Since the success of his first novel, Jakob der Lügner (1969), Jurek Becker continues to draw and puzzle literary scholars. Becker and his works elude classification. He is at once a Pole, a German, a Jew, and an Atheist. His prose has been called Holocaust, East German, and Exile literature. The consistent thematic development in his otherwise greatly varied literary achievements springs from a unique personal and political history - one that brings his reader closer to the German, as well as the human, situation in over half of this century.