The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [101]
And after the apologia, the assertive declaration: “York House Press is in serious discussion to publish a work of fiction in early spring that is based on the screenplay, tentatively called Flower at the Fence, about Herman Rosenblat’s life and love story, that is grounded in fact and that rises to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility.” Here, presumably, is the claim to literary legitimacy, however oblique. Whatever the “proper levels of artistic value” may be construed to be, how do they intersect with ethical conduct (on whose part? author? publisher? screenplay writer?) and social responsibility? What is the social responsibility of a work of fiction? And in what sense is the work to be “grounded in fact”? Pretty clearly, the publishers want to have things both ways: the unutterable truth of the Holocaust and the forgivable fiction of the love story.
Furthermore, the “serious discussion” in which the putative publisher is engaged (presumably a conversation about contractual issues) becomes linked, by a kind of rhetorical slippage or legerdemain, to an implied seriousness of the work. What is being discussed is a “work of fiction” that is also based on “fact.” Because if it were not—if, for example, the entire narrative had been invented by a twenty-five-year-old creative-writing student with no personal link to the Holocaust—the commercial possibilities for both the film and the book to be derived from it (“can we now call it a ‘novelization’?”) would be much more limited. Was the Rosenblat scandal really just a category crisis, readily resolved by resituating the book on a shelf marked fiction?
With perhaps predictable regularity, hoax memoirs have returned again and again to the topic and the ground of the Holocaust, the overdetermined historical locus of witnessing, testimony, survivors—and deniers. But the tendency persists in all testimonial, confession, autobiographical writing, even in the writing of other lives. The claim of truth invites not only the suspicion but perhaps even the formal inevitability of the lie. “There is no testimony,” writes Jacques Derrida, “that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury.”11
Yet another supposed memoir, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, told the story of a Jewish child who killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense, trekked over a thousand miles through Europe in quest of her deported parents, and was adopted by a pack of wolves. And this entire story, too, it developed, was a fabrication. The author, Misha Levy Defonseca, acknowledged that she was born in Belgium to Roman Catholic parents who were arrested and killed during the resistance; her birth name was Monique De Wael. Despite the revelation that the claims made in the book—which had been translated into eighteen languages and made into a movie in France—were false, De Wael deployed the language of “reality” to justify what she had done. “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” she said in a statement released by her lawyers.12 She asked forgiveness of “all who felt betrayed” and said she “felt Jewish” and had felt so “since forever.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of a book on his quest for the story of his great-uncle and other Jewish victims of the Nazis, dismissed this empathetic banality with brisk contempt: “ ‘Felt Jewish’ is repellent; real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.”13 Mendelsohn thus countered De Wael’s claim of an alternative reality with his own deployment of real, then followed it up with an extended discussion of what it means to say “my reality.” “It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before,” he observed. “What’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true.”