Writing in the American literary magazine Salmagundi , Alvin H. Rosenfeld called The Portage a " breakthrough work " that " astonishes " . He was struck by the book 's interplay between the landscape of swamp and jungle , and the " landscape of speech " — the former being " brilliantly registered " with its " immense feeling of physicality " , and the latter , " even more dramatic " in the way it exposes " the dark underside of words " and how its use and misuse reveals the true nature of a person . He was particularly impressed by the depiction of Nazi hunter Emmanuel Lieber and his role as representative of the Jewish consciousness . Rosenfeld noted that while Holocaust literature often either soars to " expostulation and apostrophe " , or sinks to " a dwindling sob of elegiac lament " , Steiner 's Lieber " mediates between these two extremes , ... simultaneously records and mourns , coldly enumerates yet carries an immense affect " . What did concern the reviewer , however , was the way Steiner used ideas from his earlier works , that he had put them " virtually verbatim " into Hitler 's mouth , creating the impression that " Steiner 's understanding of Hitler were identical with the latter 's self @-@ understanding " . Rosenfeld also questioned why the book had to end with Hitler 's speech . He said that Steiner 's fictive Hitler plays " the devil 's game of language subversion " , making " madness [ sound ] like music " , something the real Hitler had perfected . By stopping at this point , Rosenfeld felt that Steiner " succumb [ s ] , rhetorically , to the seductive eloquence of negation " , which undermines his own " high standards of moral intelligence " . But overall Rosenfeld said The Portage " must be counted among the most vigorous attempts to portray the presence and meaning of Hitler " , forcing us to confront him " in a way hardly seen before in fiction " .