by Oprah bagged James Frey for “making up” his life story. Now Oprah has been burned again, this time by a Jewish couple that unnecessarily faked their Holocaust suffering for fun and profit.
In media circles, there is a joke about facts that are too good to check. This week Oprah Winfrey and the New York publishing industry stumbled on yet another unverified account in the form of a Holocaust survivor who said his future wife had helped him stay alive while he was imprisoned as a child in a Nazi concentration camp by throwing apples over the fence to him.
The story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat, who said they reunited years later on a blind date in New York, turned out to be fabricated, and over the weekend the publisher of his memoir, “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived,” canceled the February release of the book. This isn’t the first time either a publisher or Ms. Winfrey has been gullible in the face of an exaggerated tale. Now both Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, and Ms. Winfrey are faces on a media dartboard, with Ms. Winfrey dodging criticisms of what the media blog Gawker called her “liar’s club.”
Ms. Winfrey has not commented publicly on Mr. Rosenblat’s fabrications And, other than to announce the cancellation of the book, Berkley Books has said nothing further. Nearly three years ago Ms. Winfrey was famously duped by James Frey, the author of “A Million Little Pieces,” his memoir of drug addiction and recovery in which he embellished several details; for example, he wrote that he had spent nearly three months in jail when in fact he had been held for a few hours. An outraged Ms. Winfrey rebuked Mr. Frey on television, telling him that he “betrayed millions of readers.”
I thought Oprah was too hard on James Frey. When one renders a life on the page, you can explore, change, and modify that perceived reality as you wish because you are telling a story and not creating a documentary.
Will Oprah give these two Holocaust survivors the same rabbit punches she gave James Frey? No, she won’t — even though she should — because their fakery is much worse than anything Frey did.
When you knowingly choose to change world history to serve your pocketbook — and that’s precisely what happened — you cheat the Holocaust, you ruin your own being, and you tear down all the goodness that was given to you in good faith: You can mar your own self-worth, but you cannot degrade the misery of the dead in the process without paying for it in the shedding of your own blood.
Uch. Just uch. How sad that they needed to make that stuff up just for some cash money.
It sounds like it could have been a great love story, Gordon — that is, until the lies curdled their entire lives.
Sad to watch…
You rarely expect people commercialize their love life…
It was risky, Katha, especially since they both knowingly told the lie together to create a false hope in a tragic history. They’ll pay for this error for the rest of their lives.
So wrong and on so many levels.
Yes, Nicola, and their want for fame and money is what exposed their lie. Many of their close friends knew they were lying about their meeting during the Holocaust because there was no physical way for her to be so close to him with the concentration camp setup, but they didn’t say anything because that was the lie the two of them told each other to help them move along in life. When, however, they traded that “love lie” for profit — the meaning of their lie changed the truth of their love forever.