The Emperor of Lies
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In February 1940 the Nazis established what would become the second largest Jewish ghetto in Poland, in the city of Lodz. A wire fence was built around the Old City, completely separating Jewish families, some quarter of a million people, from the rest of the population. The fence was patrolled by police ordered to shoot on sight should anyone attempt to escape.
The ghetto’s chosen leader was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman. Mysterious, ambiguous, monarchical, ‘King Chaim’ was motivated by a titanic ambition. Realising that his survival rested upon his ability to make the ghetto indispensable, he sought to transform it into a productive industrial complex, forcing adults and children alike to work punishing hours in workshops to provide supplies for the German military.
Was Rumkowksi a ruthless opportunist – an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through collaboration? Steve Sem-Sandberg’s extraordinary novel draws on genuine chronicles of life in the Lodz ghetto to ask the most difficult questions about survival and oppression.
Now published in over twenty languages, The Emperor of Lies is one of the great Holocaust novels of the twenty-first century by one of Scandinavia’s most admired authors.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Sarah
Death
Studied Swedish at Cambridge University and University College London (PhD 1985) with shorter periods at the Swedish universities of Uppsala and Växjö. Active as a freelance literary translator since 1987 with many full-length published works to her name. Mentor, editor and reviewer. Three times winner of the George Bernard Shaw Prize, most recently in 2021 for ‘Letters from Tove’, the correspondence of Tove Jansson. Awarded the Swedish Academy Translation Prize 2008 and the Royal Order of the Polar Star 2014. A director of Norvik Press since 2011.
Studied Swedish at Cambridge University and University College London (PhD 1985) with shorter periods at the Swedish universities of Uppsala and Växjö. Active as a freelance literary translator since 1987 with many full-length published works to her name. Mentor, editor and reviewer. Three times winner of the George Bernard Shaw Prize, most recently in 2021 for ‘Letters from Tove’, the correspondence of Tove Jansson. Awarded the Swedish Academy Translation Prize 2008 and the Royal Order of the Polar Star 2014. A director of Norvik Press since 2011.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
The Emperor of Lies is a story about the abuse of power and how the power can be used to survive. It shows how power corrupts in general. It depicts how a slave in power must constantly prove the fact that he has the power indeed. He needs to stand out from the slavery by the use of power over someone weaker and poorer.