The Journey: A Novel [Hardcover]

H. G. Adler (Author), Peter Filkins (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2008

A major literary event: the first-ever English translation of a lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature by acclaimed author and survivor H. G. Adler

The story behind the story of The Journey is remarkable in itself: Award-winning translator Peter Filkins discovered an obscure German novel in a Harvard Square bookstore and, reading it, realized that it was a treasure unavailable to English speakers. It was the most powerful book by the late H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, a writer whose work had been praised by authors from Elias Canetti to Heinrich Böll and yet remained unknown to international audiences.

Written in 1950 after Adler’s emigration to England, The Journey was not released in Germany until 1962. After the war, larger publishing houses stayed away from novels about the Holocaust, feeling that the tragedy could not be fictionalized and that any metaphorical interpretation was obscene. Only a small publisher was in those days willing to take on The Journey.

Yet Filkins found that Adler had depicted the event in a unique, truly modern, and deeply moving way. Avoiding specific mention of country or camps–even of Nazis and Jews–The Journey is a lyrical 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, uprooted into a surreal and incomprehensible circumstance of deprivation and death. This cataclysm destroys father, daughter, sister, and wife and leaves only Paul, the son, to live again among those who saved or sacrificed him. The Journey reveals a world beset by an “epidemic of mental illness . . . As a result of the epidemic, 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 is as much a revelation as other recent discoveries on the subject as the works of W. G. Sebald and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise. It is a book proving that art can portray the unimaginable and expand people’s perceptions of it, a work anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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From School Library Journal

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
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 292 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (November 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400066735
• ISBN-13: 978-1400066735
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #834,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique prose poem!, March 29, 2011

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Maynard H. Makman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

This long lost novel is totally unique in the annals of Holocaust literature. It, in veiled and novelistically transformed manner, tells the author's own tale of descent into the madness of WW II, various concentration and labor camps, and ultimate survival and re-emergence into the world of the living. His poetic style enables one to experience the disorientation and near-madness resulting from total dehumanization by a group of others. I cannot recommend it more highly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life and Death as Limbo, July 8, 2011

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Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

Written in 1950, published in Germany in 1962 (overcoming orchestrated opposition from the German publishing establishment), but appearing in English only in 2008, THE JOURNEY occupies an important and unique place in Holocaust literature. According to the translator, Peter Filkins, it is one of only four books of fiction written in German by Jewish survivors of the camps. And among the hundreds of Holocaust novels published since, it must be the only one with its particular point of view, located neither in time nor place (the word "Auschwitz," for instance, never appears), but in a kind of bird's eye view from above, as a continuous journey of the soul unmarked by obvious way-stages, even that of ultimate extinction. In his brilliant introduction, which is essential reading before attempting the book, Filkins cites Hölderlin speaking of a "synoptic view across the barrier of death," a slow-motion Totentanz that defies time.

At one point, Adler evokes the image of a line of prisoners, hands on the shoulders of the one in front, shuffling along day and night, a "mute ghost train in no need of tracks to run on." Were this to be taken to its conclusion, he says, "time would be erased. The journey would have only a direction, but no destination. It would continue and yet lead nowhere. Senseless would be the question about where you were born, for the day of your death could come long before the day of your conception." Where other Holocaust writers portray Hell, Adler concentrates on Limbo. Such story as there is in the book is a thin fictionalization of his own family history, spending much of the war in Theresienstadt,* the so-called "safe community" for Jews, in which they were kept in suspended animation for several years before the inevitable transportation to Auschwitz. Adler's father, an elderly physician, died of starvation, as does his alter ego in the book, Dr. Leopold Lustig. His mother, sister, and aunt went to the gas chamber; their fictional equivalents merely disappear in a cloud of metaphor. Paul Lustig (Adler himself) is the sole survivor.

The writing ranges from the abstrusely philosophical to the a Kafkaesque surrealism or Orwellian doublespeak: "The forbidden is at last behind you for good, and now eternal freedom is waving you on. [...] We wish we had the chance to share your lot, but unfortunately that has been denied us. With us lies the responsibility to worry about your well-being, and then to worry about your brothers who are also awaiting the journey." The voice here is presumably that of the despatching railroad officials in Prague, but Adler jumps around so freely that you soon no longer know whether this is the language of the oppressors, or the oppressed buying into it. This is not a normal novel by any standards, an intensely difficult book to read** (hence only 4 stars), but its difficulty is necessary to the subject.

The camp gates open almost unnoticed, and there are still 100 pages to go. Paul drags himself along the road to another Limbo: this time, one of rubble, where Aryans and Jews alike are victims. Adler calls it Unkenburg -- literally Toad City, but with overtones of deception or unknowing. It is a place where nobody recognizes anybody or anything, nobody knows the future, nobody fully acknowledges the past. A housewife, enclosed in her still-intact apartment, asks him: "Was it really so horrible? There have been so many lies. Indeed, no offense, but at the very least it doesn't appear that respectable people were taken away." Captain Dudley, the American officer in charge of refugees, is too busy trading cigarettes for old medals to give Paul the time of day. But Paul does meet at least one Good Samaritan, a Herr Brantel, who asks him "to just remember that in the country whose people had robbed him of everything precious and dear there were still decent people." And Paul/Adler does remember, as a ray of light even in this nightmare record of the death of the soul.

* Here called deceptively "Ruhenthal" or "Vale of Rest."
**Try deciphering a few sentences like this: "For indeed, we are our own creation; whether we are denied or accepted at our final end, when one must answer for oneself, much more depends, namely the flourishing of a world that, out of its deepest despair and highest aspirations, is called upon to form its own, in a certain sense, eternal countenance amid the destruction of our only meaningful yet impalpable achievement, one accomplished in and for itself without the participation and help of the world at large."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Neglected Literary and Cultural Monument, March 7, 2011

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Stuart - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Journey: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

Art is not dead after Auschwitz; Adler proves it in an intellectually compelling way. The style of narration is as challenging as the subject-matter. Journey is a work for those who can read.