Plume Fiction: King of the Jews

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In what has become a classic novel of the Holocaust, Leslie Epstein dares to explore the excruciating moral dilemma of the Judenrat, the group of Jewish officials who in each ghetto of Europe were forced to collaborate in the destruction of their own people, to choose who was to live and who was to die. It is especially the tale of one such leader, Isaiah Chaim Trumpleman, who strides across these pages, as he does across the lives of his subject, with terrifying force. Part con man, part charismatic hero, both savior and executioner, he is, finally, a tragic character - a figure of inexhaustible vitality who rules over a kingdom of death. But not only death: for this is also the story of the ghetto itself, a community which, while filled with dirt, disease, and despair, is no less marked by courage, irrepressible laughter, and a fierce grip upon life.