[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...