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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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I just figured out why I might have such kinship with the heroin freak. Her father is a cabdriver! Outside the Holy Land, we must be among the very few Jewish women who can make that claim.
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