Jakob der Lügner (1969)
(Jakob the Liar)
Jurek Becker (1937)
283 pages
In a community caught in a monstrous situation, hope can be a final barricade against despair. Someone seen as a source of hope in the midst of such desperation takes on a status and importance that can feel overwhelming. How does one carry such a burden, live up to such a responsibility?
Jakob, a Polish-Jew living inside a walled off ghetto in a town in German-occupied Poland during World War II, faces this dilemma in Jurek Becker’s novel Jakob the Liar. Jakob works at a railroad yard loading and unloading cargo, and also owns a small restaurant. As the story opens, he is walking home close to curfew time, when a German street-guard accuses him of being out after curfew and orders him to report to the nearby German police station. Though he is eventually allowed to go home, he happens to overhear a radio report while in the police station that indicates that Russian troops have advanced to within 400-500 kilometers of his town. At the railroad yard the following morning, in a moment of crisis as he tries to stop a friend from taking a life-threatening risk, he tells the friend the news about the Russian advance, information that carries tremendous importance for the suffering Jews of the ghetto --- that hope is on the horizon. His friend doesn’t believe him, however, unable to imagine how Jakob could know such a thing. Desperate to convince his friend by substantiating his information, Jakob blurts out that he has a hidden radio, though he actually has no such thing and even the hint of owning one could cost him his life if the Germans hear of it.
Before he can take it back, the news of the secret ratio spreads through the ghetto like wildfire, and Jakob suddenly finds himself the center of attention, the focus of everyone’s hopes. A steady stream of people begin approaching him for the latest news, and, without an actual radio, he is forced to invent Russian progress each night, to tell lies. Jakob at first tries to find ways to extricate himself from the situation he’s inadvertently created, but his friends and neighbors in the ghetto, so desperate for any hopeful news, and unaware of the reality, end up blocking his every attempt. Finally even Jakob himself realizes, as he notices the positive effect his daily updates have on his fellow Jews, that he won’t be able to bring himself to stop the charade.
In telling the story, Becker convincingly recreates the environment of life in the ghetto. Not surprisingly, the tense and always dangerous interactions between the Jews of the ghetto and the German overseers play an important role. When, for example, two German SS officers come into the ghetto looking for a particular Jew, Becker’s description highlights the fear and, on both sides, the hatred that accompanies them; the many different ways that the Jews in the ghetto react are as varied as the people involved. More central to Becker’s telling are the complex relationships between the Jews themselves, as they try to survive the daily dangers of their situation. Even the presence of the radio becomes a point of strenuous division in the population of the ghetto.
The basic story of the novel is simple, and as Becker sets it up in the first couple of dozen pages it is hard to imagine how it will fill out the rest of the pages of the book. But the key to the novel is not the story of the non-existent radio, or the lies that Jakob must invent because of it; what shines through in Becker’s writing is the psychological complexity of life in the ghetto, and the variety of personalities and attitudes that make up the population. He skillfully mixes moments of humor and mundane events in the lives of the residents, with periods of fear and despair they feel at the apparent hopelessness of their situation.
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