ADAM RESURRECTED

About The Production
“Not all who are free scorn their chains.”
-- Doris Lessing, Quoted in Yoram Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected
First published in 1968, Yoram Kaniuk’s ADAM RESURRECTED was instantly controversial,
yet soon began to draw the admiration of the world’s foremost writers and literary critics. The late
Susan Sontag compared Kaniuk to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Time Magazine measured him against
Dostoyevsky and the New York Times anointed him “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in
the world.” The novel – the story of Adam Stein, once a famous European clown, animal trainer and
mind reader, now living as a compellingly unhinged mental patient in an upscale Israeli institution –
was the first to truly grapple, in luminous and darkly comic fiction, with the sheer impossibility of
returning to ordinary life after the horrors of World War II and Fascism.
Kaniuk added something new, even transcendent, to the conversation about catastrophe and
survival: a biting inquiry into a question that continues to be all too relevant: how do shattered souls
sustain the most basic human needs of love, laughter and desire in the face of terror and absurdity?
More than four decades after the book’s release, ADAM RESURRECTED (once a project
associated with the late Orson Welles) has finally become a motion picture, directed by Paul
Schrader and featuring stand-out performances from Jeff Goldblum – in what he calls the “juiciest and
most challenging role” he’s ever played – as well as Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi and Ayelet Zurer.
The inspiration for ADAM RESURRECTED came in the aftermath of a more recent war. After
being wounded in the Independence War of Israel in 1948, the writer Yoram Kaniuk moved to New
York where he had two deeply affecting personal experiences. He met a group of concentration
camp survivors and heard their stirring stories; and he encountered the unusual tale of a boy in a
mental institution who had been raised on a chain and believed he was a dog. Thus, the basic
structure of Adam Resurrected was put into place to become the story of a man who was once
treated as a dog who befriends a dog who is really a boy.
From that confluence of characters spilled out a richly layered, poetic tale of a man in a
profound psychic crisis. Kaniuk would set his story in an extraordinary place: the Seizling Institute, a
fictional asylum, one Kaniuk wrote was created by a rich Cleveland widow who believed that cutting-
edge psychological techniques might help troubled concentration camp survivors. No such place
existed at the time, but the novel would prove prophetic. In the 1980s, Israel created AMCHA, the
National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support of Holocaust Survivors and The Second Generation,
a psychiatric treatment center dedicated to aging survivors and their children.
Inside this intricately imagined world, Adam Stein comes to life as one of literature’s epic
characters: a divine fool who is alternately an entertainer, a swindler, a drunk, a seducer, a
clairvoyant, a genius and a madman. Ultimately, he is a broken soul who finds redemption in unlikely
human connections.
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