His Holocaust novel “King of the Jews” was widely praised. He also wrote about his show-business family and taught writing at Boston University.
Leslie Epstein, a celebrated novelist and revered writing teacher who was born into Hollywood royalty — his father and uncle collaborated on the script for the classic 1942 film “Casablanca”— died on May 18 in Boston. He was 87.
His wife, Ilene, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was complications of heart surgery.
The best known of Mr. Epstein’s novels was “King of the Jews” (1979), a powerful, biting and at times humorous story about the leader of a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in a Polish ghetto during the Holocaust.
Councils of elders, which were established by the Nazis to run the ghettos, provided basic services to the Jews who were forced to live there; they also had to make the morally fraught decision to provide their occupiers with lists of Jews to deport to labor and concentration camps. When Adam Czerniakow, the leader of the Warsaw council, received an order to round up Jews for deportation, he apparently chose to end his life rather than obey.
Isaiah Chaim Trumpelman, the protagonist of “King of the Jews,” was modeled on Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the megalomaniacal leader of the Jewish Council in Lodz, Poland. The character of Mr. Rumkowski had resonated with Mr. Epstein since he read a single paragraph about him in a book about the Holocaust in the 1960s.
“He rode around with his lion’s mane of hair and his black cape, put his picture on ghetto money (to buy nothing) and ghetto stamps (to mail nowhere), and decided which of his fellow Jews should or should not be sent to death,” Mr. Epstein wrote, about Mr. Rumkowski, in an essay for Tablet magazine in 2023.
Writing about “King of the Jews” in The New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter praised Mr. Epstein’s focus on “the morally ambiguous politics of survival” practiced by Council leaders “who were both violently thrust and seductively drawn into a position of absolute power and absolute impotence in which no human being could continue to function with any moral coherence.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
