Looking Forward to Look Back: H.G. Adler's Rediscovered Shoah Trilogy

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The rediscovery of H.G. Adler’s Shoah trilogy – PANORAMA, THE JOURNEY, and THE WALL – offers not only an opportunity to reconsider an important writer, but also to examine how his writing informs and challenges contemporary readings of the Holocaust and its aftermath. This panel will consider Adler’s trilogy from three different critical perspectives that take up the depiction of trauma, the uses of the survivor’s experience in the shaping of art, and why these rediscovered works benefit from a more embracing reception than was granted them on publication, and what that means for how we read Holocaust fiction now.

Chaired by Leslie Morris, who will also serve as respondent, the panel will begin with Peter Filkins taking up the uses, misuses, and abuses of biography in H.G. Adler’s fiction. Specifically, his paper will explore how Adler transforms his life as a survivor into fiction, as well as the twin drives toward moral witnessing and redemptive self-preservation that power the author’s fictive imagination. Dorota Glowacka’s paper will then discuss the nature and use of the visual image in mediating the horror at the center of Adler’s fiction, and how such a practice aligns Adler with the expressionistic techniques forwarded by visual artists in Theresienstadt, as well as confronts the problem of images of horror and the museum that we confront today. Sara R. Horowitz will then speak on the changing reception of Adler’s work, especially given the deep neglect with which it was met with upon publication, versus the expanded audience for rediscovered works that has developed in the twenty-first century. This will allow the discussion to take up issues of how our reading of the Holocaust has changed over time, and how the rediscovery of writers like Adler is perhaps as much a symptom of the reader’s changing practice as it is an impetus to changes in how we read Holocaust fiction, history, and the ability of art to find, engage, and transform its audience over time.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• The Uses, Misuses, and Abuses of Biography in H.G. Adler's Shoah Trilogy - Peter Filkins, Bard College at Simon's Rock

• The Archive and the Image: H.G. Adler's snapshots of traumatic history - Dorota Glowacka, University of King's College

• Rediscovered Gems: H.G. Adler's Fiction Then & Now - Sara R. Horowitz, York University

Respondent

• Julia Creet, York University