The Journey

Here is "a rich and lyrical masterpiece"notes Peter Constantinethe 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 campseven of Nazis and JewsThe 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, born in Prague in 1910, was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Adler is best known for his studies of day-to-day life there, as documented in Theresienstadt 1941-1945 and Der verwaltete Mensch (Administrated Man). Also a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Adler lost his wife and her parents to the camps before leaving Czechoslovakia after the war to settle in England. Once there, he began writing novels about the Holocaust, The Journey being the first of five works of fiction. Working as a freelance writer and teacher throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.

Peter Filkins is the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken, as well as author of two books of poems: What She Knew and After Homer. The recipient of a Berlin Prize fellowship in 2005 from the American Academy in Berlin, he has also translated two of Bachmann’s novels: The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship, an Outstanding Translation award from the American Literary Translators Association, and a 2007 Distinguished Translation award from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.


From the Hardcover edition.