The Emperor of Lies

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More About This Book

Overview

"Fiction of true moral force, brilliantly sustained and achieved...I find it difficult to think of any book that has had such an immediate and powerful impact on me...Brave and brillant."—Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director. From one of Scandinavia's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it —and himself — indespensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz Ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience and asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
A Swedish bestseller, this sprawling, Dickensian novel of the Holocaust now lands in America, where it is sure to attract attention.

Based on historical fact and a real-life central character, Sem-Sandberg's magnum opus is set in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, Poland. The time is the winter of 1940, when the Nazi invaders have newly arrived to find an apparently willing accomplice in a very unpleasant man named Chaim Rumkowski. Sadistic and abusive in every possible way, Rumkowski has an odd dream: He believes that he can "demonstrate to the authorities what capable workers the Jews are," thereby convincing the Nazis to turn all of Lodz into what would eventually become "a Jewish free state under Nazi supremacy, where freedom had been honestly won at the price of hard work." Against the awful figure of Rumkowski, who Sem-Sandberg allows to come out of the shadows only slowly, stand other characters, real and imagined: Rumkowski's sister, horrendous in her vanity; Gertler the policeman, a law unto himself; Adam, hooked of nose and in care of a mentally disabled sibling, both the kind of people the Nazis want very much to exterminate. The Nazis, of course, are very bad indeed, as they reveal with little ceremony from the first, and especially when the deportations to the death camps begin. But the Jewish administrators of the ghetto are perfectly capable of inflicting terror on their own people; Sem-Sandberg risks courting controversy by revisiting this complicity with evil, as he does by allowing the possibility that Rumkowski may have honestly believed that he was saving his fellow Jews by his acts—a possibility that historians have lately been wrestling with. Sem-Sandberg is very good with period details, and most of his scenarios seem well founded, though often the prose strays into melodrama.

Of a piece with Jonathan Littell'sThe Kindly Ones(2009) as a philosophically charged novel of an ever-more-distant time, written by one who was not there to see those terrible events firsthand.

Daphne Merkin
…a freshly felt, fully absorbing novel about the Holocaust…The Emperor of Lies is a chilling and illuminating look at a period of history that has been analyzed and reconstructed before but rarely in quite so three-dimensional a fashion. Sem-Sandberg's mostly artful use of archival material gives the fictional reconstruction a gravitas, a form of legitimacy, it might not have on its own, while the fictive element allows us as readers to call upon all our powers of empathy and projective identification to imagine ourselves into the doomed fates of the ghetto's denizens.
—The New York Times

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780374139643
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date: 8/30/2011
  • Pages: 672
  • Sales rank: 144,140
  • Product dimensions: 6.40 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in 1958. He divides his time between Vienna and Stockholm.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 7 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 7 Customer Reviews

  • Posted October 9, 2011

    A graphic and vivid book.

    This book was very well written and you could almost feel the cold, the despair and the hunger of the Jewish people confined to the ghetto during World War II. Humankind must be reminded periodically of this tragic time in our history to avoid the repetition.

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    Posted December 1, 2011

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    Posted November 28, 2011

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