Jurek Becker, the author of the first comic novel on the Holocaust,
Jacob the Liar, and other highly acclaimed works, was one of West
Germany's most famous exiles from the GDR. A survivor of the Shoah-his
mother died in a Nazi death camp-and witness to the Soviet occupation of
Eastern Europe, Becker endured most of the trials that Jews experienced
in Europe from the onset of World War II to the end of the Cold War.
In the first biography of this fascinating figure, Sander Gilman tells
the story of Becker's life in five worlds: the Polish-Jewish
middle-class neighborhood where Becker was born; the Warsaw ghetto and
the concentration camps where Becker spent his childhood; the socialist
order of the GDR, which Becker idealized, resisted, and finally was
forced to leave; the isolated world of West Berlin, where he settled
down to continue his writing; and the new, reunified Germany, for which
Becker served as both conscience and inspiration.
Gilman was close friends with Becker for nearly thirty years, and his
biography is based on unprecedented access to both the man and his
papers. As Gilman reveals, Becker's story encapsulates the fractured
experience of life in twentieth-century Europe, a time and place in
which political systems and national borders were constantly in flux.
The life of Becker, we learn, was one of great literary achievement and
notoriety, but it was also one of profound cultural dislocation. An
important theme in the book is Becker's struggle with his Jewishness, an
identity he repressed in socialist East Germany, but embraced after
reunification, when he found himself at the center of Jewish culture and
literature.
Sander Gilman's story of Jurek Becker is biography of the highest order,
a portrait of an extraordinarily gifted artist whose hope and courage
are manifested in his legacy as one of the greatest German writers of
the past century.
