Time book review--1971
This is a great review of the novel (which the film is apparently quite faithful to) from Time Magazine, when the book first came out. Great summary of what the film is about, especially if you didn't read the book.
Monday, Jul. 19, 1971share
Rags and Bones
ADAM RESURRECTED by Yoram Kaniuk, translated from the Hebrew by Seymour Simckes. 370 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.
His name is Adam Stein, and he is a kind of W.C. Fields of the Jews. Once he was Europe's greatest clown, and more than that, a clairvoyant who could tell the history of anybody in the audience from a piece of cloth held in his hand, read whole books through their covers, and even, just by looking into a man's eyes, tell that he had quarreled with his wife the night before. Chatting about a movie, he would automatically register that the hero spoke 4,266 words of dialogue (v. the heroine's 2,437). He was also a swindler, an alcoholic and—well, of course, periodically insane.
Adam, in short, possesses some of the manic gifts that used to be associated with divine madness. Like Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin, he sees only absolutes in a world of ostensible reason. Almost singlehanded, he gives gnarled life to this book, the third novel of Israeli Author Yoram Kaniuk.
Voids and Pressures. A crazy house in the desert—dominated by enormous biblical presences, voids and the threat of war—is perhaps the only place where discussion of Hitlerism and the Jews can be conducted any longer; the grim documentaries have become self-defeating by repetition, the outrage exhausted by its own weight. Appropriately, therefore, Adam Resurrected is centered on a flossy insane asylum near the Dead Sea.
Predictably, the source of Adam's madness is the fact of his survival. He was spared the gas chamber at a German camp by Commandant Klein, "who didn't hate Jews any more than the average butcher hates his cows." Adam agrees to calm and amuse the prisoners on their way to the gas chambers. Even when his wife and daughter pass through the line Adam giggles them on, bowing to Klein's austere logic that it is better to spare them as much final pain as possible: "Nothing disturbed Commandant Klein as much as the dread that they might die screaming." It is also Klein's fancy to have Adam act like a pet dog, making him crawl around his parlor on all fours and compete with his teeth for bones tossed to Klein's dog Rex.
So much for temporal hell remembered. Stein's present haven is an institute established by an eccentric Cleveland widow persuaded that God was conceived in the desert by prophets who were themselves psychotics. As a fanatic inmate explains: "We were a nation, a nation that betrayed its God. And we paid the highest price possible —we became smoke and ashes." And all those who returned are, in Kaniuk's idiosyncratically mordant view, insane. During the day they live well. They are allowed to work, make money, build houses, enjoy the illusion of progress. But at night they have nightmares and cry. "The insult scorches," the author explains. The knowledge, the final realization that they were "simply raw material in the most advanced factory of Europe, under a sky inhabited by God in exile, this information drives us crazy. Such humiliation! So we have turned this country into the largest insane asylum on earth."
When Stein arrives at the asylum —his latest of several commitments—he turns this antiseptic bedlam into a private club. He harasses the director. He delivers impromptu lectures on the history of the drama. He hides bottles of Beefeater, Courvoisier and J&B behind every radiator and makes love to his lush but Germanically efficient nurse.
Stein mocks his fellow inmates' god. "Some hero," he shouts at believers. "In his neighborhood he's the bully, but among the other nations he's hidden in the crowd, scared stiff." Finally, he leads a march into the desert to seek God—whom Adam at last imagines to be Commandant Klein—and announces: "We are living in a cemetery. There is nothing to rescue."
Author Kaniuk sometimes floats away in the wash of his own rhetoric. But even his savagely forensic moments are often saved by the self-mocking irony that seems particular to the Jewish consciousness. At the novel's end, Adam is cured—and regrets it. But is he really cured? In a closing quote, taken from Lessing, Kaniuk sounds a motif that illuminates the whole book: "Not all are free who scorn their chains."