The King of Warsaw

"Yes, this is another extremely powerful novel, originally out in 2016, and published in English translation in 2020 by Amazon Crossing. Set in Warsaw in 1937, it’s an extraordinary act of historical memory and retrieval. The central figure is a larger-than-life Polish-Jewish champion boxer-turned-gangster, Jakub Szapiro, idolised in his community for knocking out antisemitic fascist fighters, but also a brutal enforcer for a Polish crime lord. Szapiro is seen through the eyes of an awkward 17-year-old boy, desperate to escape his more orthodox Jewish heritage. When Szapiro adopts him, ostensibly after killing his father, he becomes drawn into this twilight underworld of prizefighters and mobsters, bars and brothels. The violence is brutally graphic—think The Godfather or Peaky Blinders— but at the same time, it’s an ingeniously structured literary novel, with unreliable narrators and fantastical elements, including a magic-realist sperm whale who surfaces in the plot from time to time to devour and spew out the characters. The violence has a counterpart in the ominous historical setting, with allusions to a planned coup by antisemitic Polish military officers and their cohorts. With snippets of Yiddish dialogue—translated in footnotes—it recreates a multi-ethnic Poland that no longer exists, even though, at the time, Jewish and Polish Warsaw are seen to be intertwined yet also sharply segregated. That the novel moves between 1930s Poland and 1980s Israel, where the boy seems to have fled and to be writing his Warsaw memoirs, creates another layer of irony and complexity for the present-day reader. But as long as Szapiro vacillates between wanting to be king of the Warsaw underworld and to escape to a new life in Palestine, the looming historical violence, with the rise of Nazi power, lends the world of the novel an almost elegiac quality. It’s a marvellous read."