Tonight Dara hosts her forth annual Young Poets Evening at the National Arts Club. This year the readers are Joshua Mehigan, Rowan Ricardo Phillips & David Yezzi. Details: Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 8 pm. The National Arts Club. 15 Gramercy Park South. Admission is free. Join us for an evening of verse in the most poetic surroundings in New York!
Viewing entries in
Dara's Publications
THE NEW CRITERION
February 2009
The long journey
by Dara Mandle
A review of The Journey by H. G. Adler.
H. G. Adler wanted to be a writer, but history intervened. He was born in 1910 in Prague. In 1942 he was deported with his wife to Theresienstadt, the camp that acted as a way-station for Central European Jews. Before his liberation in 1945, Adler was imprisoned in several other camps, including Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Despite having lost eighteen family members, including his parents, his wife, and her family, Adler, near death, returned to Prague. He emigrated to London in 1947, where he was finally able to build up a life as a freelance writer. In 1950, in a period of ferocious intensity, he wrote Eine Reise, now translated by Peter Filkins as The Journey.
Adler wrote in isolation, and even in his lifetime he was never an easy writer with a large audience. Members of the “Prague school,” the tradition of Kafka to whom Adler was indebted, were gone. In the years immediately following the war, Germans did not want to read about the horrors of the camps, the ostensible subject of Adler’s book. Many publishers rejected Eine Reise. Elias and Veza Canetti, to whom the book was dedicated, admired the manuscript, as did Heinrich Böll. Still, the famous German publisher Peter Suhrkamp vowed that the book would never see the light of day while he was alive. Sure enough, it wasn’t until a year after Suhrkamp died in 1961 that Eine Reise found a home at a small German publisher.
When the translator Peter Filkins unearthed Eine Reise in a small bookshop near Harvard, he was amazed at his discovery. Here was someone writing in German, a Jewish survivor of the death camps, who had forged an innovative way to discuss the Holocaust and yet remained unknown in the United States. Filkins could not put the book down. He resolved to translate it. Its publication by Random House marks the first time any of Adler’s six works of fiction have been brought into English. The translation of The Journey is a publishing-world event for other reasons as well. As Filkins notes in his Introduction, “the number of novels published by Jews who had direct experience of the camps and lived to write fiction about them in German comes to a grand total of four.”
Given its uneven publishing history in Germany, the decision by Random House to publish the English translation is a pleasant surprise. That the revered German writer W. G. Sebald admired Adler’s work mitigated the publisher’s doubts. Before his death in a car crash in 2001, Sebald, a generation younger than Adler, made his career out of writing about the Holocaust. Adler’s thousand-page volume Theresienstadt 1941–1945, the book for which he is best known, is a study that describes in exhaustive detail the structure and organization of the camp. Peter Filkins realized that Sebald had featured Adler’s study in the climax of his highly acclaimed novel Austerlitz and that this connection would create a built-in audience for The Journey.
Filkins has delivered an accomplished translation. A professor at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and an award-winning translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry, Filkins here tackles a complex prose style that, in his own words, employs “montage in jumbling its sense of time and place” and blends “philosophical speech with poetic imagery, [and] pointed political insights with oblique imagist renderings.” Filkins does especially good work with this “philosophical speech,” which he makes haunting and direct.
Though Adler was clearly writing about the death camps, he refused to use the words “Jews” and “Nazis.” As his son Jeremy Adler notes in his Afterword to the English edition, “It was the very polarization of such groups that led into the abyss.” Instead, in The Journey, H. G. Adler calls Jews “the forbidden.” In a moving passage at the book’s start, Filkins translates:
We are all forbidden because we are not what we wished to become, and we are not what we wished to become because we’ve been turned into something unwanted.
This circular logic underscores the pernicious absurdity of the Nazis’ Final Solution.
The Journey displays Adler’s inventive, challenging style. The saga centers on the Lustigs (based on his wife, Gertrud’s, family), whom we infer to be a Jewish family imprisoned by the Nazis. We meet the patriarch Leopold Lustig, a doctor, his wife Caroline, and her sister Ida Schwarz. We also get to know Zerlina and Paul, Caroline and Leo’s grown children. All perish but for Paul. Instead of writing in his own voice, the author became the brother of his wife, Gertrud-Zerlina. She was murdered in Auschwitz when she “chose to join her mother on ‘the bad side,’” as Adler’s son writes in his Afterword.
In telling his story, Adler omits the kind of markers that help readers gain purchase in a tale. We encounter no chapters. The third-person narrator does not signal to the reader when a scene or speaker changes. The characters’ voices blend together. The effect of these narrative subversions is discomfort. And that is precisely their point. Adler suffered through the most unspeakable atrocities known to man. Our own disorientation as readers resonates with the chaos of the Shoah.
The appeal of Adler’s novel depends on your tolerance for experimentation. If you are a fan of Kafka’s terrifying fables or of W. G. Sebald’s oblique storytelling, The Journey will be an important addition to your bookshelf. And you will be in luck—Random House has just commissioned Peter Filkins to translate another of Adler’s books. (Before his death in London in 1988, he penned twenty-six.) Next up: Panorama, Adler’s first novel, written in 1948 and not published in Germany until twenty years later. It is now forty years past that date, and H. G. Adler is finally getting his due.
Dara writes:
Bukharian Jewish food might be the most under-appreciated ethnic food in the City. At least that's my thought after a wild foray to Rego Park, Queens, sometimes referred to as Regostan because many residents hail from the old Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Our guide was Alex, a friend who lives in the area with his wife and two children and works in nearby Forest Hills. We visited two establishments just blocks from each other off of Queens Boulevard. Alex knew the restaurants' owners and ordered from them in Russian (but menus are in English, as well.) Russian music videos wail from the walls ("It is Bukharian country music," lamented Alex, who hails from Uzbekistan's capital city). After the fall of the Soviet Union, Alex's small subset of Jews, the Bukharians, fled the republics to settle in Israel or the United States. Alex himself arrived in New York eleven years ago from Tashkent.
As Julia Moskin has written in the New York Times, "fresh noodles and lamb kebabs, cilantro and garlic sauces and spiced rice pilafs are home cooking for many of these new New Yorkers." Bukharian food is its own form of pan-ethnic cuisine. Asian and Indian influences abound in its recipes, which are utterly delicious, if heavy. In its richness it resembles Eastern European Jewish cooking. But chili, lemongrass, and cumin would be out of place in that more familiar tradition.
I could easily see a Bukharian David Chang opening a Momofuku-type restaurant for his own native food. Take lagman, my new favorite dish. It's a soup. I don't like soup. Not normally. But this is no normal soup. It's a clear beef broth that doesn't feel heavy. Chili oil spikes it. Fresh yellow, red, and green peppers, string beans, and pickled turnip adorn the broth. Fresh herbs such as dill and cilantro top it off. Lemongrass and bits of beef stud it. Fat noodles slither in it. A master noodle maker throws the noodles, which are one long thread.
What's amazing about this food is how many cultures it is connected to. Take the samsa. Yes, it's like an Indian samosa, and also made in a tandoor oven. But imagine a samosa with the flaky crusty dough of a perfect French croissant. Imagine biting into the piping hot dough and discovering inside juicy bits of caramelized onions and rich, pungent meat. Then imagine dunking the treat in a vivid, Mexican-salsa-like tomato and cilantro dipping sauce. Fiesta!
Lamb rib kebabs come steaming hot and covered with raw onions. French fries come topped with minced garlic and fresh parsley, dill, and scallions. This food is so sharp it is not for the faint of heart. That said, we took home six samsas, which I took to calling Gregor Samsas, and consumed them non-stop for the next 48 hours. We have been suffering from withdrawal ever since.
Our favorite place for lagman is Ganey Orly (65-37 99th Street. Rego Park NY 11374. 718-459-1638). For samsa and kebabs, it's Tandoori Food & Bakery (99-04 63rd Rd, Rego Park NY 11374, 718-897-1071). The former is Glatt Kosher while the latter simply kosher. Both restaurants are a short walk from the R train's Rego Park station.
