H. Adler: The Wall

This page:Arthur visits Resi Knispel, who along with Herr Buxinger wishes to start a new journal, and she wants Arthur’s help in recruiting talent to write for it. Knispel tries to persuade Arthur to popularize his work, eventually revealing that the journal’s name will be Eusemia . Arthur says he has to think about it and prepares to leave. In the foyer, Knispel throws herself at Arthur, claiming that she’s in love with him and scratching his hand as he tries to release it from her desperate hold.

This page:Arthur and Johanna then visit her cousin Betty for two weeks in South Wales, where they enjoy the simple country people and the countryside. Despite the frosty cold, he and Johanna hike for hours over the hills and through the fields, stopping to picnic along the way. Once again, they declare their love for each other and realize that they must begin again, like Adam and Eve. Arthur presents Johanna with Franziska’s pearls. Arthur tells Johanna that Franziska spoke to him in a dream right before he departed the Old Country, declaring that he was free to go, and that he now realizes that he indeed exists.

This page:Back on West Park Row, while anticipating the arrival of Anna, Arthur is astonished when the mailman knocks on the door to announce the arrival of the pallbearers, Brian and Derek, who have orders to bring Arthur to the Sociology Conference, at which he is to be honored. They are supposed to convey Arthur there in a coffin and a hearse, but instead Arthur rides atop the coffin while Johanna and the children travel behind in the truck of a neighborhood grocer. The conference takes place at Shepherd’s Field, the site of the earlier carnival, which is still up and running and now contains exhibitions hosted by all the characters encountered thus far from Arthur’s past and present.

This page:After appearing onstage with Roy Rogers, Arthur slinks to the side and escapes by crawling under the circus tent, fleeing Shepherd’s Field. On his way back to West Park Row, he can only be grateful for the stability his wife and children provide him in a world that remains suspended between the past and the present, the only hope being that his children will enjoy a future that is free of such duress.

Born in Prague in 1910, H. G. ADLER spent two and a half years in Theresienstadt before being deported to Auschwitz, Niederorschel, and Langenstein, where he was liberated in April 1945. Leaving Prague for London in 1947, Adler worked as a freelance scholar and writer until his death in 1988. The author of twenty-six books of fiction, stories, poems, history, philosophy, and religion, he was awarded the Leo Baeck Prize for his monograph Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community in 1958. The Wall was completed in 1956 but did not appear in print until 1989, a year after Adler’s death in London.

Peter Filkins is a poet and translator. He is the recipient of a Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Art, and Culture, a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He teaches literature and writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and translation at Bard College. His translations of H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama were published by Random House in 2008 and 2011, respectively, and also appear under the Modern Library imprint.