memoirs
Duped Again
Berkley Books has canceled publication of “Angel at the Fence,” Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir, after the author revealed it was a fabrication; why didn’t they realize sooner? By all accounts, the Rosenblat’s have been guests on Oprah’s television program on multiple occasions.
Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblat appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1996, telling their story of meeting as children while Mr. Rosenblat was a prisoner at a subcamp of the infamous Buchenwald. Eleven years later the couple returned to Ms. Winfrey’s show, and Mr. Rosenblat got down on his knees to give his wife a new ring. Ms. Winfrey called it “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air.”
Although Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir was pulled before it was ever published and therefore never had the chance to be a candidate for Ms. Winfrey’s book club, some viewers seemed to take the fabrication — and Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of it — personally.
And it appears that the damage goes further…A children’s author, Laurie Friedman, was so inspired by an online news article she read about the Rosenblats that she wrote a children’s book based on his story. Lerner Publishing, the publisher of the book, “Angel Girl,” released in September, said earlier this week that it would not proceed with any reprints and would offer refunds for returned copies.
False memoirs are becoming more and more common these days, but for some reason, publishers (and Oprah) continue to disregard proper fact-checking. How do you feel this trend is affecting the reading public?
Discussion
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Of course, I’m always encouraged when I hear a reference to “the reading public.” I’m grateful that we still have one. Having said that, I do expect memoirs to have more basis in fact than fantasy. I don’t think that the Rosenblats are old enough to be senile enough to remember the Nazis as giving even children freedom to fraternize with citizens. I wonder why they didn’t think to write a YA novel or children’s book in the first place. (It is a lovely story.)