The King of the Jews by Leslie Epstein - 1979

In the summer of 1942, the Germans confined around 300,000 Jews in a Ghetto in Warsaw.  This was to be the biggest Ghetto.  The Germans created a council of Jewish Elders, called the Judenrat Council to run the ghetto on their behalf.  This included selection of residents for shipping out to what they were at first lead to believe, some knew better, to remote work camps, enforcing all regulations.  One of the most chilling segments of the King of the Jews was when the German commander of the Ghetto cited the Codicils of the Council of the Elders of Zion to the Jewish leaders.  This document was created around 1905 by the Tsarist secret Police as if it were a Jewish plan for world domination.  I have never seen the impact of this forgery so brilliantly depicted as done in King of the Jews.  The German commander believes it real and just assume all elderly Jewish leaders are in on the plot.  He can recite from it from memory. 

At first able bodied residents were used as slave labourers building weapons.  The Ghetto had it’s own social structure and Epstein shows us this.  The Germans begin to cut food supplies.  Epstein lets us see how desperate conditions brought out the worse in some and the best in others.  In one powerful chapter we see how The Judenrat Council bargained with the lives of the inmates.  Some council members used their positiion to live well, with plenty of food, limos and mistresses.  Women became prostitutes to survive.

Some killed themselves rather than do the bidding of the Germans. Suicides increased and guards begin to be murdered.  For every guarded killed, the Germans killed 100.  

Everyone grasps for information about the war.  Epstein shows the planning of the uprising, starting on April 19, 1943.  We feel The residents gaining pride, they draw strength from ancient Jewish resistance to Romans.  In around 30 days the Germans crush the rebellion, kiling most of the remaining 50,000 residents.  Epstein makes it personal as we see characters in the story die.  

The King of the Jews should be read by all into Holocaust literature.  It is a masterpiece. 

Leslie Epstein was born into a filmmaking family in Los Angeles. His father and uncle were, respectively, Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein, legendary wits and the writers of dozens of films, including Casablanca, for which they received an Academy Award. Leslie studied at Yale and then Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He has published eight other books of fiction, most recently San Remo Drive (Handsel Books), as well as Pinto and Sons, Pandaemonium, and two volumes on the adventures of Leib Goldkorn. His articles and stories have appeared in such places as Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Playboy, Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Tikkun, Partisan Review, Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. In addition to the Rhodes Scholarship, he has received many honors, including a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowship, an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a residency at the Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio, and various grants from the NEA. For many years he has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. He lives with his wife, Ilene, in Brookline, Massachusetts. They are the parents of three children—Anya, Paul, and Theo.. from The publisher.

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