Jacob The Liar

Jurek Becker

When it came out in 1998 Robert Benigni's Life Is Beautiful felt like a daring and original idea. A comedy set in the concentration camps. Turns out there is nothing new under the sun. Jurek Becker's minor German classic was doing something similar back in the 1960s.

Admittedly not set in the camps but in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz it's truly a strange and terrifying work of holocaust literature. And yet it is semi-comic. Its hero is Jacob who is trapped at the outset of the novel by an idle boast that he is the owner of the ghetto's only radio and therefore its only source of news. Since it's not true and since possession of a radio is punishable by death the lie is a dangerous one but for various reasons Jacob is forced to sustain it. Our hero is no carefree Benigni character, however, and as the lie spirals out of control some of the humour is in the solid, honest Jacob's unhappy attempts to mine his own imagination for fictitious news to present to his ghetto audience.

But Jacob discovers that even small quantities of his made-up good news can save lives. With the radio apparently reporting the Russian advance on Lodz his fellow Jews start to plan for a future beyond the nazi occupation and this renews their determination to survive. Suicide rates drop away and love affairs blossom.

In this surreal atmosphere the novel mixes a lightness of tone with moments of tragedy. And while the reader will know very well that the Russians did indeed liberate Lodz it never feels like it's going to end well in the book for Jacob or his radio.