Adam Resurrected

Adam Stein, once Europe’s greatest clown, is also a clairvoyant, a swindler, an alcoholic, periodically insane, and possessed of manic gifts associated with divine madness. He survived the Holocaust because the death-camp commandant wanted him to entertain victims on their way to the ovens.

After his arrival in Israel in 1958, Adam breaks down and enters the Seizling Institute for Rehabilitation and Therapy in the southern desert. Here he presides over a demented kingdom that includes Jenny, a martinet of a supervisor who supplies him with medical and sexual services, and the “dog,” who slowly begins to stand upright, feel love and finally speak.

The reader gradually understands the connections between Adam’s disconnected musings, flashes of memory and encounters with the other inmates. After curing the “dog,” he sheds the remains of his soul. “I have recovered and become an ordinary man,” he writes. “Sanity is pleasant, calm, amusing but it lacks greatness, it lacks true joy as well as the awful sorrow which slashes the heart.”