Leslie Epstein's novel, King of the Jews, is loosely based on events in the ghetto of Lodz under the German occupation of World War II. (p. 76)

Although its central character, I. C. Trumpelman, is based on the actual chairman of the Lodz Judenrat, and though the book's descriptions of the local conditions derive from documented ghetto history, King of the Jews does not attempt a historical interpretation of either the ghetto Elder or of the ghetto itself. The book bears the same relation to the Holocaust as M∗A∗S∗H does to the Korean war. Its flat caricatures, cabaret style of narration, and stylized theatrical staging for all the main events of the plot belong to the category of farce. Like other American war farces, Epstein's book isolates the moral angst of the situation from the historical conditions in which it originated: from the aggression of totalitarian...