SOURCE: Cheyette, Bryan. “Recapturing a Lost Childhood.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4611 (16 August 1991): 23.

In the following review, Cheyette examines the protagonist's loss of identity in Wartime Lies, contending that the story is well written, but that Begley's ease with the language denotes his need to justify his own survival of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust still claims its victims, to this day. The children of survivors, often the unwitting receptacles of their parents' suffering, have themselves begun to comprehend the ramifications for their own lives of a history which has been agonizingly repressed. Returning to the origins of this cycle of pain, Louis Begley, a Jewish child-survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, has waited over forty years to write his first novel, Wartime Lies, in a bid to recapture his lost childhood. The book is as much about the psychological consequences of this loss as anything else.

The short opening section of...