Word: adams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ADAM RESURRECTED by Yoram Kaniuk, translated from the Hebrew by Seymour Simckes. 370 pages. Atheneum...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...