• Lies, and Also Exploitation

  Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008 10:01 AM | By Emily Bazelon
  
  
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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.
  
  Filed under: literature, Jewish, memoirs, Holocaust
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