The Wall

Starred review from October 27, 2014
This is Adler’s third (posthumous) and final work in the Shoah trilogy (after The Journey and Panorama), one of the very few works of Holocaust fiction written by a survivor. The author, once a prisoner at Theresienstadt and three other concentration camps, crafted this modernist homage to his despair over the course of many years; it was first published in 1989. His protagonist, Arthur—most certainly Adler himself—is an exile in the “Metropolis,” a thinly disguised London. He lives a bemused existence with his second wife, Joanna, and their two children, going through the motions of being a father, and indeed of being human. He has suffered something so dreadful that it is almost impossible to articulate, but it seems that his first wife perished in the war, as did his parents. In his dreams, which reflect in an absurdist way the real horror he faced, he returns to his father’s haberdashery in Prague; sometimes his parents are still alive and sometimes they die before his very eyes. Neighbors recognize and pity Arthur, knowing more than he about the fate of his family. He reminisces or dreams about being taken in by friends he does not recollect, of interacting with scholarly colleagues in London, and of meeting his beloved Joanna, on whom he relies utterly as his only link to the world in which he now finds himself adrift. He also imagines witnessing his own death. The symbolic wall of the title is purported to be the past, but it is much more: an existential barrier made of pain that separates him from the rest of humanity. The past and the present are indistinguishable in the stream of Adler’s consciousness, but this distracts very little from the story. The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word. One cannot begin to share this author’s anguish, but can participate in not allowing it to be forgotten.

November 1, 2014
Pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity. "To write poetry after Auschwitz," wrote the German literary critic Theodore Adorno, "is barbaric." But what of those who lived through Auschwitz? Just to live, to say nothing of writing, is problematic. So thinks the protagonist of survivor Adler's novel, the last in a trilogy, the preceding two volumes of which were published out of order a half-century ago. There is the sheer guilt of being alive when so many died, and then there are the memories, the past that "hisses in my ears, causes horrible and sometimes also multiple sensations, pressing into me, lifting me, holding ready a thousand horrors...." Arthur Landau has lived. At the beginning of the 1960s, he's living in London, beginning to trust his neighbors a little, even though he and his family are the definitive strangers: "[T]he few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away." The welcome trade-off, Landau says, is that no one bothers him, though the thought is always with him that he could just as easily disappear from the street with no one noticing or caring, as before. Landau's world is one of memories that sometimes become very real-if only in his mind, though it's not always easy for him or for readers to distinguish the real from the imagined, as with his Dostoyevski-an encounter with an "Assessor of Sympathies." Landau's disconnection is more affecting, and more open to the reader's sympathy, than that of the protagonist of Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe, which has a similarly strident quality; Adler's novel has a Kafkaesque dimension as well, save that Landau has at least the saving grace of an understanding wife who does what she can to make him feel safe, or at least safer, in the world: "She was happy to see," Landau tells us, "that I had achieved a partial and tolerable sense of resignation." An eloquent record of suffering-and perhaps of redemption as well.

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July 1, 2014

Born in Prague in the early 1900s, Adler lost most of his family in the Holocaust and himself spent time in the camps; he died in London in 1988. With the 2008 publication of The Journey, his first work to be translated into English, he was declared a major rediscovery and compared to the likes of Kafka, Woolf, and Musil, which highly recommends this conclusion to his Shoah trilogy. Here, Holocaust survivor Arthur Landau first returns to Prague, then ends up in exile in London with his second wife and their children. Eventually, he manages to knock down the wall that separates him from life and forge ahead with a brighter future. A celebration, then, of the human spirit.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014

In what is now an extensive literature on the Holocaust, certain writers and their work have achieved iconic status, Adler among them. He was born in Prague and later interned in several camps during World War II, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Having lost his wife and many members of his family before war's end, he eventually settled in London and wrote numerous books of fiction, philosophy, and history, most notably his "Shoah" trilogy, composed between 1948 and 1956. In this final volume in the trilogy (which includes Panorama and The Journey), the author continues drawing on his own experiences to recount the fictional life of survivor Arthur Landau, which unfolds in a metropolis apparently meant to mirror London and Prague. After war, exile, and intellectual isolation, Landau is finally able to achieve a measure of peace through love of his second wife and children. VERDICT In the introduction, masterly translator Filkins best characterizes the work by saying, "The novel's nonlinear plot...at times make[s] it difficult...to know just what is going on or how we end up in a certain locale or set of circumstances." This stream-of-consciousness style lends itself to a wordiness that will slow down the narrative considerably for some readers. Best recommended for large collections of literary treatments of the Holocaust and the lives of survivors. [See Prepub Alert, 6/8/14.]--Edward B. Cone, New York

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.