It is a truism about holidays that they can be hell on families: those crazy relatives whose peccadilloes you can defend from a distance all year long are suddenly in your face, and harder to take. So it was for me last week when I heard the news—first reported by Gabriel Sherman in the New Republic, though rumors of the story have been circulating on the Internet for some time—that a publisher had bought, defended and, finally, dumped a Holocaust memoir that “turned out” to be a fake. “Oh, there they go again,” I thought, not terribly kindly, thinking back, of course to the Freys and Selzers et al. Except this time, I didn't feel so forgiving of my people.
Let me be clear: my annoyance is not so much with Herman Rosenblat, the Buchenwald survivor who has now admitted that he made up the story—praised by none other than Oprah Winfrey—about the “angel at the fence,” the girl who supposedly tossed him apples and then, miraculously, reappeared in his life 12 years later (on a blind date, no less). I have never talked to Rosenblat and I wouldn't presume to know how memory works, especially in people who have suffered the trauma of the Holocaust. (There have, of course, been other famous survivors—Jerzy Kosinski comes to mind—whose memories turned out to be factually faulty.) No—the culprit here is, plain and simple, our own beloved book business. How, after so many fake-memoir scandals of very recent vintage, could no one at Berkley have asked the kind of question that any intelligent 12-year-old would ask. To wit: “Wow, that's a bunch of wild coincidences—did this really happen?” But apparently, though the book had to have been seen and read by dozens of people, nobody asked it.
What's infuriating about this is not only that it opens the floodgates, again, to all the usual criticisms of BookLand: that publishers don't fact check, that we're only in search of the holy buck, that we're either willfully blind or just plain stupid. What's infuriating about it is that when the book business needs all the help it can get, we're sabotaging ourselves. The traditional-house model is being challenged on all sides—by digital forces, by self-publishers, by the economy—so to lose sight of our most esteemed function as guarantor of authenticity—is unforgivable. What's more, we are in danger of alienating one of our greatest boosters. “I'm afraid we're going to lose Oprah,” one publisher e-mailed me, suggesting that the talk show host might give up touting books altogether for fear of further fakes.
Come on, people. How hard would it have been to say Angel was “based on a true story” (which is what the children's book version, Angel Girl, says—though that, too, has now been pulled by its publisher)? Did no one look to the success of, say, The Reader and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (both Holocaust stories, both fiction, and now both successful motion pictures) and suggest Rosenblat at least call his story a fable?
That publishing was either too blind, too stupid or too arrogant to consider such moves is, to me, the most worrisome fact of all. I'm no Oprah, but I love the book business—and I'm losing my patience.
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