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When Reality isn’t Fake Enough

by | 4:10 am, December 31, 2008 | 2 Comments

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future. – Robert Heinlein

Oprah swooned over the book, purring that it was “the single greatest love story in 22 years” (because – as you all doubtless know – love, humanity, and time itself only began to matter when Oprah started getting all worked up back in the salad days of power shoulders and synth-pop).

Of course, it helps when non-fiction titles are actually, you know (hat tip – Caroline K.) true.  And Miss Winfrey has had this problem before.  The latest iteration of her ‘never let truth get in the way of cheap emotional manipulation’ brand involves Herman Rosenblat, whose story of the woman he later wed saving his life while he was in Buchenwald was all set to devour the pop-culture landscape.  A movie and a children’s version of the book were in the offing.  America’s favorite purveyor of bubble-gum self-help bromides was fluffing the couch cushions for a third appearance.

Now, there’s no movie, no kiddie-book, and no Oprah.  Berkley Books has halted the presses.  Mr. Rosenblat’s family members are ashamed.  Holocaust survivors and scholars are furious.  His friends are saddened and baffled.

While Herman Rosenblat did survive the Holocaust, his story of meeting his wife during the war is a fabrication.  So, why does this bother me so much?  I mean, the guy survived the Nazis.  Doesn’t he get a break?

No, he doesn’t.  Not at all.  Holocausts happen when truth gets distorted and simple respect for humanity gets replaced with pageantry, when ordinary people choose to throw away morals and pursue a grand vision.  Germany’s bid to make life resemble a Wagnerian opera ended with mothers watching their children own slain, with fathers forced digging their children’s graves.  The survivors carry the story for millions in unmarked tombs.  The truth does not belong to them, not to distort, not to dress up, not to sanitize for Oprah’s book club and her reader’s who are unwilling to confront the truth of the Holocaust.

The plain truth of a human being’s innate dignity and inalienable rights are before us all.  It takes a master story teller to give us a holy vision suitable to trample men beneath us.

I am so offended because he does have a story to tell – an unusually powerful one.  He spent his adolescence in a chilling hell created by man to torment his fellow souls and he survived.  He found love, made a life for himself, raised children.  He triumphed.  Yet the truth wasn’t enough.  What he concocted is the cliche-ridden tripe that swirls and stinks around Hollywood’s glitter encrusted alternate reality.

The articially sweetened genre of Oprah is the muse calls for cloying recitations of threadbare sweet nothings, attention grabbing stunts that would qualify as stalking in reality, and idiots who throw true love away only to have an epiphany in the precise amount of time it takes to play a Celine Dion medley, rushing back to their beloved in the nick of time.  Hollywood is populated with people who re-write the end of Crime and Punishment to have Sonia and Raskolnikov dancing in a sun dappled field of daisies because they can’t understand that he has to do the right thing and reclaim honor in order to love her.

And so Herman Rosenblat slotted himself into this appetite for easily swallowed fare, in so doing tarnishing the awful truth of the Reich’s legacy and dishonoring its victims in order to deliver a made to order storybook ending.  He also lost the love that was in his story of survival, editing out his brothers who took great risks to provide him with extra food and who lied about his age to save him from immediate execution.  His wife deleted her own story, of hiding with her family some 200 miles from Buchenwald, so as to assume her starring role.

The story Mr. Rosenblat came up with was so implausible that at least two scholars, Ken Waltzer and Gabriel Sherman, were already fact-checking when Berkley Books began its publicity for the book.  The publishers simply stopped responding when Sherman and Waltzer pressed for answers.  Instead, the Penguin imprint touted the work, then slated for early February release, as the perfect Valentine’s Day gift.

Again, this is the problem with the way Oprah and a large swath of America see the Holocaust, or any unpleasant episode at all.  This is not a heart-warming story to be present edin pink heart-print paper over candle-lit dinner for two.  The Holocaust experience, like that of the Gulags, the Laogai, the camps of the Khmer Rouge, of Castro’s Cuba, is heart-rending.  If you want to learn about the past, you owe it to yourself to learn the truth.  And if it doesn’t hurt, you’re missing something vital in the history and in yourself.

If the honest story of the death camps destroys your appetite and keeps you awake, it should – not because you’ve done anything but because human beings, just like you and I, did this.  If it makes you sick and cold and unspeakably sad and blindingly angry, it should – because there is nothing other than deliberate human will and strength to keep it from happening again.   There is nothing cozy and sweet about Buchenwald. Such agony is going on in the world right now.  There is no shortage of men who would visit another genocide upon some damned people in pursuit of utopia.

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Comments

  1.   travis
      December 31st, 2008 @ 12:15 pm

    The perfect Valentine’s gift???

    What kind of sick tone-deafness does one have to be afflicted with to think that that’s even a remotely appropriate marketing ploy for a death-camp story?

    I’m guessing the point of the musical in “The Producers” would be lost on these morons.

  2.   danny bloom
      January 1st, 2009 @ 10:51 pm

    Here is the story: straight from the horse’s mouth:

    QUOTE: “Over at The New Republic blog The Plank, the magazine’s editors offer a helpful recap of *how* their reporter successfully exposed a Holocaust memoir as a hoax.”

    It’s true, Gabe Sherman did a terrific reporting job exposing how that hoax memoir came to be. He deserves a Pulitzer award for that kind reportage, really, because he took material supplied to him by several sources and went even deeper and found amazing quotes from people directly involved in the backstory, inforamtion that nobody—nobody—ever knew for certain before—and certainly never said in public before.

    But there is one thing you should know, Sara, and I am sure Gabe won’t mind me telling tales out of school. Gabe never heard of Herman or his cockamamie backstory before a reporter who had been investigating the matter for 2 months, based in Taiwan, go figure, called Gabe up at midnight and badgered, pestered and cajoled him for three days and nights into agreeing to take on this “assignment”.

    What the TNR does not mention, not anywhere, I guess it is natural and for promotioanl reasons of their own, is that their TNR reporter had no idea about this “story” before he was contacted by me. And at first, for the first two days of my barrage of emails and phone calls, Gabe resisted, said he was busy with other things, and besides, how did i know all these things—I knew, Sara, I knew, but according to my promises to my sources deep with the investigation, I could not go public with what I knew, and that’s okay, from here in Taiwan, I did not have a platform to publish what I knew anwyays.

    So I spent 8 weeks trying to find a reporter in the USA who would listen to me, and believe me, and act. Gabe, who didn’t know me from Adam, at first was skeptical of this unknown blogger in far away Taiwan calling him at all times of the day, and badgering his email box with over 5o emails of names, tips, addresses, phone numbers, the whole megillah, and at one point, Gabe—and I love the guy, he is salt of the Earth and an ace reporter and he did the perfect job, nobody else in US journalism could do what he did on this story, and I deeply respect and admire him—Gabe at one point in our phone chats told me to stop bugging him, stop calling him, stiop emailing him, and to go away.

    Go away? No way. Not when I had the goods on Herman, and took it on as my self appointed mission to try to stop that book from coming out before it was published. Against the advice of those who were advising me in the ongoing investigation group.

    They told me to “chill” and “give it a rest, Danny” and “we aren’t ready yet to go to the media, our reserach wont’ be ready until the end of January”—and i understood their concerns, but i knew instinctively, Ben that if the book was published, once it was out of the warehouse and into the bookstores, the damage would be done, the book would be very hard to stop, what with all the coming Oprah PR and the book tours and all the AP and Reuters stories about this lovely couple, so I acted alone, on my own heartfelt instinct, that the time to act was ASAP.

    I didn’t know Gabe from Adam either. Never heard of him before. Of course, I have been out of the USA for 20 years or so, so I am not familiar with the new names in NYC and DC journalism, so I didn’t know him.

    How did I find him? Good story, Sara, and glad you asked. …[SMILE]

    I was carrying out my investigation here in Taiwan of the Herman hoax case using the internet and the blogosphere as my tools, plus my hunch from the get go that the BLIND DATE part of the book was impossible, not in this Universe, but a sweet touch, but completley off the wall, so i was googling every search window I could find about earlier hoaxes.

    And i found one item about a book by a child soldier nbamed Ishamel Beah, and there was a big to do about this in Slate magaizne, writteny by, are you ready?—drum roll—Gabriel Sherman!

    I think YOU were quoted in that story, too, Sara. Small world, getting smaller every day.

    So i emailed him in a jiffy, found his website and emailed him, and he wrote back in Internet time, “Danny, sounds interesting, Call me or I will call you.”

    Well, of course, he didn’t call me. Nobody ever calls me back. Story of my life. So I called him…. the very next day, and dished. I told him everything I knew in a one hour phoen call,—My dime my time. He said “all this is very interesting, Danny, but how do you know? It’s some people’s word against Herman’s word, and who are you? Why are you so obessed with this story?”

    So we said goodbye on the phone, I told him I would email him more damning news tip I had in my files, from top historians involved in the case, and he said, Okay, keep me informed.

    I thought I had landed my fish, my big fish. The fish i needed to land the final punch somewhere in thte USa media landscape.

    The top reporters at the NY Times and your own PW would not answer my emails at all at first and then eventaully the Times reporters just said , Yeah, we know about this issue, but we are mulling it over. “Mulling it over”? It will take too long to mull it over. We need to act now. Before the book is out. stop it in its tracks. PW never answered at all. Shame on PW! Fire them all! Kidding.

    So I kept up my badgering campagn with dear ol’ Gabe, who must be all of 30, and here I am , all of 60, oi, and I never gave up. I knew he was the guy to do this story, to pull the rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, to lift the lid on this Pandora’s Box of fabircations by a sweet old man. I like Herman. I never had any animostiy against him. I just wanted to epose the blind date thing.

    That was my sticking point. that is was got me invovled in this, when i read a newspaper acocunt from the AP on October 12 about Herman and the applkes and Roma and the blind date. Impossible, i said. I called the AP reporter in Miami who wrote the AP story and said Matt, this could not be true.

    He said,”Danny, it’s what they told me. Who are we to question their story? Until a smoking gun can be found, the media cannot report what you are saying, Danny. Sorry.”

    So i started looking for the smoking gun. I found many. Not on my own. I am no historian, no forensic expert, i am a nobody. Just a lone blogger with a mission. So ….I alerted the media in the USa all of October and November and early December. The entire USa media force, including PW, ignored my emails and phone calls. The Miami Herald, too. I spoke the features editor there, he said, “thanks for calling, interesting news tips: but he never acted.. Just sat on this story..

    anyways, back to gushing narrative of this story: I knew by Dec, 19 , i had to find a reporter , soon, do or die moment, so i kept bugging Gabe until he finally said, “Look, Danny, you sound like a nice and sane man, but please, enough of this calling me and emailing me already…go away. leave me alone. I will make some calls, like you suggested, using your leads and contacts, and let’s see if there is a story here.”

    The rest is history, cultural history of our times, sad tragic Holocaust history, too, and GAbe made it happen. The man!

    So that’s the backstory of the backstory, and if you don’t beleive a word I typed, because most people never believe a word I say — I don’t know why, I am always right —.kidding — in fact, i am often wrong — ….ask Gabe!.

    He’s on CNN and NPR and Canada TV now and it;s great. More power to him. He helped expose a very sad and tragic episode in Jewish life. And in American life and Oprah life. And in the publishing world. And in Holocaust history.

    I salute his groundbreaking reportage, and consider him my brother for life! OKAY, enough of this tale told out of school.—Danny, checking in from a small village in southern Taiwan where nobody ever heard of Rosenblat and has no idea what I am doing in the Internet cafe every day, moving on to other things now……

    How’s that for an interesting story,Sara, typed in a ligtning speed,, typos and all, mis-spellings and all?

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