Adam Resurrected is a moving and highly original novel. Adam Stein was spared from the Holocaust because his death-camp commandant recognized him as a famous circus clown and kept him alive to entertain the other victims—including Adam's wife and daughter—who were on their way to destruction…. The sign of his degredation is his ineradicable memory of playing dog to amuse Commandant Klein….

Adam Resurrected is filled with the tensions between the native-born pioneers who created Israel and the immigrant survivors who came to it for refuge. Though [Adam,] who becomes a dog and destroys his family, finally regains sanity through his love for Uriel, the dog-child he finds in the asylum, his resurrection seems as provisional and uncertain as the reborn nation he must, with considerable reluctance, continue to live in.

Adam Stein may, as we see him from the outside, have a little too much...