GREAT BARRINGTON - On Friday, Mar. 29 at 10:45 a.m., Knosh & Knowledge hosts poet and translator Peter Filkins, who will talk about the life and career of H.G. Adler, who was born in Prague, survived the Holocaust, fled post-war communist Czechoslovakia, became a freelance writer and scholar in the United States and went on to author 26 books on history, sociology, and philosophy, as well as poetry, fiction, and autobiographical works. The author is the subject of Filkins’s just-published biography, H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds.

This Knosh & Knowledge program begins at 10:45 a.m. and is open to the public. Hevreh of Southern Berkshire is at 270 State Road in Great Barrington, MA. The presentation will be followed by a buffet. Admission with lunch is $11 - the program only is free. Advance reservations for lunch are required – call the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires at (413) 442-4360, ext. 10 or email federation@jewishberkshires.org.

Poet, novelist, author of two seminal Holocaust studies, one of the earliest historians of Auschwitz, a last representative of Kafka’s Prague, and expert for the Eichmann trial, H.G. Adler (1910-1988) survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other camps. With friends Elias Canetti and Heinrich Böll, he forged a deeper understanding of the Shoah, engaging Leo Baeck, Hannah Arendt, and Gershom Scholem in critical questions facing modern societies to this day. Translator Peter Filkins will explore Adler’s life and work on the publication of his authorized biography, H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds, by Oxford University Press.

Peter Filkins is an award-winning poet and translator. He has translated three novels by H.G. Adler, Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall, as well as the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the DAAD, and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and also teaches translation at Bard College.

(press release and image of Peter Filkins sent to WSBS from the Berkshire Jewish Voice for online/on-air use)

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