Oh, how I wish I’d blogged about the latest literary hoax last week before the publisher canceled the contract! Feet-dragging is a bad habit, boys and girls.
The air’s out of the balloon now. A man named Herman Rosenblat claimed that while he was in a concentration camp, a Jewish girl whose family was pretending to be Christian gave him apples over a fence. One day he asked her not to come back because he had an “appointment” with the gas chamber. He wasn’t killed; he was transferred to another camp.
Years later, he went on a blind date with a woman who turned out to be the girl who’d given him apples lo those many years ago.
Critics cried foul. First, the concentration camp where Rosenblat said he was detained didn’t have gas chambers. Second, the Nazi’s didn’t tell prisoners when they were going to the gas chamber. The point was to trick them into going. Third, there’s no way Herman or Roma could have gotten close to the fence without the guards seeing them. Fourth, it was highly unlikely that a Jewish family who feared the Nazi’s wouldn’t know about their nine-year-old daughter’s daily visits to a concentration camp fence, for crying out loud, or would allow her to continue once they found out. And on and on.
Herman Rosenblat and his wife Roma ended up on Oprah, and Berkley Books offered him a deal for his memoirs, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. And you know Hollywood is partial to Holocaust stories. The book is set to be made into a movie.
Despite Rosenblat’s story being discredited, publisher Berkley Books stood by him until December 27, when the company canceled the contract. Rosenblat admitted he’d made up the “love story.” But guess what? Hollywood still intends to make the movie. It’s fiction, so why not?
Read all about it at The New Republic, which exposed the hoax. The latest article contains links to previous ones.
Perhaps the biggest burn victim is Oprah Winfrey. Her gullibility knows no bounds. This is the second memoir she’s endorsed and gushed over that’s turned out to be a big fat lie.
You may recall that after she made memoir author James Frey a lot of money, he confessed to fakery. The so-called bad boy drunk who wrecked cars, went to prison, fell in love with a fellow drunk in rehab who killed herself, tamed a wild beast of a hardened criminal, etc., was nothing more than a wanna-be bad-a**, a relatively unremarkable frat boy who spent maybe a few hours in jail. Check out The Smoking Gun’s outstanding piece of journalism exposing Frey.
Oprah asked Frey to come back on the show to explain himself. For the first time in years, I watched the show. I had to. It was funny and worth every minute. Frey looked like a little boy being scolded by his mommy.
Will Miss Oprah ask an old couple to return and explain themselves?
I’m not a Jew, so I don’t pretend to understand how upsetting Rosenblat’s lies must be to people who were imprisoned in the camps and their relatives. Why did he do it? “I wanted to bring happiness to people,” he said. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”
The problem, Mr. Rosenblat, is that your story was wide open for exposure. Your story was obviously phony to thinking people and easy to pick apart. How many Jewish people were touched in some way by the Holocaust? Did you not stop to think about Holocaust survivors who could verify, or in this case, refute, your claims? The ramifications were too great to even take the chance, in my opinion.
But, whatever. Time to dust off the live-blogging skills!
Update (12/30): NYT on fake love story memoir.
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