Wartime Lies

Wartime Lies is a semi-autobiographical novel by Louis Begley first published in 1991. Set in Poland during the years of the Nazi occupation, it is about two members of an upper middle class Jewish family, a young woman and her nephew, who avoid persecution as Jews by assuming Catholic identities. Time and again the boy, who narrates the story from some remote point in time, reminisces about how he learned at an early age to lie in order to survive. Thus, his whole adult life is founded on the "wartime lies" of his childhood.

Wartime Lies won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1991. The French version, Une éducation polonaise, won the Prix Médicis étranger in 1992.

Plot summary

Maciek and his aunt Tania are Polish Jews during World War II. By getting Aryan papers, they elude arrest.^[1] In parallel, we follow Maciek, now fifty years old and struck by the tragedy of the consequences of a lying childhood transforming his entire life in a constant fiction.

Film adaptations

In the early 1990s, Stanley Kubrick almost went into production on a film of Wartime Lies. The first draft screenplay, titled Aryan Papers, had been penned by Kubrick himself. Kubrick chose not to make the film due to the release of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust-themed Schindler's List in 1993. Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman were both considered to play the female lead however Johanna ter Steege was eventually cast for that role. Joseph Mazzello was cast to play the nephew. Kubrick chose cinematographer Elemér Ragályi to become the director of photography. In addition, according to Kubrick's wife, Christiane, the subject itself had become too depressing and difficult for the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate film about the Holocaust was beyond the capacity of cinema.

In 2005, William Monahan was hired to adapt Wartime Lies for Warner Independent Pictures in co-operation with John Wells Productions.^[2]

Read on

• Jurek Becker: Jacob the Liar (1969)
• Thomas Keneally: Schindler's Ark (1982)

Footnotes

External links

• A review by Laurel Graeber in The New York Times (May 5, 1991)
• An interview with Louis Begley from the National Book Foundation Archives on the genesis of Wartime Lies