The XX Factor: What women really think.

Ixnay on the Candy Coating

Well, I end the year with a mea culpa: I should have read the New Republic piece about Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat before piping up to defend him. But even after doing so, I agree most with this part of what one of the scholars who initially questioned the veracity of Rosenblat's memoir said: "The most tragic part is that [Herman's] embellishments have no impact at all on the essence of the story of his suffering. ... He invented a love story to go with it. I am not excusing him for doing this—of course this could be a false memory incident—but I am cautioning a note of sadness as opposed to some of the 'gotcha' things that are floating around.''

Noreen raises a good question about what in the world Mrs. Rosenblat was thinking all this time. It was after being shot in a robbery in the '90s that her husband apparently woke up from a dream featuring his mother and only then started telling people this wild story about how she had chucked apples over the fence for him to eat when he was a prisoner in a concentration camp. Was he shot in the head in this robbery or what? (Seriously. Did the shooting impair him cognitively or otherwise unhinge him?) Was his wife going along with this fabrication to cover for him? How did their friends and family react? Her family, if she had any, had to have known all along that the story wasn't true. Why did it take more than a decade for any of them to challenge the story? If someone you loved were about to go on national TV and tell an earth-shattering whopper, wouldn't that be the time to speak up? I'd like to hear a lot more from those around the Rosenblats.

And, meanwhile, am repulsed by the attitude of the guy producing the movie based on Rosenblat's fable: " 'The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America,' [movie producer Harris] Salomon said. 'Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done.' " Noooooooooo; please hold both the condescension and the candy coating. In defending accessibility, sugary treats were not what I had in mind.

More on Herman Rosenblat

Once More, With Subtitles

Ben, your response to my defense of Herman Rosenblat made me think that maybe my post was itself too inaccessible, so let me be clearer: My point wasn't that films about the Holocaust have been made in other countries, too. (Duh.) It was that the impulse to focus on resistance fighters and the odd righteous Gentile is not just an American thing, and that prettifying is what Hollywood does. But I am not arguing in favor of spiffing up the Holocaust, for heaven's sake. And I am certainly not saying that art of any kind has to be uplifting in order to be accessible. I personally think everyone should see Shoah, preferably in a theater and on back-to-back evenings, but there are other, more accessible ways to tell the truth about the Holocaust, and they don't necessarily have to be sneered at.

I do not defend the Hallmarkization of the Holocaust; what I defend is this man who lived through it and needs no lectures from us about the truth of it. None of us knows how we would come through an experience like his, but if his way of keeping his sanity was to imagine a girl tossing apples at him, I don't think it is my place to stand in judgment.