Fictionalizing the experiences of those 160,000 Polish Jews who were first herded into the ghetto of Lodz and later deported to the Nazi death camps, this novel rehearses yet again the question of Jewish "complicity" in Hitler's war against the Jews. In mannered and inflated prose, meant to evoke the narrative voice of Eastern European folklore, King of the Jews attempts to represent life inside the ghetto in terms that will fairly bristle with moral meanings and ironies. At the heart of this tendentious enterprise is one I. C. Trumpelman, head of the ghetto's Judenrat, a strutting, half-mad, power-hungry tyrant, and his cohorts on the council—venal, self-pitying, spineless Jews who at best passively acquiesce to the destruction of their fellows, and at worst, actively seek their own aggrandizement through betrayal and chicanery.

Masked by the author's stylistic tricksterism, the realities of ghetto life—the hunger, cold, filth, degradation...