Jurek Becker. The author of “Jacob the Liar”

When Jurek Becker’s début novel “Jakob der Lügner” was published in 1969, he was in his early thirties. It’s not known exactly how old he was. What we know of his early life is not just fragmentary, but also contradictory, as Becker’s friend and first biographer, Sander L. Gilman, recorded.[1] According to the official register, Becker was born on 30 September 1937 in Łódź, Poland, as Jerzy Bekker. At that time, Łódź was known as a “Polish Jerusalem”. Of the nearly 700,000 inhabitants, 233,000 – one-third of the total population – were Jews. Becker’s parents, Mieczysław and Anette, spoke Yiddish as their native language, but from the time of his birth, Polish was spoken in the family home.[2]

Even then, antisemitism was part of everyday life for the Jewish population. Just a few years later, following the outbreak of the Second World War and Germany’s invasion of Poland, this would turn into pure terror. The Bekker family were also caught up in the events that followed. In what later became known as the “Litzmannstadt Ghetto”, his father, Mieczysław Bekker, pretended that his son Jurek was older than he really was in order to save him from being deported. He claimed later that he could not remember Jurek’s exact date of birth; it is likely, however, that Becker was several months younger. He spent most of his early years in the “Litzmannstadt Ghetto”. Later, he had no real memories of this time. For Olaf Kutzmutz, another of Becker’s biographers, this may have been due to the fact that “for him, they were simply normal and uneventful, rather than nightmarish”[3].

There wasn’t much variety to his days. “For Becker, invention became a source of sustenance and his literary works became the medium through which he attempted to find the lost years of his childhood.”[4] Nevertheless, Becker’s false age was unable to save him from being deported. He was taken first to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and then to the satellite concentration camp in Königs Wusterhausen, before being liberated by the Red Army on 26 April 1945. His mother, Anette, and around 20 other members of his family, did not survive the war.

Becker later processed these experiences in his début novel “Jakob der Lügner” (1969, English translations: “Jacob the Liar”, 1975 & 1996). In the novel, the protagonist of the same name hears of the advance of the Red Army in the news by chance, and is unable to keep what he knows to himself. To make his story more plausible, he claims to own a radio. However, his white lie soon gets out of control. To strengthen the sense of hope and optimism among the people living in the ghetto, Jakob keeps inventing new stories. According to one well-known quote from the book, “People don’t live on bread alone, but on hope”. In this way, Jacob the liar becomes a source of hope and a moral support for the Jews in the ghetto – until reality catches up with him and he is deported together with other Jews.