"Emperor of Lies" by Steve Sem-Sandberg (translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 664 pages; $30) is an epic historical novel set in a small space. It is as physically and emotionally draining to read as it must have been to write, telling of the meticulously researched fictional re-creation of life in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, set up by the Nazis in 1939 near the Polish city of Lodz. At its height, the ghetto contained 320,000 Jews, with a sprinkling of Communists and other perceived enemies of the Reich.
Figures from history live side by side with fictional characters, and official documents, taken from the actual Ghetto Chronicle -- a document of five volumes of more than 3,000 pages -- are sprinkled throughout the narrative.
The protagonist is Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a real person, the 63-year-old former orphanage director appointed by the Germans as Eldest of the Jews, Chairman of the Council of Elders who nominally run the ghetto. In the ever-changing angles of vision provided by the novelist, he is either, or both, a power-hungry willing tool of the oppressors, or a tragic figure trying to save as many of his people as he can. He also molests children, including the little boy he saves from deportation by adopting him.
When the novel opens, he has been ordered to deliver all the children and old people -- all those unable to work -- for transport outside, supposedly for resettlement, though the reader suspects otherwise.
Stupidly or wisely, Rumkowski has managed to keep most ghetto inmates in the dark about their fates, though it is hard to keep up illusions when some of the returning transports are full of dirty clothing and shoes. He does manage to save children above the age of 9 by putting them to work.
In general, ghetto life is a daily monotony, marked by constant hunger and the occasional moment of violence or murder. The tone of the novel is one of detached, matter-of-fact reportage, which makes the daily horrors endurable for the reader. One becomes as numbed as the characters, who until the last years of the war, when clandestine radios appear here and there, have no clue about the world outside or the rationale for the arriving and departing transports of Jews. They work, making uniforms and shoes for the Germans, they have rivalries, marry or have love affairs. They even try a brief uprising, dashing their cups to the ground in protest over the daily ration of watery soup, moldy bread or rotting horsemeat. And in the early years they put on musical revues.
Occasionally, a character emerges from the faceless mass of prisoners, like the nurse, Rosa, who cares for the children until none are left; Vera, who works in the archives, and the sturdy young worker Adam Rzepin, who survives the slaughter of his family and winds up one of the last remaining Jews as the Germans empty the ghetto near war's end. "When the exiled and dead outnumber the living," he muses, "it is the dead who start talking instead of the living." Never have those dead spoken as eloquently about their fate as they do in this heroic book.
Brigitte Frase is a book critic in Minneapolis.
