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    The Emperor of Lies: A Novel
    The Emperor of Lies: A Novel
    The Emperor of Lies: A Novel
    Ebook720 pages12 hours

    The Emperor of Lies: A Novel

    By Steve Sem-Sandberg

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the August Prize, Sweden's most important literary award
    A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title

    To be published in more than twenty-five languages

    A major international literary event

    "This is real literature. A great work of fiction." —Per Svensson, Dagens Nyheter

    In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto, in the Polish city of Lódz. The leader they appointed was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director—and the elusive, authoritarian power sustaining the ghetto's very existence.

    A haunting, profoundly challenging novel, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter-million Jews for the next four and a half years. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it—and himself—indispensable to the Nazi regime. These compromises would have extraordinary consequences not only for Rumkowski but for everyone living in the ghetto. Drawing on the detailed records of life in Lódz, Steve Sem-Sandberg, in a masterful feat of literary imagination and empathy, captures the full panorama of human resilience and probes deeply into the nature of evil. Through the dramatic narrative, he asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime motivated by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies? How did the inhabitants of the ghetto survive in such extreme circumstances?

    A critically acclaimed breakout bestseller in Sweden, The Emperor of Lies introduces a writer of great significance to American readers. The archives detail daily life in the Lodz ghetto, under the reign of Rumkowki, but it takes a writer with Sem-Sandberg's singular talent to help us understand the truth of this chilling history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 30, 2011
    ISBN9781429968843
    The Emperor of Lies: A Novel
    Author

    Steve Sem-Sandberg

    Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in 1958. He divides his time between Vienna and Stockholm. He is the author of books including The Emperor of Lies.

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    • 3/5
      During WWII, the Lodz ghetto was the last to be evacuated. Its chairman Rumkowski had turned it into a special production zone, whose inhabitants produced useful output for the German war economy and thus were spared the transfer to the extermination camps until very late in the war. At the same time, Rumkowski had to accommodate the Germans, and eliminate all non-productive elements from the ghetto, amongst which were its children. His notorious "Give me your children" speech is included in the book.This novel offers descriptions of various characters (many of which actually existed) who lived in this ghetto as it descended into starvation and extermination during the war years. Some of these characters really come alive on the pages, but Rumkowski remains an enigmatic figure, an evil deus ex machina rather than the personification of hamletian ethical dilemmas. At the end the dry narrative style of the book, so effective on describing the hunger, fear and violence, veers off into a rather unfortunate magical realism. What I'll remember from this book are the odd combinations of human pettiness and heroism, ruthless selfishness and suicidal generosity amidst the gradual descent into misery and annihilation.
    • 3/5
      Heard about this book on Eleanor Wachtel's Writers and Company. Thought it sounded interesting. However, I really couldn't get into it. Fro me there were too many characters, or perhaps because I'm not familiar with Polish names I just kept getting confused.
    • 5/5
      The Lodz ghetto was established by the Nazis in 1939 and was home to over a quarter of a million Jews. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski was its leader – a business man and the director of an orphanage who was chosen by the Nazis to rule the ghetto. Rumkowski thought by establishing the ghetto as a productive center for the Nazis, he (and likewise the ghetto) would become indispensable to the regime.Was his dictatorial rule really designed to save Jews? Or was Rumkowski motivated by greed and power in his collaboration with the Germans? This question has been debated by scholars and students of history. Rumkowski was surrounded by controversy. Although he attempted to make the ghetto a community, he also worked hand in hand with the Germans as they began to “resettle” the Jewish inhabitants in concentration camps where they were systematically murdered. Many survivors remember Rumkowski as a tyrant. However, many scholars have pointed out that the Lodz ghetto was the last ghetto in Eastern Europe to be liquidated and nearly 7000 Jews from that ghetto survived the war – although Rumkowski himself was murdered in Auschwitz. For me the question is: Does the end justify the means?Steve Sem-Sanberg’s novel is a mesmerizing, albeit disturbing, look inside the Lodz ghetto and examines the life of its most controversial member. The book is a door-stopper at over 600 pages and introduces dozens of significant characters – many who are historical figures.The narrative focuses on several central characters as they struggle for survival in the ghetto.Sem-Sandberg has done a vast amount of research for his novel and there were moments when the book felt more like nonfiction than fiction. Readers who are hoping for an answer as to whether or not Rumkowski was a villain or hero will be disappointed because the author does not really answer that question. Rather, he lays out the facts through fiction and allows the reader to come to her own conclusions.This is not an enjoyable novel. Often the realities of life in the Lodz ghetto are horrifying, dark, depressing and overwhelmingly sad. The Emperor of Lies reminds the reader that the Holocaust is a very real part of our recent past. Despite the passage of years, it still feels acutely painful to re-live.Steve Sem-Sanberg won the August Prize for The Emperor of Lies and it is easy to see why. The book is magnificent in its scope, painstakingly researched and an astonishing accomplishment. That said, readers should be warned that this is an emotionally difficult historical novel.Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Glad I read it - didn't know anything about the Lodz getto/Rumkowski, but found the structure and language confusing at times. Not sure why this needed to be a novel instead of nonfiction - left me wondering which parts actually happened and which were created by the author
    • 3/5
      Rating: I really do not know. Say three stars just to put a value here.The Book Report: "There's no business like Shoah business." It's cynical, it's infuriating, and it's inevitable that this huge, horrific, and richly dramatic story should be exploited in a million different ways. This novel manages, seventy years after the fact, to find a new and interesting, if completely depressing, angle on the oft-told tale: The life and times of Chaim Rumkowski, the Eldest Jew as the Germans called him, who was granted ownership of all the people and property in the Lodz, Poland, ghetto.The novel shows Rumkowski in a strong and unflattering light, casting some really dark shadows; but it also illuminates what the author presumes to be Rumkowski's inner life, fraught with the ordinary human disappointments and the everyday human hurts of a misfit with an outsized personality. How Rumkowski comes to be the King of the Jews in this horrible little ghetto and what he assents to and dissents from is the meat of the book. The gigantic cast of characters includes all the factual German and Polish overlords of the ghetto that Rumkowski strives against, as well as fictional composite characters meant to offer the author a more efficient and effective means of communicating Rumkowski's complex and unappealing, if completely relatable, character.The entire span of existence of the Lodz ghetto is covered. It's not something I think a review should try to explain...the subject of Jewish mistreatment and misery took the author over 600 pages to explore even superficially...so I'll leave it at, Rumkowski's life as King was unenviable, bordering on unendurable, and makes for extremely emotionally fraught reading.My Review: This is not a cheery little bagatelle with which one can wile away the heavy hours of the night. This is a "sit down right here and eat your spinach" kind of a read.I didn't like it one little bit. I am awed by the author's audacity. I am riveted by the technical bravura of the storytelling choices he's made. I cannot speak highly enough of the translator, whose efforts on behalf of the story are heroic in the actual sense of the word: Imagine the saddest, least hopeful story ever conceived by the mind of Man and then tell it in your own language that's faithful to the poetics of another language and another person. [[Sarah Death]], what a dreadful last name she has, has served thee and me in true hero's part by taking this dark and sad and fascinating journey before us, then coming back to tell us all about it. It's a landmark achievement. I wish there was a huge, well-publicized prize for translations, one that would have the impact of the Nobels. Death deserves it.So how to rate the book...whether to recommend it or not...it's tough to say. I didn't, as mentioned above, like the book at all, because the vast amount of and dreary sameness within Holocaustic literature has worn me thin in the empathy spot. But this is a story that's really, really involving, and the sheer magnitude of the storytelling chutzpah is worthy of praise and commentary.How about this: The less you know about the Holocaust, the stronger my encouragement that you read this book. If all you've ever done is read The Diary of Anne Frank, then I consider this book essential to your education. For anti-Semites, it's crucial (pun intended) that you read the book.But it is not at all fun.
    • 5/5
      It took me a while to face picking this book up and reading it; not just its sheer heft (650 pages...) but also the dark subject matter, the story of the Lodz ghetto during World War II. When I did, the first 20 or 30 pages weren't all that encouraging, as it first began to read more like a documentary memoir of sorts than a novel. Then the drama and the narrative crept up on me and I was hooked.Can a Jew really become a collaborator with the Nazis? Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski almost certainly never saw himself as a collaborator, but told himself that everything he did while running the Lodz ghetto for the Nazis was done with the goal of preserving as many as possible of its inhabitants from the horrors that lay outside its walls. That reveals the extent of the man's self deception and lies (as in the title) that he tells himself as well as Lodz's Jewish population. This is a novel that's a study of power, of corruption, of the daily and mundane horrors that we tend to forget about, overshadowed as they are by the concentration camps. (When Lodz's Jewish population was finally deported, the majority went straight to Chelmno -- in contrast to Auschwitz, this was truly an extermination camp that only three people are known to have survived.) The reader, however, knows and sees only what the ghetto's inhabitants know and see. They cling to the ghetto without fully knowing what might lie ahead for them if they succumb to pressure and register for deportation. It is Rumkowski who controls their fate: he talks of "my Jews" and "my ghetto", and insists that to be saved, to be worthy of being saved, the Jews must work for their captors in factories that turn out water materiel and other goods. They must prove that they have value to the Nazis. This is a devastating character study of Rumkowski himself, who remains the kind of man who makes other people wince with embarrassment when his jokes fall flat and with his clumsy platitudes and tinny laugh. There's also a much darker side to the man who at first does seem to have some redeeming qualities, such as his pre-war commitment to creating residential homes for Jewish orphans. A childless man, the war transforms him into a paterfamilias and an emperor of lies.The broad story line is about power but the author does a remarkable job of blending Rumkowski's own story with that of other ghetto inhabitants, real and imagined. What makes this book an astonishing achievment is the line that the author walks between fiction and fact; at times, it reads almost like a memoir or documentary novel. Then the shifting point of view and the drama kick in and you realize, no, this is fiction, but it's so tightly woven with fact that you can't separate the two. The other tremendous achievement is that Sem-Sandberg somehow manages to keep the death camps in the distance -- he writes from the perspective of his characters as if he, like them, can't and doesn't know for sure what lies beyond the boundary of the ghetto for those who are deported. I was left stunned by this book on many levels, not least of which was the level of commitment and energy required to research and write such a dense book about such a bleak subject. It feels so authoritative that I can't imagine that anyone who wants to understand -- viscerally -- what it was like to live in the Lodz ghetto during the war would want to read anything else, unless they are a Holocaust historian. With all that has been written about Warsaw, this is a fascinating and chilling insight into a different kind of tyranny. I'm rating it 4.5 stars, which means I recommend it, but only with a big caveat. The subject is bleak; it's difficult to read for that reason alone, and the omnipresent greyness hovers overhead. A more minor gripe: the ARC that I read had a Yiddish glossary in the back, but it was incomplete and there are reasonably frequent bits of German (conversations, signs) in here that weren't translated in my version and that aren't completely obvious to a reader. They may be there for a purpose, but without a translation, it's the kind of thing that some readers will find irritating. I found it worth persevering, though; I still feel haunted by the novel's bleakness but it goes on my list as one of the more memorable books of 2012 so far.
    • 5/5
      Sem-Sandberg's story of life during the war in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in Łódź, Poland, is quite immense, not only in physical size but in subject matter. Instead of telling a straight history of the Jewish ghetto, he immerses the reader in the day-to-day events, small as well as big, and introduces us to its people, small as well as big. What I found particularly haunting wasn't the evils done by the German soldiers, although those atrocities are bad enough, but rather that most of the main characters - bad and good - are the regular inhabitants of the ghetto. I don't think it takes away from the horrors that some of the perpetrators are Jewish themselves, but rather adds to it; quite frightening it is, the thought of how callous people can become when they are in dire straits and, more importantly, how benevolent some of them stay, regardless of famine, cold, and torture. The most remarkable part of this story, however, I think is not the events that are recounted, but the fact that Sem-Sandberg has managed to evoke the feeling of the ghetto and the time so incredibly well that any reader will think themselves transported back in time, as uncomfortable as that trip may be. This novel, based on the Litzmannstadt Ghetto Chronicles, is currently (as of January 2011) only available in Swedish, but rights have been sold internationally, so hopefully an English translation will be available shortly. The only change I would have made would be to expand the Yiddish dictionary in the back and add translations of the German phrases. It is a very worthy winner of the 2009 August-prize, and I would highly recommend it to just about anyone.ETA: Have gotten notice that this book will be published in English on August 30, 2011 under the name The Emperor of Lies.

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    The Emperor of Lies - Steve Sem-Sandberg

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