[Kaniuk] set himself a truly ambitious task [in Adam Resurrected]: to grasp what happened, not by entering the fire, which is impossible, but by sifting the ash. The results are curious, and startling. First, there is the inevitable shock and upset to one's emotions that the material causes, partly because each of us, I suspect, has managed to arrange a delicate equilibrium private to ourselves about these matters. Then, in pondering the book one begins to see what Kaniuk has it in mind to say to us about the unsayable. Briefly put, I should characterize Adam Resurrected as an inverted jeremiad, a negative book of prophecy, a demonic discussion of the fate of the Jew in which the writer attempts to appropriate certain deep problems about the cost of being Jewish. In the climactic chapter "Desert Night," Adam Stein leads a party of lunatics out into the Negev to seek the God they believe he has been sent to announce. The escapade kills some of them, disillusions others, and cures Adam himself, who experiences the Nothing that is and the Something that is not, although we are not told what it is he does experience, just as we are not told very much about what happened to Moses during his forty days on the mountain. But Adam wants only to die; it is impossible for him to choose life—because it cost him everything to do so when he was in Auchausen camp. Whatever the Jew was, the Holocaust has changed that forever, Kaniuk is saying. It is a tremendous assertion, a flawed and bitter one too.

The flaws are literary ones primarily. I don't mind particularly that familiar setting of the loony bin: it has worked well for novelists and dramatists. It has validity not only for the Europe of Hitler but for Kaniuk's young State of Israel, as well as for the America of Henry Miller and Ken Kesey too. A sampling of psychoses makes for shorthand characterization of individuals and a society, and allows for the exasperated grotesquerie that makes anything possible to say, act out or think.

For example, who is Adam Stein? A composite figure: magician, circus impresario, Europe's great clown, clairvoyant and mind reader…. [Adam Stein is also] the benefactor of Dr. Weiss, aka Herr Commandant Klein of Auchausen, his savior. To be sure, the price was exorbitant: not for nothing was Adam (who is Man writ large) a Stein, that is stone, in his Jewish-German avatar. Only a stone could have clowned and fiddled beside Klein who ran an extermination machine: why should there be lamentation, resistance or fouling of the conveyor belt? So Adam lived, on all fours, literally, facing down Klein's brute dog, and eating from the dog's dish with him. He chose life. After such knowledge, as Eliot put it in a different context, what forgiveness? Can Adam be "cured" of his guilt? What does it take to cure him?

Adam Resurrected answers that question, sardonically, mordantly, with outrage and bitterness, and the novel is a set of essays, variations on the themes deriving from the unthinkable. The humor, and there is plenty of it, is humor after the gallows, the humor of the dead who have lived on, the Survivors, desperate and pitiless. No one is spared, and certainly not Adam Stein's lover Jenny, the Sabra head nurse in the ultramodern Institute for Rehabilitation and Therapy, a concrete fantasy…. [Here] Adam has his last chance to escape his will to die, and he does escape it too. How? by finding and showing that God did not make him and will not speak to him or anyone ever again, no matter how much they have paid, throughout history as Jews, for the right to hear Him.

Psychiatry, parable, allegory: the madhouse microcosm of Jewry in Israel: Adam Resurrected is a powerful, surreal blending of archetypal Jewish motifs interwoven with the unutterable tragedy of the Holocaust, which permeates the lives of its survivors, their children and will doubtlessly permeate that of their children's children as well, as we are learning. From this perspective all of the Children of Israel are made. The vision is ambiguous. There is a cure for Adam Stein; but it is folly to suppose there is any cure for us. At the end, Kaniuk relents somewhat, perhaps in the hope of redeeming his book of fiction, when he remarks that it is only in the depths of their psychoses that the lunatics see the shards of truth momentarily, the abiding, terrible and unspeakable truths deriving from the fate of the Jews. The rest is silence. (pp. 199-201)