The Wall

"When Random House published the first English translation of H.G. Adler's The Journey in 2008, literary critics and historians alike came to recognize Adler as a neglected modern master, comparing him to Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Gertrude Stein. Told in a powerful 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, Arthurreturns 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. Though Adler recreates time and place with stunning descriptive detail, the themes are universal and timeless. The "wall" in frontof Arthur will not let him entirely remember the past and thus free himself from nightmares, nor entirely let him forget the past and move on. Though he sees himself as akin to "that first Adam", expelled forever from Paradise, Arthur gradually learns toaffirm his life once again through his family and work, a testimony to the human spirit that continues to persevere within him"--

H. G. Adler was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Adler later settled in England and began writing novels about his experience. Having worked as a freelance writer and scholar throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.

Peter Filkins is an acclaimed translator and poet and the recipient of a Berlin Prize fellowship in 2005 from the American Academy in Berlin, among other honors. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and translation at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.