Angel at the Fence: This Week's Made-Up Memoir

I am happy to report that, by 7:30 this morning, I had several emails from people alerting me to the latest made-up memoir, "Angel at the Fence." It seems I am getting a rep for being outraged about such things, when really, it's curiosity as to the minds that make them up. This is in fact the topic of one of three books I have percolating on my little stove, people who fabricate their histories in order to garner sympathy, adulation, love. In all the cases I'm looking into, the root seems to be the fabricators feel unfairly undeserving of love, and so create false personae, or false histories, they think unimpeachable; who, after all, would not extend sympathy to and celebrate those who've survived child abuse, disease, drug addition, the loss of a fiance in the World Trade Center, or some confection therein? And when the ruse is exposed, and the love and celebration withdrawn, the perpetrator says, see? I told you I was unlovable, and that's why what I did was justified, and will you now love and celebrate me simply as me? Nearly all these people, thus far, have been obese white American women, their malaises those of American talk shows, at which they judged, correctly, we would bite.

But there is another apple people who like to make things up tend to offer, in the case of "Angel at the Fence," quite literally: the Holocaust. Without going into detail, author Herman Rosenblat claims that, during his interment at Buchenwald, a little Jewish girl disguised as a Christian tossed apples to him over the fence. Twelve years later, at a survivors meeting in New York, they surreptitiously met, and married. The book was set for publication in February; a movie is in the works; excerpts have already appeared in a "Chicken Soup..." book and, predictably, Oprah was taken in, calling the book's story, "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air."

There is the usual hue and cry about fact-checking, and sure, it's not a bad idea. A better idea, and frankly one that will rinse this spate of bullshit, is to expect those who acquire books for publishing houses do so with a critical eye, not one merely trained to recognize the most expedient glucose syrup. And to those who say, well, it's their job to make money, not turn out good or true books, I respond: how much money have the publishers made this year? How much will the editor make after she's fired for allowing these giant turds through the gate?

I spoke the other day to someone who does not rue the idea of there being fewer independent newspapers, meaning those who do not rely in whole or part on AP stories and the like. His point was, we have the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times... I reminded him that last was in bankruptcy; that they'd axed their Washington Bureau ('cause, you know, there's not going to be anything happening of interest there in the near future); that god dammit we need people to go out and look for truth -- or at least variations of the stories being shoved down our throats.

An example of that shoving:

In 1996, the night before Herman was set to make his debut on the Valentine's Day special of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," his wife, Roma, confided to their friend Sidney Finkel, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor, that she had only first met Herman years after the war, in New York. Herman told Finkel on the same evening that he had originally turned down several requests by Winfrey's producers to appear on the show. It was only when Winfrey personally called him that he agreed to sit for an interview.

Emphasis mine, but the above graph from The New Republic, a gorgeous and trenchant investigation into "Angel" and its falsehoods, which appeared the day before the book's cancellation on Saturday. Double bravo, TNR.

Bravo to Hillary, too.

Comments

[Robey]

Is it just me or do the people who eat up this type of tripe deserve what they get? I almost admire the perpetrators of these hoaxes. They know what people want to hear and feed it up on a plate. Frey? Try writing a book, any book (not you nancy). I certainly couldn't do it. I'm not defending them so much as just offering some props to someone who has the balls to hoodwink a nation.

[Brooke]

The Rosenblat story is so sad. Why is Atlantic Pictures making a film based on a lie? Why didn't Oprah check the story out before publicizing it, especially after James Frey and given that many bloggers like Deborah Lipstadt said in 2007 that the Rosenblat's story couldn't be true.
Genuine love stories from the Holocaust do exist. My favorite is the one about Dina Gottliebova Babbitt - the beautiful young art student who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children's barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. This painting became the reason Dina and her Mother survived Auschwitz. After the end of the war, Dina applied for an art job in Paris. Unbeknownst to Dina, her interviewer was the lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They fell in love and got married. It's such a romantic love story. Another reason I love Dina's story is the tremendous courage she had to paint the mural in the first place. Painting the mural for the children caused her to be taken to Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he made her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber.

Dina's story is also verified to be true. Some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. The story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children's barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also documented.

Why wasn't the Rosenblatt's story checked out before it was published and picked up to have the movie made?? I would like to see true and wonderful stories like Dina's be publicized, not these hoax tales that destroy credibility and trust.

[NancyRomm]

I can't comment on Lipstadt's contribution to "Snow White," except to say that my stepfather, David Levine, the caricaturist and painter, did some early work for Disney. Not sure if Snow White was amongst them; I think he was too young. In any event, when my daughter was little, he gave her a tape of the original (and still only) "Snow White," with its incomparably gorgeous hand-drawn cells.

[Alice Bachini-Smith]

I love this piece and Hillary's too. Maybe it's me, but why aren't more people asking the right questions about all this? There's clearly some sort of bad trend going on here, with numbers of people's heads stuck up in the clouds, either from desperate denial or just intellectual laziness. Most likely both, I guess.

[Kate]

I do love this sort of thing. People want to believe, and they want to believe that miracles happen. Time was, fiction filled this longing, but now we have to have to be a "true story", and if it's not true, the publisher figures that the public will reject it. Are we too jaded to handle fiction? Did the Greeks take the Odyssey as a factual travelogue?

And when you expose someone's elegant little fables, you don't always get rewarded, as well I know.

(Art Babbitt animated the Wicked Queen, and his first wife was Marge Champion, the dancer.)