Jacob the Liar     by Jurek Becker, Translated by Melvin Kornfeld Original title: Jakob der Lügner Original language: German Published by Arcade Publishing Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Hardcover Dimensions: (in inches): 0.95 x 8.58 x 5.85 ISBN: 1559703156 Edition: 1st USA Edition List Price: $21.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £13.96 Published by Picador Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Hardcover, 207 pages Not available for ordering Published by ?Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pub. Date: 1976 Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering

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Becker was a Jewish Pole who settled in East Germany and became a leading author there. Jakob the Liar is set in one of the ghettos created by the Nazis in occupied Poland by stuffing thousands of Jews into a barricaded part of a city with very little food and under various harsh regulations. Eventually nearly all the surviving inhabitants would be transported to extermination camps.

Extraordinarily enough in this setting Becker creates a story with a good deal of humour and warmth. The ghetto denizens are, after all, ordinary people only recently torn from everyday lives and in their conversations emerge poignant details of their pre-deluge lives; their little shops selling potato pancakes, haircuts or tobacco; the tricky loose ends of love-affairs and marriages, all evoked by a particular kind of sardonic Yiddish wit and warmth. In fact, although writing in German, Becker draws on a Yiddish oral storytelling tradition.

One of the conditions of ghetto life was that any contact with the world outside was forbidden, including the possession of any radios. Jakob, the former proprietor of a potato pancake (latke) and ice-cream shop, claims one day to have a radio and this story of the imaginary radio rapidly develops under its own strange logic bringing in the hopes for survival of various very different individuals including a eight-year-old child that Jakob looks after, one of the stray children of exterminated parents who often died of starvation in the Ghettos. The relationship of these two is at the emotional centre of this tremendous and humane book. This tenderly described odd couple and the light shed by their human warmth only goes to illuminate the monstrous crime of the Shoah or Holocaust, leaving open all those questions still unanswered as to how should the nation that perpetrated it be thought of today.

‘Come on, lean back and close your eyes, let’s not spoil the pleasure by talking, let’s take a few puffs and dream of old times, which will soon be back again. Come on, let’s think of Chaim Balabusne with his thick steel-rimmed spectacles and the tiny shop where we always bought our cigarettes, or rather the tobacco to roll our own. His shop was closer to yours than mine was, it was between our two shops, yet we never became real friends with him, but that was his fault. Because he wasn’t interested in pancakes and ice-cream, or in a haircut or a shave. Many people said he let his red hair grow so long out of religious piety, but I know better, it was out of stinginess, nothing else. Ah well, never mind, mustn’t speak ill of the dead, Balabusne always had a good selection, cigars, pipes, cigarette cases with little flowers, gold-tipped cigarettes for the rich, always tried to persuade us to take a more expensive brand but we stuck with ‘Excelsior’. And the stand with the little gas flame and the cigar cutter on the counter, the brass stand he was always polishing when one went into his shop, it’s that brass stand one always remembers in thinking back to the old days, though we only bought tobacco from him once a week at most and never used the stand.’ p91-2