With his first novel, Nacht (1964; translated as Night, 1966), Edgar Hilsenrath shocked German readers, who had recently been reeducated to think of Jews as the passive victims of untempered Evil. Hilsenrath depicted Jews fighting brutally and without mercy for survival in a Romanian ghetto. He broke another German taboo when, in his second novel, Der Nazi & der Friseur (1977; translated as The Nazi and the Barber, 1971), he used black humor and pointed satire in his depiction of the persecution of the Jews and the Germans' attempts to avoid too close a confrontation with their criminal deeds in the immediate aftermath of the war. Later in his career, however, especially after settling in Berlin in 1975, Hilsenrath developed into a folksy Jewish storyteller who tried to revive in the German language the tradition of the deeply pessimistic Yiddish literary humor. The cultural matrix and original audience for this literary tradition had been...