nightmares and his memories of the past as he strives to forge a new life for himself. Haunted by the death of his wife, Franziska, he returns to the city of his youth and receives confirmation of his parents’ fates, then crosses the border and leaves his homeland for good. Embarking on a life of exile, he continues searching for his place within the world. He attempts to publish his study of the victims of the war, yet he is treated with curiosity, competitiveness, and contempt by fellow intellectuals who escaped the conflict unscathed. Afflicted with survivor’s guilt, Arthur tries to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. Ultimately, it is the love of his second wife, Johanna, and his two children that allows him to reaffirm his humanity while remembering all he’s left behind. The Wall is a magnificent epic of survival and redemption, powerfully told through stream of consciousness and suffused with daydream, fantasy, memory, nightmare, and pure imagination. More than a portrait of a Holocaust survivor’s journey, it is a universal novel about recovering from the traumas of the past and finding a way to live again. Praise for The Wall “[A] majestic novel . . . Adler’s prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “A towering meditation on the self and spirit . . . The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Masterful and utterly unique.”—The Jerusalem Post “Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching . . . a literary masterpiece.”—Historical Novels Review “An epic novel . . . an unforgettable portrait.”—The Jewish Week “[A] pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity . . . an eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.”—Kirkus Reviews Praise for H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama, translated by Peter Filkins “Modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil.”—The New Yorker “Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony.”—San Francisco Chronicle, on Panorama

A Novel

The Wall

A novel of the Holocaust based on the author's own experiences chronicles the ordeal of a family, forced from their home and struggling to cope with the destruction, deprivation, and death around them.

The Journey

Here is “a rich and lyrical masterpiece”–notes Peter Constantine–the first translation of a lost treasure by acclaimed author H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Written in 1950, after Adler’s emigration to England, The Journey was ignored by large publishing houses after the war and not released in Germany until 1962. Depicting the Holocaust in a unique and deeply moving way, and avoiding specific mention of country or camps–even of Nazis and Jews–The Journey is a poetic nightmare of a family’s ordeal and one member’s survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself “forbidden” to live, enduring in a world in which “everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.” Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The Journey portrays the unimaginable in a way that anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.

Jeremy Adler

The first English-language edition of H. G. Adler's acclaimed account of the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezin.

The Face of a Coerced Community

Theresienstadt 1941-1945

Only recently available for the first time in English, Panorama is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I–era Bohemia of Josef’s youth, to a German boarding school full of creeping prejudice, through an infamous extermination camp, and finally to Josef’s self-imposed exile abroad, achieving veracity and power through a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our greatest modern masters. The author of six novels as well as the monumental account of his experiences in a Nazi labor camp, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, H. G. Adler is an essential author with unique historical importance. Panorama is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.

H. G. Adler

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