There’s This Literary Genre Called Fiction. Ever Hear of It?

Another fake memoir almost hits the press (from the NYT):

A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.

And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.

This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.

Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr. Rosenblat return his advance.

Now, both articles linked above touch on all that is wrong with this sort of thing, as well as ponder why it’s just so popular to make up a story about your life and claim it’s true; and I admit, while reading the article, the entire time I’m thinking, “what an asshole.” This bit, however, touched me in a strange way:

In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

I get this. It makes me start to like the guy. It also made me wonder, “what the hell is wrong with fiction”? And that’s the thing. These faked memoirs are obviously compelling stories, or else publishers wouldn’t pick them up and people wouldn’t read them. Do people feel that their messages will somehow lose their oomph if presented as fiction sprinkled with occasional truth? It’s not like no one has ever written fiction with elements of true events before. If these are his dreams, why not write and present them as his dreams? As fiction. Storytelling can be an agent of change, regardless of the veracity of the events described. To paraphrase Einstein, often times the imagination is more important than knowledge.

I’d like to believe that Rosenblat, at least in the beginning, wasn’t motivated by profit, that he was motivated by a desire to do good. It’s saddening that his legacy is now tarnished because he had to present the story he wanted to tell as the truth. The best fiction, after all, revels in the fact that it is a lie.