Quarrel & Quandary (15 page)

There is another image less well known than the fires and the boy and the bulldozer; it is more overtly brutish by virtue of its being less overtly brutish. And if satire means a parody of normality, then perhaps this scene is travesty enough to gratify the most jaded observer. A city street, modern and clean, lined with leafy bushes and arching trees, on a fine bright autumn day. The road has been cleared of cars to make room for a parade. The marchers are all men, fathers and breadwinners, middle-class burghers wearing the long overcoats and gray fedoras of the thirties; they appear gentlemanly but somber. Along the parade route, behind mild barriers, a cheerful citizenry watches, looking as respectable as the marchers themselves, all nicely dressed, men and women and children, but mostly women and children—these are, let us note, business hours, when fathers and breadwinners are ordinarily in their offices. The weather is lovely, the crowds are pleasant, the women are laughing, the marchers are grave; here and there you will notice a child darting past the barriers, on a dare. The marchers are Jews being taken away in a scheme preparatory for their destruction; they are being escorted by soldiers with guns. Perhaps the watchers do not yet know the destiny of the marchers; but what a diversion it is, what a holiday, to see these dignified gentlemen humiliated, like clowns on show, by the power of the gun!

We may tremble before these images, but we are morally obliged to the German lens that inscribed them. The German
lens recorded truthfully; its images are stable and trustworthy: the camera and the act are irrevocably twinned. Though photography can be kin to forgery (consider only the egregious slantedness of so many contemporary “documentaries”), at that time the camera did not lie. It yielded—and preserved—an account of ineffaceable clarity and immutable integrity. And later, when the words disclosing those acts of oppression first began to arrive, we knew them to be as stable and as trustworthy as the camera’s images. The scrupulous voice of Elie Wiesel; the scrupulous voice of Primo Levi; the stumbling voices of witnesses who have no fame and have no voice, yet whose eloquence rises up through the scars and stammerings of remembered suffering. The voices of Christian conscience and remorse. All these words were consequential in a way the pictures were not. The pictures belonged to their instant; though they could serve memory, they were not the same as memory. You could not quarrel with the pictures. You could not change what they insistently and irremediably saw. But as the words rushed in in torrents, as they proliferated, becoming more and more various and removed, some broke through the gates of memory into the freer fields of parable, myth, analogy, symbol, story. And where memory was fastidious in honoring history, story turned to the other muses. Where memory was strict, fiction could be lenient, and sometimes lax. Where memory struggled for stringency of historical precision, fiction drifted toward history as a thing to be used, as imagination’s stimulus and provocation.

And just here is the crux: the aims of imagination are not the aims of history. Scholars are nowadays calling historiography into radical question; history is seen as the historian’s clay; omniscience is suspect, objectivity is suspect, the old-fashioned claims of historical truthfulness are suspect; the causes of the Peloponnesian War are sometimes what I say they are, and sometimes what you say they are. But even under the broken
umbrella of contemporary relativism, history has not yet been metamorphosed into fable. Scholars may not agree on what happened, but they do consent to an actual happening. Your Napoleon may not be my Napoleon, but the fact of Napoleon is incontrovertible. To whatever degree, history is that which is owed to reality.

Imagination—fiction—is freer than that; is freed altogether. Fiction has license to do anything it pleases. Fiction is liberty at its purest. It can, if it likes—in the manner of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, or Mel Brooks in the French Revolution—place Napoleon in command of the armies of Sparta. It can alter history; it can invent a history that never was, as long as it maintains a hint of verisimilitude. A fictional character represents only itself. You may be acquainted with someone “like” Emma Bovary or “like” Anna Karenina, but if you want the true and only Bovary, you must look to Flaubert, and if you want the true and only Karenina, you must look to Tolstoy. Bovary is not a stand-in for French women; she is Flaubert’s invention. Karenina is not a stand-in for Russian women; she is Tolstoy’s invention. Imagination owes nothing to what we call reality; it owes nothing to history. The phrase “historical novel” is mainly an oxymoron. History is rooted in document and archive. History is what we make out of memory. Fiction flees libraries and loves lies.

The rights of fiction are not the rights of history.

On what basis, then, can I disdain a story that subverts document and archive? On what basis can I protest a novel that falsifies memory? If fiction annihilates fact, that is the imagination’s prerogative. If fiction evades plausibility, that too is the imagination’s prerogative. And if memory is passionate in its adherence to history, why should that impinge on the rights of fiction? Why should the make-believe people in novels be obliged to
concur with history, or to confirm it? Characters in fiction are not illustrations or representations. They are freely imagined fabrications; they have nothing to do with the living or the dead; they go their own way.

And there the matter ends; or should. Nothing is at issue. But there are, admittedly, certain difficulties. Embedded in the idea of fiction is impersonation: every novelist enters the personae of his or her characters; fiction-writing is make-believe, acting a part, assuming an identity not one’s own. Novelists are, after all, professional impostors; they become the people they invent. When the imposture remains within the confines of a book, we call it art. But when impersonation escapes the bounds of fiction and invades life, we call it hoax—or, sometimes, fraud. Three recent exemplars have captured public attention; all have provoked argument and controversy.

In 1995, Alan Dershowitz, known equally for his contribution to the legal defense of O. J. Simpson and for his authorship of books of Jewish self-consciousness, published a review of
The Hand That Signed the Papers
, an Australian novel on a Ukrainian theme. Dershowitz took issue with both plot and substance, and accused the twenty-four-year-old writer, Helen Demidenko, of “the most primitive manifestations of classic Ukrainian anti-Semitism: all Jews are Communists, cheats, smelly animals and otherwise subhuman.” According to Dershowitz’s summary of the novel, when the Soviet commissars—all Jews—arrive in Ukraine in the nineteen-thirties, they burn down a house with a family inside; understandably, the surviving child becomes the so-called Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. A Jewish woman from Leningrad, Dershowitz’s account continues, “refuses to treat a sick Ukrainian baby, declaring ‘I am a physician, not a veterinarian.’ ” Demidenko’s “subtle goal,” he concludes, is “to explain the Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust so that the murders
go unpunished,” and her “greatest anger is directed against the Jewish survivors who sought to bring their Ukrainian tormentors to justice.”

Soon after the appearance of Dershowitz’s review, the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organizations threatened to bring a legal action against him under Australia’s racial vilification law. Dershowitz responded by welcoming a lawsuit as “an excellent forum for reminding the world of the complicity of so many Ukrainians in the Nazi Holocaust.” That the dispute concerned a work of fiction appeared to vanish in the legal and political tumult. Meanwhile, however, the novel rose to fourth on Australia’s best-seller list, and received the country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. The judges praised Demidenko for illuminating “a hitherto unspeakable portion of the Australian migrant experience.” Demidenko herself insisted that her story was based on her own family’s travail.

As it turned out, all parties were duped: the protesting reviewer, the infuriated Ukrainians, the publisher, the prize-givers. Helen Demidenko was in reality Helen Darville, a daughter of British immigrants pretending to be Ukrainian in order to augment her credibility. Allen & Unwin, Darville’s publisher, confirmed that the novelist “had made some stupid mistakes,” but argued that “we still have a book of great power, a book daring to deal with awesome topics.” Dershowitz’s objections went largely unaddressed. But after the exposure of Demidenko as Darville, the threat of lawsuit was quietly withdrawn.

A more ambiguous instance of novelistic impersonation occurred in Ecuador, when Salomon Isacovici, a Romanian-born survivor of the camps, set out to tell his experiences under the German terror. He enlisted the help—and the Spanish language facility—of Juan Manuel Rodríguez, a Jesuit and former priest; it is not clear whether Rodríguez was amanuensis, ghost, or co-author. In 1990, the manuscript, entitled
Man of Ashes
, was published
in Mexico under both names and promoted as “cruel and truthful testimony of the Nazi concentration camps.” Mexico’s Jewish community praised it as a genuine work of witness and awarded it a prize. Isacovici died early in 1998, but three years before he had announced in a letter that he was “the legitimate author,” that
Man of Ashes
was his autobiography, and that Rodríguez was hired only to assist with “the literary and structural parts of the book.” Reporting in the
Forward
, Ilan Stavans, a writer and university professor educated in Mexico, quotes Rodríguez as claiming that he “wrote the entire book, its title included, in six months, based upon [Isacovici’s] manuscript and mutual conversations.”

Rodríguez continues to insist that
Man of Ashes
is not Isacovici’s memoir, but is, rather, the product of his own literary imagination. “I transposed many of my philosophical views to Salomon,” he told Stavans. “My philosophical formation helped achieve the transplant and succeeded in turning the book from a simple account to a novel of ideas.” In the fall of 1999 the University of Nebraska Press issued the book in English as Isacovici’s memoir, with Rodríguez named as co-author, and Rodríguez is considering a suit. “Salomon is my novel’s protagonist, I am his author,” he states. “I invented passages and details, and afterward he believed he had lived through them. For him the book is autobiography; for me it is a charming novel.” Quite aside from “charming” as a description of Holocaust suffering, how may we regard what appears to be an act of usurpation? When Rodríguez declares a narrative of survival to be fiction, is the Holocaust being denied? Or is it being affirmed in terms of art?

The same query, steeped in similar murk, can be put to the extraordinary history of
Fragments: A Childhood 1939–1948
, published as the memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a self-declared Latvian Jew. The book, brought out by Germany’s
Suhrkamp Verlag in 1995, and a year later by Schocken Books in New York, purports to be the therapy-induced recovered memory of a boy, born in Riga, who was deported at the age of three to Maidanek, a camp in Poland. Lauded as a literary masterpiece,
Fragments
won the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain, and a National Jewish Book Award in the United States. It has been endorsed by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, translated into more than a dozen languages, and eloquently blurbed by established writers. Its success lent credence to the theory that profoundly repressed memory, even of events very early in life, can be retrieved; and it also offered, in a child’s pure voice, a narrative of German oppression to set beside the classic accounts of Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank.

All this began to disintegrate when Daniel Ganzfried, a Swiss writer and the son of a Holocaust survivor, undertook to verify Wilkomirski’s assertions. He found, instead, inconsistencies of dates and facts, as well as documents identifying Wilkomirski as the child, born in Switzerland in 1941, of an unwed Swiss Protestant woman named Yvonne Grosjean. He also uncovered legal papers proving Wilkomirski’s adoption, under the name of Bruno Doesseker, by a middle-class Zürich family. At the same time, Holocaust historians began to note that no child younger than seven would have been spared instant gassing—demurrals that were, however, not voiced during the period of rhapsodic prize-giving. Ganzfried’s disclosures ultimately caused grave uneasiness among Wilkomirski’s several publishers. Late in 1999, Suhrkamp Verlag withdrew its hardcover edition of
Fragments
, a decision followed some weeks afterward by Schocken. Carol Janeway, the book’s American translator, affirmed that the “enormous impact that
Fragments
has had upon its readers must not blind us to the truth,” and ruminated over the “human bafflement about the psychological processes that went into
this.” One speculation that arose in Wilkomirski’s defense (reminiscent of Rodríguez’s charge against Isacovici) is that there was no hoax, and Wilkomirski had committed no fraud, because he believes in his written story, and takes it to be his own. Perhaps he does. In that event we might wish to dub him insane. Even so, his conviction, if conviction it is, has done harm: it led a survivor living in Israel to suppose that he had recovered his lost son, whom he had thought long dead.

There was more. Defending yet another award bestowed on Wilkomirski by the American Orthopsychiatric Association (and eschewing human bafflement), a psychologist who is a member of that organization stated: “We are honoring Mr. Wilkomirksi not as historians or politicians, but as mental-health professionals. What he has written is important clinically.” From this it would be fair to conclude that “mental-health professionals” care nothing for historical evidence, and do not recognize when they are, in fact, acting politically. If Wilkomirski is indeed a fabricator, then to laud him is to take a stand—politically—on the side of those who declare the Holocaust to be a fabrication. In any case, how does it advance the public cause of mental health to encourage a possible public liar who is possibly an opportunist and possibly a madman?