The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once remarked of a new theory, ‘It's not even wrong.’ Such is nearly the case with Israel Epstein's memoir. Almost everything in it is either twisted, false, or a lie – even the title: his Jewishness is invisible except during his not quite five years in prison in the time of the Cultural Revolution, when, he claims, he told himself Jewish jokes.

But this is also a very sad story – of a man who lobotomised himself so thoroughly that even after years of persecution at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party he continued to support a regime that outstripped those of Hitler and Stalin in causing its own people to