Stolen Suffering

[Christiern]

From the NY Times - March 9, 2008

Stolen Suffering

By DANIEL MENDELSOHN

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

ON a March day four years ago, a very old lady, striking, snowy-haired, unsmiling, was looking at me with disgust. A Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust, she’d been telling me how she and her young son had managed to keep a step ahead of the people who were hunting them down, and at the end of this stupefying tale of survival I’d looked up at her and said, “What an amazing story!” It was at that point that she flapped her spotted hand at me in disdain. “‘Amazing story,’” she mimicked me, tartly. She fetched a heavy sigh. “If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive.”

She was referring to literal survival, of course — survival at its meanest, most animal level, the mere continuance of the organism. At a time when Jews throughout Europe were being rounded up like livestock or hunted down like game, survival indeed depended on feats of endurance or daring so extreme, on accidents or luck so improbable, that they can seem too far-fetched to be true.

A Jewish couple who hid in the attic of a Nazi officers’ club, forced to listen as the soldiers below joked and drank after a day’s slaughter; two young brothers who hid in a forest, strapping the hooves of deer to their feet whenever they ventured into the snow to confuse those who were trying to find them; a youth who, the day before the Germans entered his Polish hometown, left home and just kept walking east, until he reached ... China.

I heard these stories firsthand five years ago, while researching a book about relatives of mine who didn’t survive. But still they keep coming. Last Monday, I heard about an orphaned Jewish girl who trekked 2,000 miles from Belgium to Ukraine, surviving the Warsaw ghetto, murdering a German officer, and — most “amazing” of all — taking refuge in forests where she was protected by kindly wolves.

The problem is that this story is a lie: recounted in a 1997 international bestseller by Misha Levy Defonseca, it was exposed last week as a total fabrication — no trekking, no Warsaw, no murder, no wolves. (No Jews, either: the author, whose real name is Monique De Wael, is Roman Catholic.) To be sure, phony memoirs aren’t news: in 1998 the acclaimed child-survivor memoir “Fragments” was proved a fake, and more recently James Frey’s credibility infamously exploded into a million little pieces. But the trickle now seems to be a flood. Just days after the revelations about Ms. De Wael’s book yet another popular first-person account of extreme suffering turned out to be a fraud. (This one, “Love and Consequences,” purports to be the autobiography of a young half-white, half-American Indian woman who was raised by a black foster mother in the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles.) This trend sheds alarming light on a cultural moment in which the meanings of suffering, identity and “reality” itself seem to have become dangerously slippery.

Each of the new books commits a fraud far more reprehensible than Mr. Frey’s self-dramatizing enhancements. The first is a plagiarism of other people’s trauma. Both were written not, as they claim to be, by members of oppressed classes (the Jews during World War II, the impoverished African-Americans of Los Angeles today), but by members of relatively safe or privileged classes. Ms. De Wael was a Christian Belgian who was raised by close relatives after her parents, Resistance members, were taken away; Margaret Seltzer, the author of “Love and Consequences,” grew up in a tony Los Angeles neighborhood and attended an Episcopal day school.

In each case, then, a comparatively privileged person has appropriated the real traumas suffered by real people for her own benefit — a boon to the career and the bank account, but more interestingly, judging from the authors’ comments, a kind of psychological gratification, too. Ms. Seltzer has talked about being “torn,” about wanting somehow to ventriloquize her subjects, to “put a voice to people who people don’t listen to.” Ms. De Wael has similarly referred to a longing to be part of the group to which she did not, emphatically, belong: “I felt different. It’s true that, since forever, I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community.” (“Felt Jewish” is repellent: real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.)

While these statements want to suggest a somehow admirable desire to “empathize” with the oppressed subjects, this sentimental gesture both mirrors and exploits a widespread, quite pernicious cultural confusion about identity and suffering. We have so often been invited, in the past decade and a half, to “feel the pain” of others that we rarely pause to wonder whether this is, in fact, a good thing.

Empathy and pity are strong and necessary emotions that deepen our sense of connection to others; but they depend on a kind of metaphorical imagination of what others are going through. The facile assumption that we can literally “feel others’ pain” can be dangerous to our sense of who we are — and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too. “We all have AIDS,” a recent public-awareness campaign declared. Well, no, actually we don’t: and to pretend that we do, even rhetorically, debases the anguish of those who are stricken.

Similarly — to return to the world of the Holocaust — a museum that offers ticket holders the chance to go inside a cattle car, presumably in order to convey what it was like to be in one, can ultimately encourage not true sympathy or understanding, but a slick “identification” that devalues the real suffering of the real people who had to endure that particular horror. (When you leave the cattle car, you go to the cafeteria to have your chicken salad; when they left it, they went into a gas chamber. Can you really say you “know what it was like”?)

In an era obsessed with “identity,” it’s useful to remember that identity is precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriated by others; in a world in which theme-park-like simulacra of other places and experiences are increasingly available to anyone with the price of a ticket, the line dividing the authentic from the ersatz needs to be stressed, rather than blurred. As, indeed, Ms. De Wael has so clearly blurred it, for reasons that she has suggested were pitiably psychological. “The story is mine,” she announced. “It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”

“My reality,” as opposed to “actual reality,” is, of course, one sign of psychosis, and given her real suffering during the war, you’re tempted to sympathize — until you read that her decision to write her memoir came at a time when her husband was out of work, or (we real Jews call this chutzpah) that she successfully sued the publisher for more than $20 million for professional malfeasance. Or until you learn about her galling manipulations of the people who believed her. (Slate reported that she got one rabbi to light a memorial candle “for animals.”)

“My reality” raises even more far-reaching and dire questions about the state of our culture, one in which the very concept of “reality” seems to be in danger. Think of “reality” entertainments, which so unnervingly parallel the faux-memoirists’ appropriation of others’ authentic emotional experience: in them, real people are forced to endure painful or humiliating or extreme situations, their real emotional reactions becoming the source of the viewers’ idle gratification. Think of the Internet: an unimaginably powerful tool for education but also a Wild West of random self-expression in which anyone can say anything about anything (or anyone) and have it “published,” and which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic identities, reality and fantasy.

That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before; 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. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his novel — er, memoir.

But then, we all like a good story. The cruelty of the fraudulent ones is that they will inevitably make us distrustful of the true ones — a result unbearable to think about when the Holocaust itself is increasingly dismissed by deniers as just another “amazing story.” Early on in my research for my book, another very old woman suddenly grew tired being interviewed. “Stories, stories,” she sighed wearily at the end of our time together. “There isn’t enough paper in the world to write the stories we can tell you.” She, of course, was talking about the true stories. How tragic if, because of the false ones, those amazing tales are never read — or believed.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” is a professor of humanities at Bard College.

[alocispepraluger102]

thank you.

we know this, but the author brings it into much clearer focus.

[AllenLowe]

well, it's interesting, because this also relates to my current fatigue with "oral histories" which, to me, represent the cheap and easy way out - no research, no understanding, no verification, no integration, you name it, a mindless technique: stick a microphone in front of someone and than transcribe it, and regard the results as the gospel truth.

[seeline]

Excellent article, though - having had to rely heavily on informants for some research I did in the 80s - I'd have to say that *not* cross-checking accounts (and facts) is bad practice. Oral history is a very tricky thing to do well/right, and each person's recollections are exactly that - theirs, and based on memory.

to use recollections as various ways of viewing something is, I think, fine - but memory is notoriously faulty, in so many ways. (Mine as much as anyone else's.) And people do tend, consciously or not, to change their stories, or (at very least), to change the focus/emphasis in their stories depending on who's doing the listening and recording. It's not necessarily about lying or fabricating things - I think it's a pretty basic fact of the way we all communicate with each other.

[Christiern]

Sometimes the problem is that one is interviewing people who have read wrongful information written about themselves by sloppy writers--and have reached an age where it is difficult for them to distinguish between their own first-hand recollections and something they read. Many a jazz performer has been Schaaped, I'm afraid, and a conscientious writer will do his or her best to not perpetuate the fantasy. Of course, this has been going on long before Phil Schaap made it a habit, just look at the myths that were attached to Bessie Smith's story and how the lived on for decades after her death.

In preparation for my biography, I interviewed Bessie Smith's niece for many hours, over a period of two or three weeks. She told me many amazing things that could easily have been made up, but I was comforted by the fact that she often dismissed an opportunity to fabricate by answering, "I don't remember anything like that, I guess I wasn't there." Then, too, she would call me, when she arrived home after one of our interviews, to either correct or add to something she had told me. I also had several opportunities to fact check her information or get another account from a different source--what Ruby told me always checked out.

For example, I asked her if Carl Van Vechten's name meant anything to her. She thought for a minute, then said that she remembered "someone with a name like that threw a great big to-do were Bessie and I went." She could not recall the name of Van Vechten, but she seemed to remember that it was "either at the Waldorf or the Plaza." It was actually at Van Vechten's home, but Ruby had never before been in a wealthy home, so it was natural for her to recall it being a luxury hotel. I subsequently came across a description of the party written by Van Vechten himself, and one by Langston Hughes, who was among the guests that night. I also interviewed Leigh Whipper, who was there and--close to 100--had a remarkably sharp memory. Van Vechten and Hughes wrote polite accounts, but Whipper gave me the exact same story as Ruby had, except that he identified Mrs. Van Vechten, whom Ruby referred to only as a "lady". Whipper also substituted the word "excrement" when he recalled the exact quote Ruby had attributed to Bessie, "I ain't never heard of such shit!"

One story was about a time when Bessie found herself in a menacing situation. Ruby said that she leaned over to her and whispered, "go to my room and get my gun." Two other eye witnesses, Bessie's Sister-in-Law and a chorine, told me the very stame story, except that each claimed that Bessie had asked them to get the gun.

Sometimes, there is no way of checking, in such cases, it is no sin for the writer to tell the story anyway, but point out that it may be pure hearsay. I don't think that takes away from it, but when I read a book in which I find iffy material presented as fact, I immediately suspect everything that writer has put down. It may be an interesting book, but having to take it with a grain of salt renders it worthless as a source for research, IMO.