Jacob the Liar

"An unforgettably beautiful novel . . . Cuts to the very heart of human experience.Jacob the Liar is a strange, powerful, moving work, beautifully written and well served by its translator."--The New York Times Book Review

"One of the enduring works of the Shoah . . . This miraculous novel pays profound homage to remembrance."--Boston Globe

"Creative storytelling . . . Asks us to weigh the human need for hope in all its real and imagined forms."--The New Yorker

"A novel about the martyrdom of Europe's Jews that has never been surpassed."--Times Literary Supplement

"Twenty-seven years after its initial German publication, this celebrated . . . novel of life and death in a Nazi-occupied Jewish ghetto during WW II appears here in the translation authorized by the author, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. In the midst of a morally inverted universe where the monstrously wicked has become utterly commonplace, Jacob Heym, a yellow star on his chest, gives hope to his fellow ghetto occupants by telling them he has clandestinely overheard a radio report that Russian troops are advancing and will soon liberate the ghetto. One life-sustaining lie leads to another as the former eatery owner, who now does back-breaking forced labor in a freight yard, circulates invented radio news of German defeats and Allied progress. Jacob's stories halt a stream of suicides, even though savage beatings, shootings, executions, starvation and deportations to concentration camps continue unabated. In a moving, almost hallucinatory, narrative that gives voice to a grief beyond words, Becker shows us ordinary people struggling to maintain their humanity and dignity. Vennewitz's translation conveys the restraint and emotional power of a story that unfolds with the impact of a moral parable or a folk legend."--Publishers Weekly