IVP - Behind the Books - Fact Check, Memoirs, Aisle Two

Fact Check, Memoirs, Aisle Two

Yet another highly publicized memoir has been proven fallacious, further embarrassing Oprah Winfrey and the New York publishing community, and once again calling the whole enterprise into question. Angel at the Fence, a love story by Herman Rosenblat, tells the story of a boy in a Nazi concentration camp and a girl who threw apples over the fence to him. They met again twelve years later and eventually married—or so the memoir would have you believe. They are married, it’s true, but they never met in Germany. How you like them apples?

If publishing as an endeavor is like politics, it seems, then memoir as a category is developing the reputation of Chicago politics: anything—true or false—is saleable; the only sins are losing the deal or getting caught. Someone should write a memoir about writing a fake memoir; if they really want to mess with us, they could write a true memoir, then write a fake one about faking it.

This latest memoir controversy is especially onerous because it, along with a handful of other recent entries, exploits the emotions that attend to any story of the Holocaust. Apparently Rosenblat was, in fact, a concentration camp prisoner as a child, but he imagined the relationship that supposedly built up between him and his future wife. Their otherwise normal romance is propped up artificially by the gravitas of genocide. “There’s no need to embellish, no need to aggrandize,” said Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. “The facts are horrible.”

According to the International Herald Tribune, “this latest literary hoax is likely to raise yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.” Plenty of people were duped; what started as an entry in a newspaper’s “best love story” contest traveled slowly through the media world, including stops for the couple on Oprah’s television show and a spot in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Rosenblat’s agent is already laying the groundwork for her own defense, noting that by the time she came to represent Rosenblat the story had been “in so many magazines and books and on ‘Oprah.’ It did not seem like it would not be true.”

I feel a certain sympathy for the agent and all the editors involved. Time and resources are not typically on the side of the editor, and so the due diligence of confirming a story’s veracity loses out to the more pressing priority of getting the book into a publishable form. If you don’t strike while the iron’s hot, you won’t get the outcome you were hoping for. Of course, if you’re all about striking when the iron’s hot, you run a much higher risk of getting burned and broke.

Such stories of literary scandal dominate the headlines and cast a pall over an otherwise significant literary genre. Memoirs done right give us special insight into the human condition, the thrust of history, the perplexity of relationships, the elusive complexity of justice. Faked memoirs are the manipulation of something that is inherently ethical and ought to be almost primal—the sharing of self for the edification of others.

If it’s any consolation to memoir editors, they’re not the only ones with lettuce on their teeth. Check out this painful sentence from the story that blew open this latest controversy:

On Saturday night, after learning from Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in Schlieben, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, with the help of Radzicki, canceled the book and demanded that Rosenblat return his advance.

Seems that fact checking isn’t the only priority that’s fallen to the wayside in contemporary publishing. Anyone want to take a shot at editing this into something more readable? Apparently you can make up details if it’ll help.

Posted by Dave Zimmerman at December 30, 2008 12:14 PM