Visions in the Rubble

By Christopher Porterfield

When people are trapped in a hopeless situation, is it kind to give them false hopes to live on, or is it cruel? This is the dilemma stumbled into by Jacob, a middle-aged Jew in a World War II Polish ghetto. On an impulse, Jacob claims to own a forbidden radio on which he has heard that the Russian army will soon be near enough to liberate the ghetto. His neighbors, desperate for more news, rally around to cajole, flatter and protect him, forcing him to compound his first fabrication endlessly.

Jacob the Liar is a film of confinement: at the end of every street, every glance, every joke, is a German rifle muzzle. Inevitably, the comic absurdity of Jacob's mythical radio turns to tragedy. A man is shot down by guards as he tries to pass the cheering news to a group of Jews bound for a concentration camp. In an attempt to redeem himself, Jacob confesses his deception. The letdown causes his best friend to hang himself. Untruth and truth--both come to seem equally false to Jacob.

Made in East Germany, this bleak, elegiac tale suggests that lies like Jacob's may be a necessary, if sometimes fatal condition of life. A young ghetto girl can sleep with her lover only by pretending that the lover's roommate is deaf and dumb--then, after the roommate is dead, by pretending that he is still there. Jacob (movingly played by Czechoslovak Actor Vlastimil Brodsky) has no choice but to indulge the illusions of his adopted niece, who is entranced when he slips around a corner and mimics a radio broadcast, complete with an interview with Winston Churchill. At the end, when she and Jacob are deported to a camp, he says nothing to dampen her uncomprehending glee at taking a trip.

The film is a little self-consciously poignant. It carries its point as if it were a burden--which, to Germans especially, it undoubtedly is. Jacob's only reprieve is in his imagination. He tells his niece a fairy tale about a commoner who cures a princess's illness by bringing her what she thinks is a cloud--a pillow-sized mass of cotton (an analogy, perhaps, to Jacob's trying to cure his neighbors by bringing them what they think is hope). The implication, indeed, is that these colorful visions persist amid the gray rubble of the ghetto just as the human spirit persists amid intolerance and oppression. But Jacob the Liar is too rigorous to claim any sort of triumph for that spirit -- only that it is there.

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