H. Adler: The Wall

Arthur’s experience and memory, then, are both singular and collective, and his effort to grapple with the past through writing is tied to a deeply felt need to commemorate the lives that were lost to it. For him, the past is both burden and sustenance, as it has formed his life in the present and is the only means by which he can find a way to the future.

However, what is most often missing from that past is particulars, Arthur admitting early in his courtship with Johanna that “there are only a few things that I recall precisely,” and that what he really possesses is “a memory for the relationship between things, for the dense interweaving of experience.” This also mirrors the narrative guise of The Wall . Rather than functioning as a memoir disguised as a novel, the book is a novel interested in the “interweaving of experience” and the performance of it. Given that the novel begins and ends with Arthur looking out his study window at two old women at a window across the street and the cat that walks nimbly along its sill, one might even entertain the possibility that the entire narrative takes place inside Arthur’s consciousness in a single day, much like James Joyce’s Ulysses , a novel that Adler deeply admired and read as early as the 1940s. Even if this is not the case, clearly The Wall encompasses the past and the present, and how both occur within Arthur’s consciousness, while at the same time that consciousness is meant to serve those who did not survive the past. “Until everything is thought through and made clear, I cannot rest, let alone find peace,” Arthur says to Johanna. “Thus there can be no escape.” At the same time, however, “memory is something else altogether. It’s the identification with the deportation and all its consequences, therefore with those who suffered extermination. That I can’t do. At best I was broken, perhaps shattered, but, because I indeed stand before you, I was not exterminated.”

This, then, is the paradoxical hell that Arthur inhabits: because he did not die, he cannot live, and because he is alive, he cannot properly commemorate the experience of those who died, for he did not share that experience in full. And yet he must go on, for only then can he write the works that will contain some part of the lives that were lost. Add to this classic formulation of survivor’s guilt the fact that Adler also suffers the exile’s plight of living a rootless and discontinuous life, and one sees the extent to which The Wall encompasses two great cataclysms of the twentieth century: forced deportation and permanent exile. “Whoever loses his home against his will, simply because he has been expelled by the powers that want to annihilate him,” Arthur muses, “cannot return alone to the site of expulsion as one who happened to be saved from joining the fellowship of the murdered, no matter the reasons that move him.” Given such duress, Adler’s heroic journey is one that arrives at the barest of reconciliations, one in which he realizes, “I simply have to be, because I am.” Paltry as this may seem, there is a certain victory in it, for though Arthur remains “a survivor, condemned to cling to a signpost in the deadly snowstorm of misery,” he stands at that same post with his wife and two children while wielding the tools of his trade — namely words, which Adler, too, wielded (in novels, stories, poems, essays, and scholarly studies) in an effort to both invoke and stave off the demons that he had involuntarily been assigned by fate.

Czeslaw Milosz, another enduring exile of the twentieth century, ends his “ Ars Poetica? ” ironically by saying:

What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry ,

as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly ,

under unbearable duress and only with the hope

that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument .

It is a sentiment that will also serve well the reader in approaching The Wall , for despite the anxiety and despair that so often suffuse Arthur Landau, threatening to derail his every foray into the unknown, he battles on in “the hope that good spirits, not evil ones,” will choose him for their instrument. Indeed, Arthur may be “broken,” but he knows, too, that “you have to be able to feel broken and yet not damn the world, to not become callous, not hate your neighbor, not the guilty, for they are your neighbors. You can’t separate them from those who are not guilty. Doubt and lack of faith are two very different things. Beware the one who exchanges one for the other, or mixes them up!” In like manner, Adler’s symphonic novel is composed in the faith that light will somehow prevail within such darkness, its source being the consciousness that binds together its major and minor notes, its themes and variations, its Kafkaesque poise amid inscrutable suffering before the wall of time.

PETER FILKINS

April 7, 2013

A BLACK PLUME OF SMOKE FROM THE SQUAT CHIMNEY DRIFTS AT AN ANGLE over the factories, invading the neighborhood near MacKenzie’s, where cars are overhauled and rebuilt, the smoke moving heavy and thick through the streets. Ron, the old ragman, thin with a pinched face, pushes his cart wearily along the sidewalk like a mobile cage and then stands awkwardly before our house as he has done each week for years, ever since Johanna gave him a huge box of old clothes, which delighted him, even though the weight nearly brought him to his knees, while we were happy to be free of that junk, he becoming our benefactor in taking it off our hands, rather than just a ragman. Santi, the aging yellow hound from Simmonds’s vegetable stand, wanders lazily about, barks suddenly for no apparent reason, and then shuffles silently along. With shopping bags swaying, women from the neighborhood gather together, stand for a while and lose themselves in meaningless talk until they suddenly separate, parting with an unexplained sharp laugh that disappears abruptly. In the distance, where the train heads west into the countryside, a whistle blows, as if announcing the joy of any kind of journey away from here.

It all goes as usual and is familiar, for it’s been more than seven years since we first settled here. Not in this city, and certainly not in this country, nor even really in this part of town, but just in the immediate surroundings of this neighborhood, here on West Park Row, where we live in a tiny single-family house, as well as around the corner on Truro Street and among the neighboring streets, corners, and squares with their open greens and playgrounds, all of it within a ten-minute radius. We know the entire area, but that which is closest and the most familiar is no farther away than twice the reach of a good strong voice. Here is where we live, adrift and tolerated, comfortable despite everything, almost well liked as old-timers, as they say, us not even knowing whether we have settled in a major city or a village. If anything, it feels like living in the countryside, for it’s hard to imagine that distant neighborhoods are even attached to this same place.

There are several reasons for this. If you want to visit another part of the city, then you pull yourself together, say goodbye, hop into a car, or onto the bus, or even onto a train, and you are quickly whisked away from familiar surroundings. Because here on West Park Row and for miles around us, we are strangers; the few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away. We rarely see them, some of them never, others hardly more than once a year, and only a few more than once a month.