Leslie Epstein was ready to write a play a few decades ago, but life intervened. Forty years of fiction writing later, he has finally made it to the stage through a somewhat circuitous route – by adapting his own novel, King of the Jews, for the theater.

A self-described “Hollywood brat,” Epstein said “writing was always in my blood.” His father, Philip, and uncle, Julius, wrote Casablanca, along with many other films. Epstein even recalled writing a play in the Cub Scouts as a youth.

Eventually, he received his master’s degree in theatre arts from UCLA and a doctorate in playwriting from Yale’s School of Drama, and Epstein’s stories started getting published.

Since then, Epstein has had nine novels published, including Jews. He’s been a Rhodes Scholar, a Fullbright and Guggenheim Fellow and directs the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

After all this time, he has finally managed to see his work on the stage, a very different experience for the long-time novelist.

“The life of a playwright, I think, is more attractive than the life of a fiction writer, because a fiction writer is always alone,” Epstein said.

The entire play is essentially drawn from a single section of Epstein’s book.

“There’s one chapter of the novel called [“A Decision for the Judenrat” (Jewish Council)],” he said. “In the play, it’s everything.”

It took some time for Epstein to master his adaptation, a learning process after many years of writing novels.

“I realized the difference between fiction and playwriting and drama,” Epstein said. “I tried to do the whole novel, and it was 25 characters. Not only would no theater touch it, but it would have been terrible.”

Eventually, Epstein found his groove and ultimately felt he had retained the core of his novel, remarking that “nothing’s left out morally.”

The play centers around the Judenrat of the Lodz ghetto in Poland during the Holocaust and the head of the Judenrat, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.

Rumkowski is a remarkable historical figure who replaced German money with a ghetto currency bearing his signature and created a post office, with a stamp of his image – and “he rode around in a carriage in a white horse,” Epstein noted.

But despite these seemingly egotistical touches, Rumkowski did have some positive impact.

“He lorded over the Jews and then [would] go out and lick the boots of the Germans, but the tremendous irony is he actually kept the Lodz ghetto … alive longer than any other ghetto,” Epstein said. “His technique was to turn the ghetto into a manufacturing mill, textile mill for the German army … he made the Jews indispensable.”

And so it is that the central moral conflict Rumkowski and the Judenrat face in the play is being asked for names of Jews by the Nazis. They know what will happen to the people whose names they give out but fear more Jews will be killed if they don’t comply.

Despite the serious subject matter, Epstein noted the use of humor in the play. This upset some in the Jewish community, with Epstein mentioning he had taken some heat because of the funny side. That being said, the novel has been in print for about 30 years, so obviously it has not dampened the reception of the material too much. And Epstein noted some of the jokes in the play were actually taken from material from the ghetto.

He gave an example of a joke where two Jews are taken to be executed by a firing squad. The head Nazi officer offer them a blindfold. One Jew accepts, saying “Oh yes, thank you.” The other Jew turns to him and says, “Don’t make waves.”

“What the critics didn’t realize was that’s not my joke,” Epstein said.

If anything, the play sounds challenging and original and presents one of the many horrible dilemmas produced by the Holocaust for people to consider, as Epstein did.

“Really, the final thing I come to [is] that there [are] certain situations that human beings should not be placed in, and all you can do ahead of time is try to make sure humans aren’t placed in those situations,” Epstein said.

King of the Jews runs through April 12 the Olney Theatre Center’s Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab.

dan.benamor@gmail.com