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Well, I end the year with a mea culpa: I should have read the New Republic piece about Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat before piping up to defend him. But even after doing so, I agree most with this part of what one of the scholars who initially questioned the veracity of Rosenblat's memoir said: "The most tragic part is that [Herman's] embellishments have no impact at all on the essence of the story of his suffering. ... He invented a love story to go with it. I am not excusing him for doing this—of course this could be a false memory incident—but I am cautioning a note of sadness as opposed to some of the 'gotcha' things that are floating around.''
Noreen raises a good question about what in the world Mrs. Rosenblat was thinking all this time. It was after being shot in a robbery in the '90s that her husband apparently woke up from a dream featuring his mother and only then started telling people this wild story about how she had chucked apples over the fence for him to eat when he was a prisoner in a concentration camp. Was he shot in the head in this robbery or what? (Seriously. Did the shooting impair him cognitively or otherwise unhinge him?) Was his wife going along with this fabrication to cover for him? How did their friends and family react? Her family, if she had any, had to have known all along that the story wasn't true. Why did it take more than a decade for any of them to challenge the story? If someone you loved were about to go on national TV and tell an earth-shattering whopper, wouldn't that be the time to speak up? I'd like to hear a lot more from those around the Rosenblats.
And, meanwhile, am repulsed by the attitude of the guy producing the movie based on Rosenblat's fable: " 'The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America,' [movie producer Harris] Salomon said. 'Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done.' " Noooooooooo; please hold both the condescension and the candy coating. In defending accessibility, sugary treats were not what I had in mind.
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Emily and Hanna, you might be interested in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick's 2006 documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America.
Through a side-by-side comparison of footage, Dick revealed several prevailing MPAA biases: beyond drawing distinctions that favor violent displays over sexual ones, the MPAA seems to punish homosexual and female sexual displays with harsher ratings. Additionally, Dick asserted that the MPAA is intimidated into assigning more lenient ratings to big studio films while cracking down on the content of movies that were independently produced.
The MPAA claims to be comprised of average parents with children ages 5 to 17. Dick discovered, however, that some of the raters didn't even have children and none had received any formal training for their job. This might explain why you found their ratings (ostensibly created for parents' use) to be more than a little off-base.
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Since, as Juliet points out, Herman Rosenblat probably isn't delusional, what are we to make of his wife's role in the whole affair? She may not have written the book, but she has gone on television with her husband to tell the tale, making her just as complicit in the fabrication (that's her beaming alongside Herman in the NYT article on the hoax). It's impossible, of course, to truly pin down the motivation that made him cook up the fable, but I can't help but be curious about when she decided to go along with it and why. Was it just for the thrill of notoriety?
The Rosenblat story makes me think of the fantastic tale of Joyce Hatto, the reclusive pianist whose celebrated recordings were not her own but rather a bold pastiche of various virtuosic performances by other pianists. (The stunning deception also included, by the way, a made-up backing orchestra whose fictionalized conductor was supposedly a Holocaust survivor.) Her husband, Barry, it turned out, was the man behind the curtain. His pathology was a mix of love and delusion and self-promotion that was both repulsive and oddly sweet. He told The New Yorker, "You see, the thing about her was it meant her life hadn't been a waste of time." Is that the same kind of weird psychology at work in the Rosenblat marriage—the sense that it's somehow more valid to get recognition for a made-up version of it than to quietly make peace with the real one? I don't pretend to be an expert on marriage, though I'm sure that for any marriage lasting decades there are plenty of elisions and additions to the narrative the couple tells one another and others about their own particular love story and its creation myth. But small ones. Private ones. To go on national television and completely replace the bone structure of your life seems to me a personal denial that is a tragic one indeed (though not of course as widely harmful as the other sorts of denial this story could encourage), and I wonder just what the triggers are that makes that seem like the best option.
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Melinda, Herman Rosenblat may not need a lecture from us, but perhaps he needs one from fellow survivors. If he'd written a memoir about how he kept his sanity by imagining a girl tossing apples at him, that'd be one thing. And if he were delusional, I'd cut him more slack. But from Gabe Sherman's account in The New Republic, he was fully aware of the fact that he was fabricating a story and had a great time on Oprah! It's not just his fabrication that bothers me, but the content of his fabrication. There was no young love, or apples, at Schlieben. To suggest otherwise (and here I'm paraphrasing one of Sherman's sources) is to deny the substance and reality of the Holocaust.
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Ben, your response to my defense of Herman Rosenblat made me think that maybe my post was itself too inaccessible, so let me be clearer: My point wasn't that films about the Holocaust have been made in other countries, too. (Duh.) It was that the impulse to focus on resistance fighters and the odd righteous Gentile is not just an American thing, and that prettifying is what Hollywood does. But I am not arguing in favor of spiffing up the Holocaust, for heaven's sake. And I am certainly not saying that art of any kind has to be uplifting in order to be accessible. I personally think everyone should see Shoah, preferably in a theater and on back-to-back evenings, but there are other, more accessible ways to tell the truth about the Holocaust, and they don't necessarily have to be sneered at.
I do not defend the Hallmarkization of the Holocaust; what I defend is this man who lived through it and needs no lectures from us about the truth of it. None of us knows how we would come through an experience like his, but if his way of keeping his sanity was to imagine a girl tossing apples at him, I don't think it is my place to stand in judgment.
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Here's a guest post from Ben Crair, an assistant editor at The Daily Beast who wrote an article for Slate this week on Hollywood Holocaust films.
I hoped that my article on Holocaust film would provoke some discussion, and now that some XX Factor contributors have gotten the ball rolling, I find myself unable to abstain from jumping in. (And thanks to XX Factor for the opportunity to do so).
Melinda, it's true that Holocaust film isn't "a peculiarly American phenomenon"—indeed, the subject is taken up more frequently in European film. And Europe has produced plenty of Holocaust dreck. (Life is Beautiful is from Italy.) But Europe has also given us films like Shoah, Night and Fog, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The first film, which clocks in at 9.5 hours, is a famous example of the difficulty and "inaccessibility" of Holocaust art, which might turn off your average moviegoer. But what about the latter two? Night and Fog is 32 minutes of more-or-less straightforward documentary footage, while The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is a beautiful love story about Jewish teenagers in Italy.
Why has Hollywood failed to produce similar films? Melinda, your assumption is that a film, or a story in Herman Rosenblat's case, must be uplifting in order to be "accessible." You ask, "But aren't there cases in which embroidering on the truth might not be a sign of insanity so much as the only guard against it?" Even if we concede that the Holocaust was, in fact, "insane," why should artists "guard against" that truth, rather than open it up and explore it? The problem with Holocaust film in general is that, in order to be "accessible," it routinely sets up such guards via some of the tropes I mentioned in my article and then passes them off as real. What else are we to make of their incorporation of documentary footage or their incessant need to remind us that they are "based on true stories"? Hollywood films try to wear the moral weight and prestige of the Holocaust, but refuse to let it complicate established and sentimental formulas.
Susannah is right: "Seeing as we live in a world where some would like to believe it never happened, it's indescribably imperative that its nonfiction narratives testify truly, rather than auctioning off fictions the public would rather be spoon-fed." What about fiction and, by extension, film? Cynthia Ozick writes that "when a novel comes to us with the claim that it is directed consciously toward history, that the divide between history and the imagination is being purposefully bridged, that the bridging is the very point, and that the design of the novel is to put human flesh on historical notation, then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force." Hollywood, I fear, has been building faulty bridges.
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Emily, this is, as they say, a failure in the marketplace. Despite years of protest and battle, movie ratings still draw lines along the old Puritan boundaries and bear no relationship to the sensibility of an actual child. They measure nudity, or language, and maybe specific acts of violence, but they are not sensitive enough to pick up something like nightmare-inducing terror. I took my daughter to see Man on Wire, in which there is a fleeting, silent-movie sort of sex interlude that flew right by her. This is an adult documentary about the Frenchman who tightroped between the Twin Towers, and she read it as a straight up inspirational tale. But in the various cartoons we've seen with violent chases or fistfights or mock torture scenes she is hiding under her seat. Some of this has to do with video-game culture and the fear factor brought on by better animation, as you say. And some has to do with our cultural tolerance of violence. Once a home-schooling mom recommended a Spiderman movie for my 5-year-old but warned me about a "disturbing scene," by which she meant not the death by impalement, or bombing carnage, but the upside down kiss. I think we need to set up our own informal rating system, based on the coming night's sleep: sound (S), light (L), disturbed (D), high possibility of night terrors (HPNT).
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On a different topic: I took my 5-year-old son to see The Tale of Despereaux this week and then cursed its apparently kid-safe G rating when he found it really scary. I looked into the meaning of G for General Audience and learned that the promise of "minimal violence" that the rating makes often isn't kept. More from me on this here. Have any of you tangled with fearsome kids' movies, and what if anything do you do about it? For my kids, the problem isn't quickie punches or even shootings. It's prolonged suspense, which movie makers often seem unable to resist. I don't try to shield my kids from everything harsh or sad, but movies exert real power over kids because of their visual impact. When a film keeps one of my kids up at night, I wish he hadn't seen it. Thoughts?
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Good points, Susannah. At least two more reasons to be outraged by Herman Rosenblat's faked memoir: It can only encourage Holocaust deniers, as Rosenblat's friends and family have pointed out while expressing outrage at him. And it's part of a disturbing pattern of falsity. Misha Defonseca claimed to be a Jewish survivor who lived with wolves in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years; there were no wolves and she wasn't Jewish. Binjamin Wilkomirski won prizes and comparisons to Primo Levi for Fragments, his account of surviving the camps Majdenau and Birkenau—but he made the whole thing up, down to the last emotionally affecting detail. All of this is slippery exploitation, and irredeemable.
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Melinda: Reading your post, I kept expecting to get to the part where you said you were kidding. Herman Rosenblat's grotesque "reimagining" of his time spent at a Nazi concentration camp is more obscene than little harm done. As the New Republic exposed, Rosenblat's childhood tall-tale of having been fed apples thrown over the camp fence by a little girl whom he met again years later on Coney Island and then married is wholesale BS. Only after the hoax was revealed did Rosenblat admit his lies—only after he'd appeared on Oprah twice, where he was informed his story was “the single greatest love story” that his host had ever heard, only after a $25 million movie version was already in the works, only after a children's book version was published in September.
So, in response to your questions, yes, this makes Rosenblat another Margaret Seltzer and James Frey, one more writer weak enough of mind and writing ability that, in an effort to score attention and cash, they made up a story they sold as truth. If anything, Rosenblat's fabulism is more offensive and reprehensible than Seltzer's wiggerisms and Frey's fake drugmoir, because what we're talking about here, in case anyone missed it, is the Holocaust. Seeing as we live in a world where some would like to believe it never happened, it's indescribably imperative that its nonfiction narratives testify truly, rather than auctioning off fictions the public would rather be spoon-fed.
Instead of declaring Rosenblat's act amounts to no big deal, it seems this case demands the opposite. It's a "meh" attitude toward these literary deceptions that perpetuates and encourages the increasingly shoddy practices of the book publishing industry, a slow-dying dinosaur that prefers sensationalism and bottom lines to truth and fact-checking.
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