The Journey: A Novel [Paperback]

Here is “a rich and lyrical masterpiece”–notes Peter Constantine–the first translation of a lost treasure by acclaimed author H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Written in 1950, after Adler’s emigration to England, The Journey was ignored by large publishing houses after the war and not released in Germany until 1962. Depicting the Holocaust in a unique and deeply moving way, and avoiding specific mention of country or camps–even of Nazis and Jews–The Journey is a poetic 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, enduring in a world in which “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 portrays the unimaginable in a way that anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.“H.G. Adler’s works . . . survive as a magnificent achievement of courage, art, and the stubborn will to survive.”—Peter Demetz, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Germanic Language and Literature, Yale University

“A masterpiece . . . For me, Adler has restored hope to modern literature.”—Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature


“As important a find as Irène Némirovsky’sSuite Française, and as well translated into English, it is indeed, as Veza Canetti wrote to the author in 1962, ‘too beautiful for words and too sad.’ ”—Sander L. Gilman, author ofJurekBecker: A Life in Five Worlds

“A tribute to the survival of art and a poignant teaching in the art of survival. I tend to shy away from Holocaust fiction, but this book helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.”—Harold Bloom