THE diabolically well-planned implementation of genocide that was the Holocaust has been narrated many times over, in the form of fiction and non-fiction. Indeed, it has been argued that the Holocaust, like everything else in our mercantile culture, has become commodified ("There's no business like Shoah business"), and the existence of an item like the "Holocaust Survivor Cookbook" as well as the fetishistic value placed on Nazi memorabilia (this past July an ultraOrthodox Jewish buyer snapped up a collection of writings by Dr. Josef Mengele for $245,000) would suggest that there is some uneasy truth to the charge. It would seem all the more difficult, then, from this remove in time and after so much retelling, to write a freshly felt, fully absorbing novel about the Holocaust - and yet that is precisely what Steve Sem-Sandberg has done. It is even more unexpected given that the novel, which has been translated from the Swedish, concerns a real-life figure, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, whose autocratic rule in the Lodz ghetto has been explored before in "King of the Jews," a 1979 novel by Leslie Epstein, and whose ambiguous legacy has been meditated upon by Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi and others. "The Emperor of Lies" sets out to give the reader an intimate as well as aerial view of the Lodz ghetto during the four years it existed as home to a starved, overworked population of 200,000 Jews. (It was liquidated in August 1944, the last of the Polish ghettos to go.) The author is everywhere at once, inside the thoughts and dreams of his characters while at the same time keeping an eye on the ticking clock of history; he appropriates nonfiction documents even as he gives free rein to his creative powers. Historical figures, including Heinrich Himmler and Adam Czerniakow, the leader of the Warsaw ghetto, wander in and out, and the portrait of Rumkowski himself is based on a mix of fact, rumor and sheer invention. This somewhat imperious, hybrid approach to his material enables Sem-Sandberg to draw a picture that seems both superrealist and surrealist, in the manner of an animated documentary. Although some of the liberties he takes may be questionable - I'm not sure why it's necessary to add a pedophilic relationship with his adopted son to Rumkowski's reputed list of venal traits - they also imbue his writing with a certain largeness of effect, a quality of narrative grandeur. The novel opens two years into the existence of the ghetto, right at the moment Rumkowski is about to convey to his community the latest Nazi demand for 20,000 deportees. This speech, larded with sentiment but also strangely dispassionate - "For 66 years I have lived and not yet been granted the happiness of being called Father, and now the authorities demand of me that I sacrifice all my children" - gives a keyhole glimpse into the complex man, squeaky of voice and heavy of build, whose shadow lies over the 650-odd pages that follow. From here the novel backtracks to reveal Rumkowski's background as first a failed businessman and then a bullying insurance salesman. ("No one would share a table with him. They knew he was an uneducated man who resorted to the coarsest of threats and insults to sell his insurance") Shortly after the death of his wife in 1937 he experiences " a conversion" and turns his energies to setting up and running a Kinderkolonie, a home for orphaned Jewish children. Despite - or because of v dubious methods for raising money, the home flourishes, and the 600 children who live there look upon him "as a father; they all greeted him joyfully whenever he took a trip out to see them and came driving up the long avenue. He would have his jacket pockets full of sweets, which he sprinkled over them like confetti, to make sure it was they who ran after him and not him after them." So here we have him, a man of enormous egomania and equal insecurity, filled with "oceans of hatred and envy" while at the same time fancying himself a savior of the weak and innocent. A person convinced not only that he understands the logic of his enemies - "He thought he knew that when the Germans spoke of Jews, they were speaking not of human beings, but of a potentially useful though basically repulsive raw material" - but that he can outwit them by making his ghetto into the most efficiently run, lucrative slave labor camp imaginable, in the process divesting the slogan "Arbeit macht frei" of its irony and infusing it with determination and even hope. To this end Rumkowski set about equipping the German citizenry with furniture and brassieres and the Wehrmacht with camouflage suits, footwear of all kinds, earmuffs, woollen jackets and leather buckles. Faced with what the historian Lawrence Langer called "choiceless choices," the chairman's nightmarish dream was to make the Jewish work force indispensable, to convert the ghetto into a form of livelihood. (Although it must be said that Adam Czerniakow, who committed suicide rather than organize extensive deportations, also dreamed that Nazi dependence upon Jewish labor might avert disaster - "A sewing machine can save a life," he wrote a few short lines before his diary stops.) Was Rumkowski sinner or saint? Collaborator or liberator? It is around this central question that "The Emperor of Lies" swirls, providing along the way an almost Dickensian cast of characters and cinematic richness of detail that invites immersion in the way few contemporary novels of serious ambition do. We meet Adam Rzepin, who lives with his father and disturbed sister ("The angels often came down from Heaven and spoke to Lida") in a bedbug-ridden flat before being caught for stealing and thrown into the Pit, an underground space in the ghetto prison. It is Adam, among very few others, who survives the innumerable depredations of ghetto life to witness the Russians' arrival. There are characters who tug at our imaginations, only to disappear from view almost as quickly as they appear: Zawadzki, the mythic "smuggler king of the ghetto" who escapes jail over the rooftops without leaving a trace, and one of Rumkowski's secretaries, the beautiful Rywka Tenenbaum, who falls in love with a young lawyer, which puts her in an untenable position with her amorous employer and leads to her hanging herself "from the pipework behind the courtroom in Gnieznienska Street, one of the few buildings in the ghetto that had running water and a flushable toilet." Others linger, like Maman, "a gaunt, hollow-eyed woman sitting crouched under a cloud of frizzy hair," who refuses to eat in protest at having lost her easeful existence in Prague. "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. In this, what is now the third generation of post-Holocaust literature, it takes a certain degree of daring to offer so wide and thickly-textured a canvas, almost as though the project of envisioning the Holocaust were starting up again from scratch, and I'm sure there will be those who find the very enterprise unnecessary or objectionable. I trust more others will come away from reading this novel as I did, captivated and horrified at once, entirely caught up in a story that still sounds unthinkable these many tellings later. Rumkowski sought to outwit the Nazis by making his ghetto the most efficiently run slave labor camp. Daphne Merkin is a contributing writer at The Times Magazine.

This is the story of the Lodz ghetto, located in Poland's second-largest city. Unlike the bigger Warsaw ghetto, the one that the Germans established at Litzmannstadt (their name for Lodz) was highly organized and offered jobs to thousands of Jews, who made items for use by the German army and civilian population-before they were gradually shipped off to the death camps. Masterminding this giant enterprise was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Eldest of the Jews and the "Emperor" of the title. How this initially unmarried and childless man, whom some would call a misfit, came to a position of preeminence in the ghetto is the heart of this riveting narrative. Sem-Sandberg, who lives in both Vienna and Stockholm, relied on the Ghetto Chronicle, secretly compiled by the Jews of Lodz, which he has deftly fictionalized. Readers must struggle with the issue of whether Rumkowski was a crass opportunist or saved countless lives through his near monarchical rule. Death's translation is first-rate, and the reading group guide should be especially helpful. VERDICT This portrait of hell is highly recommended to knowledgeable readers with a love of world literature and an interest in the era. [See Prepub Alert, 3/7/11.]-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Mammoth and crowded, this novel vividly illuminates the corner of history it portrays. In 1939 there were 320,000 Jews living in the Polish city of ?odz, whose Jewish self-government, established by the Nazis, was led by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a real historical figure, like many of this book's characters. Rumkowski, a childless widower and failed manufacturer, successfully runs orphanages, promising his charges safety even as he tells them lies. Hans Biebow, the Nazi head of the ghetto administration, believes that the hungry are the best workers; "Workers with full stomachs get bloated." Adam Rzepin is a Jewish boy devoted to his handicapped sister. These and many other characters fight for survival in the ghetto; some of the Jews make a fortune, but most survive on foul soup ("hot water with something greenish in it"), if they find food at all. Though Sem-Sandberg often writes with extraordinary detail (a section detailing the many ghetto suicides is terribly moving), as a novel, this book has many failings. Even characters whose mouths stream with verbiage remain underdeveloped; dialogue is often wooden and unconvincing. But as social history comes alive, it succeeds admirably in chronicling the horrors of everyday life in the odz ghetto. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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 actsa 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Swedish critic Sem-Sandberg's Holocaust novel garnered the August Prize, Sweden's most important literary award, and is to appear in 25 other languages. Based on the 3,000-page chronicle of the Lodz ghetto assembled by archivists, it demonstrates a mosaic of storytelling techniques, including omniscient narration, free indirect speech, diary entries, newspaper articles, excerpts from historical sources, speeches, stream of consciousness, and dream sequences as well as phrases in Polish, German, and Yiddish. It examines the notorious ghetto through the eyes of characters ranging from unskilled laborers to Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski. Eldest of the Jews. Afflicted with megalomania and other, more disturbing proclivities, Rumkowski made the ghetto into a highly productive industrial labor camp for the Nazis. Meant as a meditation on evil, Sem-Sandberg's novel is, instead, a monument to sentimentality, maudlin and, improbable as it sounds, gratuitous. In part this is a result of the translation, which lacks fluidity. A stronger work of recently translated Holocaust fiction is H. G. Alder's Panorama (2011). Still, Sem-Sandberg's Polish-ghetto saga will be much discussed, hence in demand.--Autrey, Michae. Copyright 2010 Booklist