Winner, 2016 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the Jewish Thought and Culture category

H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to the life and work of German-language author H. G. Adler. Among the international scholars of German, Jewish, and Holocaust literature and history who reveal the range of Adler’s legacy across genres are Adler’s son, Jeremy Adler, and Peter Filkins, translator of Adler’s trilogy, Panorama, (The Journey). Together, the essays examine Adler’s writing in relation to his life, especially his memory as a survivor of the Nazi death camps and his posthumous recognition for having produced a Gesamtkunstwerk, an aesthetic synthesis of the Shoah. The book carries the moral charge of Adler’s work, moving beyond testimony to a complex dialectic between fact and fiction, exploring Adler’s experiments with voice and the ethical work of literary engagement with the Shoah.

The essays in the tenth volume of Lessons and Legacies offer a sense of the issues that run through current thinking about the Holocaust and ideas about the different ways we engage with a broad range of sources. New sources ranging from traditional archival finds to microhistories accessible via newer technology infuse Holocaust research. At the same time, the fields of Holocaust research and Jewish studies have an increasing impact upon other disciplines. Overall, the editor and writers find that the integration of insights, methodologies, critiques, and questions from psychology, literary studies, visual arts, and other fields with those of history, political science, and other social sciences sharpens the tools of analysis. The essays in this volume testify to the evolution of the field of Holocaust studies and also indicate a future direction.