Jakob the Liar 改拍成電影【善意的謊言】(1999) 由匈牙利彼得卡索維茲導演，羅賓威廉斯主演。
傑可是個波蘭籍猶太裔煎餅師傅，住在波蘭境內的猶太區。當二次大戰開打，波蘭陷入德國納粹的手中，猶太區就被一道道高牆阻隔與世隔絕。傑可的妻子死於暴亂之中，孑然一身的他，整日望著牆外自由的天空發楞。
某日，傑可因故在外逗留超過宵禁的時間，於是被逮到納粹指揮官的辦公室去。因此偷聽到俄國軍隊已離他們的城市不遠。為了勸退他朋友落跑的念頭，不小心把這個大好消息洩漏出去。隔天整個猶太區傳遍俄軍將至的消息，於是猶太人開始懷有希望，不再有人自殺。 大家全以為傑可私藏收音機，紛紛向傑可探聽進一步的消息。傑可不由得編更多的謊言來滿足大家。不料，卻有人向納粹密告，傑可為了不連累其他人，決定挺身而出承擔責任。
Acclaimed as the most remarkable novel of the Holocaust ever written in Germany, Jacob the Liar breaks with the genre's tradition of unremitting realism to offer a suspenseful and masterfully crafted tale of hope, desire, and the life-giving force of fiction. In the ghetto, the possession of a radio is punishable by death. Like thousands of his fellow prisoners, Jacob Heym is cut off from all news of the war - until he is arrested one evening and brought to the German military office, where he overhears a broadcast report of the Red Army's advance to a city some 300 miles away. Miraculously, he is allowed to return to his quarters, but when he tries to spread the good news, he discovers the only way to make people believe him is to tell a lie: "How do I know? I have a radio!" Inevitably, one lie leads to another, and before long Jacob finds himself feeding the entire ghetto fabricated reports of the Russians' advance - reports that save lives when, under the shock of renewed hope, suicides cease and the people of the ghetto take heart. Jacob is a hero and a liar. But how long can his web of lies hold? Here for the first time is Leila Vennewitz's authorized translation of this classic novel, which won the Heinrich Mann Prize for fiction and Switzerland's Charles Veillon Award.
