The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [100]
What was the scandal here? What was the crime? Had Rosenblat called his narrative a fiction, would Oprah have been interested in it? Would a publisher have put it under contract? Would the advance have been less?
The excuse given for the support of the book’s claims were in some ways more problematic than the claims themselves, since, as the Valentine’s Day publication date suggested, the story was supposed to be all about love. Love, it was said, clouded memory and embellished it. Love, Rosenblat himself asserted, made him do it. Why did he invent the story about the girl and the apples? “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many.”9 Although he and his brothers were in fact interned in the camp, what “brought hope to many” and attracted the attention of an agent, a publisher, and Oprah Winfrey was not the survival but the love story.
The next step seems, in retrospect, inevitable. Within days of these revelations, a publisher began negotiating to issue the book as a work of fiction. What was to be published, though, was not the original text but a version based on a screenplay already in production. The book thus became the secondary partner in a book-and-movie tie-in deal. The publisher, York House Press, issued a statement that tried to explain, as well as to explain away, what had happened:
Mr. Rosenblat, now age 80, fantasized that his wife of 50 years came as a girl to nourish him by tossing apples to him over the barbed wire at a sub camp of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. This is a story he told himself and others repeatedly until it was integrated seamlessly into his otherwise factual account. It is beyond our expertise to know how Holocaust survivors cope with their trauma. Do they deny, rationalize or fantasize and promote fiction along with truth? Perhaps the coping mechanisms are as individual as the survivors themselves. Would, for humanity’s sake, that Mr. Rosenblat’s fantasy were true and that not just one girl, but a whole crowd, had come to toss apples over the fence, and to liberate those within much sooner than was actually the case.10
In this interesting mix of popular psychology (“coping mechanisms”), guilt-trip apologia (“it is beyond our expertise”), and resistance to the facts (all accounts suggest that there was no fence that bordered on public access, so that even “a whole crowd” of apple-tossing empathizers would have been unable to perform the rescue operation as described), the publishers sought to rehabilitate, even to reenoble, the author-fantasist. The problem with the “false memoir,” they implied, did not lie with Herman Rosenblat but with the tragic fact of the Holocaust itself, and the refusal of history to make his fantasy retroactively true. “Mr. Rosenblat’s motivations were very human, understandable, and forgivable,” they wrote. What does human mean in such a context? Or very human? Fallible? Exculpable? Full of pathos? Compare this to “for humanity’s sake,” in the paragraph above. Rosenblat is human, all too human. So is his story, whether fictional or