This one, sadly like much of Paul Schrader's work these days, has slipped under the radar despite being a story about the holocaust or more accurately, what happnes to a clown afer his whole family is wiped out. Here is Schrader on the challenges of  trying to adapt excellent books to the screen

I'm a huge fan of Yoram's book, so I have to preface all my remarks by saying that we made a very good adaptation in this film, but we cannot approach the greatness of the book. The greatness of the book is defined by its literary quality, by its words. When a book is really a literary masterpiece, rather than a narrative masterpiece, you can never quite do it justice, because it is what it is. You are never really going to do The Sound and the Fury or Lolita. You can get pretty close, but you can't really nail a book whose very language is its greatness. The reason that Philip Roth's books have failed to make good films is because he writes about despicable characters who are redeemed by language. When you translate them into film, you have despicable characters, but you don't have language.

(Read the whole interview at Greencine.)