The Going Gets Tough

THE JOURNEY

By H.G. Adler

Translated from the German by Peter Filkins

Random House. 292 pp. $26

To create Holocaust literature, one must reject Theodor Adorno's dictum that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" and declare instead that to remain silent after such horrors is the truer barbarism. And then the paradox reveals itself: How does one voice the unspeakable? How does one imagine the unimaginable?

All but forgotten among Holocaust writers is H.G. Adler, born in Prague in 1910, deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, transferred to Auschwitz in 1944 and freed by Allied troops in 1945. During the war, Adler told himself, "If I survive all this, and I very much doubt it, then I will bear witness to everything that I experience." In 1948, he completed a study of the Theresienstadt ghetto so meticulously objective that the constitutional court of Germany has accepted it as evidence in postwar trials. Adler then turned to fiction, producing several novels, including "The Journey," which has just received its first English translation, by Peter Filkins.

"The Journey" attempts to be both a lyrical description of one family's Holocaust experience and, by refusing to mention Jews or Nazis or concentration camps, a muted and otherworldly meditation on tragedy. While the aim is noble, the result is disorienting. For nearly 300 uninterrupted pages -- there are no chapter breaks -- Adler scrambles together a host of ever-shifting voices and viewpoints, themes and metaphors, time frames and verb tenses. "The Journey" feels less like a novel than an exercise in free-association journaling.

In seeking to define "the journey," for example, Adler opens his tale opaquely: "It is to be sure not an escape from yourself, no matter how much it may seem so, but rather the flight that consists of a ceaseless progression along the winding paths of a solitary realm, and because you abide in this realm you can call it peace, for upon time's stage everything remains fixed in the present. . . . You travel many roads, and in many towns you appear with your relatives and friends; you stand, you walk, you fall and die. You don't believe you're still on the stage, even when you acknowledge you were once on it. But you're wrong, for they took you away and set you back onstage amid the fleeting journey."

At times, the narrative calms down and reveals itself to be loosely based on the experiences of Adler's first wife's family, though the son, Paul, is a version of Adler himself. While Paul survives, his family does not: His father, a respected doctor before officers revoke his medical license, dies of malnutrition in one concentration camp, and his mother and sister die in the gas chambers of another. An aunt is shipped away, her fate unknown.

In rare moments, Adler can be affecting. As men and women are herded onto trains, the narrator asks, "Can you appreciate the fact that we're doing all of this for you for free? All we ask for in return is your life, thus the price is cheap, for what is your life worth? Used up and worth nothing!"

Likewise, a final section that details Paul's life immediately after the war is gripping in its depiction of an existence sucked dry of hope and meaning. Paul wanders dazed and adrift, a man diminished, half-hysterical, half-despondent. As painful as what is behind him is what lies ahead: He has nothing left to do but live the rest of his life.

For the vast majority of "The Journey," though, a reader is dizzied by the surrealism of what appears on the page. Before the war, Paul's family kept a dog named Bunny. Midway through the story, Paul's sister appears to transmogrify into a bunny and hide in a small cardboard box; later, Paul eats his sister in the form of a freshly caught rabbit. In another context, this might be informing metaphor, but Adler so obscures the distinction between reality and fantasy that the conceit becomes part of a larger muddle.

The author seems to have hoped that the accrual of all this would articulate the depraved power of the Holocaust. The absurdity is also meant to represent, one supposes, how Adler felt in 1947, after he had immigrated to London and began the heavy task of rebuilding his life.

The book's overarching problem is less Adler's approach to literature than contemporary society's relationship to art. "The Journey," like a Spielberg flick timed for Oscar season, incorporates, however unwittingly, all the touchstones of a modern "masterpiece" (the word, in fact, is used in two of the book's dust jacket blurbs): written decades ago by an obscure self-styled philosopher-poet; chanced upon by Filkins among the dusty stacks of a Harvard bookshop; and wrestling, ever obliquely, with the great stain of the 20th century. But art demands more than a romantic back story and a potent starting point, and while Adler can hardly be faulted, it appears that writing the book served as more of a catharsis for him than an epiphany for us.

Which isn't to say "The Journey" lacks worth. In the end, it might be best approached in the way that John Ashbery has said he reads a book of poems: casually, flipping ahead when one's attention wanders, unconcerned with details, seeking satisfaction in larger impressions. As surely Adler knew, how else to begin to comprehend the incomprehensible?