[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 Wartime Lies, which anticipates the novel as a whole, is written from the standpoint of a fifty-year-old man who, looking back on his boyhood in Poland, thinks of himself as a “voyeur of evil”: “is that the inevitable evolution of the child he once was, the price to be paid for his sort of survival?” The child in question is named Maciek, after an old Polish song, and he was born in the fateful year of 1933. Fateful, not just because of Hitler's acquisition of power, but because Maciek's mother died in childbirth. Wartime Lies is constructed as a kind of reverse Bildungsroman, charting the growing maturity of the young Maciek, but instead of gaining a sense of self-knowledge, Maciek is increasingly aware of the necessary loss of “self” which enables him to survive on “aryan papers”. He is a “scrawny and nervous” child. Maciek's Aunt Tania (his mother's sister) acts throughout as his surrogate mother and, along with his Polish nanny before the war, begins to nurse him back to health. The early chapters are written in fairy-tale mode as if to stress the wonderment and romance of his ‘normal” well-to-do Polish upbringing. Speaking of his grandfather “in that golden fall of 1937”, Maciek thinks of himself as “his hope, the little man to whom he was teaching all his secrets, the heir to his farms and forests and broken dreams”.

After this “season of enchantment”, the “fabric” of his youth begins to unravel and his aunt and grandfather are, eventually, forced to go into hiding with him and to travel precariously throughout Poland as “aryans”. The figure of Tania dominates the novel, as she both exerts an absolute control over Maciek, and also takes a perverse pleasure in the freedom of her newfound role as his saviour. According to Jewish tradition, Tania was expected to marry Maciek's father after the death of her sister. Her refusal to do this, and her sexual adventures as a single woman, made her a family outcast in peacetime but an indispensable asset during the Nazi occupation. After learning to type German by copying page after page of a German novel, she sleeps with a Nazi bureaucrat in her home town who, in turn, helps protect her. Later on, the haughty tone of her educated German persuades a guard at the railway station in Warsaw to let her and her family travel on a “civilian” train. The entrepreneurship which she demonstrates selling black-market Polish vodka during the war would have been gently quashed in less harrowing times.

Louis Begley makes an essential distinction between Tania's necessary public immorality and her private regimentation of Maciek in order that he can pass muster as a Polish Catholic. It is, precisely, Maciek's inability to distinguish between public and private deceit in this way that is the author's main concern. At a young age, “wartime lies” become ingrained in Maciek as part of his consciousness and, with this devastating loss of identity, he is unable to “recover” completely after the war. Only his circumcised penis prevents Maciek from a total surrender to Polish Catholicism. (Deborah Dwork, in her recent study of Jewish youth in Nazi Europe, points out that circumcised boys were often dressed as girls to evade this notably absolute form of identity check.) But even in post-war Poland, with the continuation of antisemitic pogroms, Maciek avoids “urinating in public places and otherwise displaying that telltale member”. This was, in the end, the much-reduced sum of his “identity”.

Wartime Lies is an extremely polished book, and this is both its strength and its undoubted weakness. Unlike a writer such as Aharon Appelfeld (also a child survivor of the Holocaust)—who imbues the very fabric of his fiction with a sense of the disjunction between his childhood memories and the words used to describe them—Begley assumes that the smooth, moralistic retelling of his story can, somehow, do justice to it. Those who wrote their memoirs soon after their experiences in the death camps, such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, were painfully aware of the inadequacy of the words which they were using. I hope that Begley will now go on to tell his own wartime story directly and realize that there is no such thing as “wartime truths”, only different kinds of lying.