BOOK REVIEW : Sometimes, Lying Is a Saving Grace

Although Jurek Becker is writing of events perceived during a wartime childhood in Germany, he has chosen to veil his story in fantasy, creating a narrator who confides in the reader, offering a choice of interpretations.

We know, of course, that the options are only illusory and that the ending is inevitable. While we want to believe, if only for a moment, that the engaging hero of this fable dies a theatrical death in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis, or better still, lives on to be liberated by the Russians, the author asks us: “What kind of an ending would this be anyway?” There is no failed escape, no survival, just “the true and unimaginative ending that makes one inclined to ask the foolish question: What was the point of it all?”

Jakob Heym is an unlikely hero, never in the least remarkable. In happier times, he was the proprietor of a forlorn cafe, serving potato pancakes in the winter and ice cream in the summer. By 1943, he’s been conscripted into a forced labor battalion, lifting and stacking bags of cement. Although the workers are permitted to return home at night, home is a dark and frigid room. There is no electricity, and the Nazis have not only forbidden pets, rings and clocks, but edible or decorative plants, even trees. The edict depriving people of trees and animals is a scenario of the future, in which human life will also be extinguished, although the implication is apparent only to the narrator. He dreams of trees--the one he climbed as a boy, falling and breaking his hand, effectively ending his potential career as a violinist; the shade of the tree where he made love for the first time; the tree under which his wife will be shot.

One night, Jakob is falsely accused of violating the curfew and told to report to the German military bureau. In a punctilious act of generosity, he is dismissed, but before he flees the building, he hears a radio bulletin announcing the Russian advance. There has been no news in the ghetto for months, and Jakob shares his illicit information with his fellow workers. General despair is replaced by fragile, tenuous hope. People contemplating suicide defer their plans, love blooms, weddings are scheduled; dreams of escape and liberation flourish. Within hours, the population believes Jakob Heym actually has a radio, a notion he does nothing to dispel. He has suddenly been transformed into a sage, a hero, a power. Each day he elaborates on his news of Russian victories until his tales become pure invention. He supplies bulletins as he once purveyed snacks, catering now to psychological needs far more profound than physical hunger. Nourished by the “news” supposedly emerging from the clandestine radio, the ghetto holds on, spirits bolstered by Jakob’s ever more fanciful lies.

Life becomes a parody of normalcy, sustained by the non-existent radio. Frantic to support his fantasies with a shred of truth, Jakob risks his life to steal newspapers from the guards’ privy, but the papers have been cut and no two squares fit together. He had hoped only for the occasional hidden allusion from which, with a bit of skill, a feast could be prepared, but there is nothing; the humble details remind us his particular fable is rooted in terrible reality.

The demand for information is relentless, and to satisfy it, Jakob becomes reckless. When trifles such as a head cold for Winston Churchill no longer serve, he invents an entire battle on the banks of the Rudna river, complete with statistics and names of casualties. In this type of activity, you must go whole hog and exude conviction.

Fragile as the plot is, the tale of the hypothetical radio is designed for humor, the effect heightened by the tragedy beneath the surface. Like all fables, “Jacob the Liar” offers a lesson: When reality is too horrific to be endured, the liar becomes not just an honorable man, but a savior.

Next: Carolyn See reviews Jaimy Gordon’s “She Drove Without Stopping” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).

JAKOB THE LIAR by Jurek Becker, translated by Leila Zennewitz Schocken Books $17.95, 208 pages