One of the few German-speaking Jewish novelists to survive the Holocaust, Adler draws on his personal experience for this story of a family in the roundups, transports, camps, and then the lone survivor's return home. He wrote it in 1962, and it has only now been translated into English; that may be because the stream-of-consciousness style makes it a difficult read, even if it is true to the madness of reality. Time, place, narrative voices, and points of view switch constantly. But the arbitrariness and confusion are the heart of the story. The bureaucracy of the camps is rigid and absurd: everything has to be labeled with your name, address, and date of birth; it doesn't matter that you no longer have an address. With the journey metaphor of the title, there is the essential horror: Thou shalt not dwell among us. The return home is to those who said nothing. For Adler, the lingering effect of his experience is disorientation, and his novel brings that feeling to life.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2008 Booklist

This unusual and noteworthy novel is a fictional account by a German-speaking Jew who survived the Holocaust. Adler (1910-88) was born in Prague and was imprisoned in Theresienstadt (Ruhenthal) and Auschwitz. In his wanderings after the war, he later came to consider himself a freelancer and teacher. The story, if such a diffuse presentation may be called that, follows the Lustig family from their internment by the Germans until the demise of every member but one. Adler (Theresienstadt, 1941-1945: The Face of a Slave Society) employs a kind of montage, eschewing a straightforward narrative. Jeremy Adler, the author's son, provides an afterword in which he explains, "As with a ballad, the book contains the refrainlike repetition of numerous central motifs." There is great beauty in this writing, though general readers will find it difficult to follow. The text has been masterfully translated by Filkins, who provides an essential introduction. The German text of the novel is from a 1999 reissue by Zsolnay Verlag. Strongly recommended for all Holocaust collections.--Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Published in Germany in 1962, this difficult, neglected Holocaust novel is the first work by Adler (191088) to be translated into English. A secular Jew from Prague, a camp survivor who wrote in German, the author refused to be categorized in his 26 books, which included fiction, poetry, philosophy and history. The same bold unconventionality is evident in this unusual novel, which begins with roundups in the fictional town of Stupart, Germany. Messengers deliver a printed message: "Thou shalt not dwell among us!" The arrested people, for whom everything is now "forbidden," are taken on trains to Leitenberg, a way station, before being shipped to Ruhenthalmodeled on the slave community of Theresienstadt, where Adler spent two and a half years, according to translator Filkins's excellent introduction. Their trajectory is obscured and muddied by narrative shifts, time loops, feints, euphemisms, contradictions and ventures into the surreal. Irony is pervasive. There are no references to Jews or Nazis. Instead there are the powerful, the powerless and the bystanders, all caught up in this "epidemic of mental illness." The occasional use of words like crematorium and extermination startles like a gunshot. Intermittently discernible through the fog of mass murder is the Lustig family. Leopold Lustig, a 75-year-old doctor, is driven out of Stupart with his wife Caroline, sister-in-law Ida and grown children Zerlina and Paul. All are sketchily characterizedafter all, they are "ghosts," more numbers than names. Leopold dies from starvation. Zerlina, by now a hybrid rabbit/woman, is allowed an impassioned swan song before being consumed by flames (or people, take your pick). Paul is the only survivor. In the final third, the novel settles into an orderly progression with a consistent viewpoint: Paul's. His efforts to get help for the sick survivors are dismissed by the American liberators, acerbically portrayed by Adler. Paul's one minor triumph is to get his name back, on new ID. Oblique, extraordinarily ambitious attempt to articulate the unspeakable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this ambitious and challenging rediscovery, originally published in 1962, Adler (1910-1988) relates the tragic tale of the Lustig family--doctor Leopold; his wife, Caroline; their children, Zerlina and Paul; and Caroline's sister, Ida--who are sent to the walled city of Ruhenthal after authorities label them "forbidden." Taking place during an unspecified period of war and genocide, the story is based on Adler's experiences at Theresienstadt, a labor camp where he was imprisoned for two and a half years during WWII. An unidentified narrator reports the Lustigs' struggles in a stream-of-consciousness style, diverging frequently into the lives of others, among them Johann, a street sweeper, and Balthazar, a reporter. Attempting to reproduce authentically the characters' nightmarish disorientation, Adler's narrative style is aggressively abstract--constantly shifting subjects and setting in a convoluted sense of time and sequence. It's a difficult, admirable undertaking, for fans of experimental fiction, but many readers will find its structure frustrating and inaccessible. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

I'VE read a lot of books, but nothing quite like this one. An attempt to use the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews, its style could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation if ever there was one. H. G. Adler's fate was as unusual as his art. Born in Prague in 1910, he failed to flee before the Nazi takeover and ended up in Theresienstadt, where, as he later wrote in a monograph about the "showcase" camp, "illusion flourished wildly, and hope, only mildly dampened by anxiety, would eclipse everything that was hidden under an impenetrable haze." Adler spent two and a half years there with his family. Later, in Auschwitz, his wife decided to accompany her mother to the gas chambers so she wouldn't have to die alone. In all, Adler lost 18 members of his family, including his own mother and father. By luck, he was saved. Witnessing the Soviet takeover of Prague and wishing to take no further chances, he fled to London, where he married a childhood sweetheart, fathered a son and produced 26 books. "The Journey," which was written in the early 1950s, is the first of his six novels to be translated into English. Though Adler had his admirers - Elias Canetti called "The Journey" a "masterpiece" - he achieved little renown in Europe before his death in 1988. Part of Adler's problem was the prevailing postwar view, formulated by the philosopher Theodor Adorno, that after Auschwitz literature was impossible. Adler corresponded with Adorno, clashing passionately with this view and arguing that literature was now more necessary than ever. Not, he conceded, that the Holocaust could ever be understood. But as the character in "The Journey" who, like the author, survives everything says: "You don't have to understand. There's nothing to understand. You only have to know it because it's simply what happened. We were no longer allowed to exist, and now my dearest ones are dead!" The novel follows the members of a family, the Lustigs, something like Adler's, as they journey through the Holocaust to a place something like Theresienstadt. It ends with a lone survivor wandering in the immediate postwar landscape of rubble and displaced persons. But the book's real subject is the displacement of minds thrust into the ultimate meaninglessness. Adler's prose seeks to catch the whispers and chirpings of insanity rather than the lamentations of suffering. To this end, the narrative voice changes continually, and so seamlessly and logically that at first the reader can even fail to notice it. Adler will shift from a description of the Nazis, usually referred to with deadpan irony as "heroes," to the Nazis' own voices speaking to their victims: "Like little children, everything has to be done for you, though you arrive at the dinner table without uttering the slightest thank you." The mundane and the surreal collide in a bizarre sort of logic. "But you don't take along coffins on a journey," people are told when they start dying en route to the camps. "It's much too costly and the freight is not worth the trouble." Adler is perfectly capable of minting sentences that could be placed in an anthology of aphorisms - "Sorrow is slight when vanity is not allowed to adorn it" - but the true purpose of such sentences is only to heighten the dimension of insanity, to further convey the "impenetrable haze." The novel's streaming consciousness and verbal play invite comparison with Joyce, the individual-dwarfing scale of law and prohibition brings Kafka to mind, and there is something in the hypnotic pulse of the prose that is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. But the book falters when it fails to maintain the fine line between trance and tedium, especially in the longer abstract passages. The reader is required at all times to pay complete attention, otherwise the thread of the narrative may be lost, along with a sense of who is speaking (registered through the tone of voice, which is often light and mocking). Though generally strong, Peter Filkins's translation from the German sometimes breaks the hypnotic spell by introducing anachronistic Americanisms - "critters"; "no pain, no gain"; "just go with the flow." But it ultimately doesn't matter whether the attention wanders because of shortcomings in the text, the translation or the reader. In the end, you are always pulled back into Adler's flickering black-and-white landscape of rubbish and rubble, where a person is only "a bit of madness who happens to have a name." Yet despite its grim setting, this is not a book of hopelessness and meaninglessness. "The truth is merciless, ... always victorious," Adler informs us, pointing the way to a means of surviving the worst that history can throw at people: "One must have a center, an unshakable quiet space that one clings to vigorously, even when one is in the middle of the journey, the unavoidable journey." Richard Lourie's most recent novel, "A Hatred for Tulips," has been issued in paperback as "Joop: A Novel of Anne Frank."