Although he would probably never admit it, I bet someone reading this article stayed up all night on his 11th birthday, eagerly hoping an owl would deliver an acceptance letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Some might find such a hypothetical to be idle, but I think it reveals something striking about us as readers.
As rational as we are, many of us still hold on to some hope that the fiction we read is at least a little true -- that Oompa Loompas, Jedi powers and the Sorting Hat are just well-kept secrets we may soon discover. However, while we often find ourselves hoping to uncover truth in fiction, the converse is almost never true. When we learn that our non-fiction is more fake than fact, we are unreasonably enraged.
Over winter break, researchers exposed "Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived" as a fabrication. The novel tells the love story of a young girl who throws apples to a boy interned at Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp. While the author, Herman Rosenblat, really did survive his time in Buchenwald, the fruit-tossing girl never existed. Experts on the Holocaust assert that Rosenblat's story was clearly preposterous, but his lie went unnoticed by the general public until Oprah recommended the novel for her book club, giving "Angel at the Fence" a massive wave of attention. Unfortunately for Rosenblat, Oprah's followers become particularly livid when they've been duped, and a media hellfire ensued after the book was exposed.
If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. Almost three years ago, James Frey fooled Oprah and millions of other readers with his exaggerated memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." While tempers flared after the Frey incident, reactions this time around seemed even more extreme. One angry fan wrote on Oprah's website, "We run out and buy these books, and then we get kicked in the teeth." This violent imagery seems a little over the top for a novel, but one radio talk show host took it even further. He was so offended that he compared Rosenblat to Bernard L. Madoff, the money manager who allegedly defrauded investors out of $50 billion. This comparison is as hyperbolic as it is inappropriate.
Mr. Rosenblat suffered atrocities that are beyond any normal person's comprehension. He witnessed humanity at its most depraved, and what he produced from that experience Oprah originally called "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air." The fact that he not only survived genocide, but also used that experience as a muse for writing a love story, is infinitely more astounding than the story of a girl sustaining a starving boy.
The Holocaust could have left Rosenblat hopelessly cynical and bitter, but he claims he wrote his story to advocate tolerance and inspire hope. No one but him knows his true intentions, but if Rosenblat inspired just one person with his novel, he deserves accolades. And, while nobody appreciates being lied to, I view this incident with the same mentality that allowed me to forgive my parents for lying to me about Santa Claus. Both parties may have betrayed my trust, but they had benevolent intentions and did more good than harm.
Furthermore, the public's outcry in the Rosenblat case reveals something more troubling than our aversion to lies; the uproar says volumes about a society that needs another person's anguish to be genuine -- a society so sadistic that it feels cheated when an author's tragedy is fictional. In Frey's memoir, he embellished the more outrageous events of his drug addiction recovery. For the most part, the story was true, but readers could not get over the injustice of him exaggerating his suffering. For some reason or another, readers wanted his misery to be genuine, and that, in itself, might be the most painful part of the Frey saga.
It's regrettable that semi-fiction enrages some to such an illogical degree. Herman Rosenblat may not have acually been fed apples by a brave girl, but the fact that he left Buchenwald able to use death to inspire compassion is remarkable nonethless. We can no longer cite "Angel at the Fence" in our history classes, but we can appreciate the resilience of a man who refused to let the Holocaust destroy his spirit or his love for mankind.
