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?
The conflict between the freedom to invent and an honest confrontation with the constraints of the historical record remains muddled—and, often enough, muddied. If the subject were, say, the Homeric wars, the muddle might be benign, even frolicsome, a simulacrum of trickster literature. But the subject is the Holocaust, and the issue is probable fraud, hoax, or delusion. What is permissible to the playfully ingenious author of Robinson Crusoe—fiction masking as chronicle—is not permitted to those who touch on the destruction of six million souls, and on the extirpation of their millennial civilization in Europe.
Yet the question of the uses of the imagination does not and cannot stop even here. Beyond the acrobatics of impersonation, or the nervy fakery of usurpation, lies a sacred zone consecrated to the power of art: or call it, more modestly, literature’s elastic license. I have in mind two novels, Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron, and The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink—one first brought out in 1979, the other published in 1998; one long acclaimed, the work of a contemporary American literary master, the other by a highly praised German writer. Both novels clearly intend to attach their stories to the actuality of the death camps.
Sophie’s Choice followed by a dozen years Styron’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Confessions of Nat Turner, and, like the latter, became a celebrated best-seller. Opening as a richly literary Bildungsroman, it recounts the often beguiling fortunes of Stingo, an untried young Southern writer whose attraction to New York lands him in Brooklyn, “the Kingdom of the Jews.” In Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman’s rooming house, Stingo meets Nathan Landau and his lover, a beautiful Polish woman named Sophie. Nathan is Jewish and mad—a paranoid schizophrenic, erratic when lucid, brutal and suicidal otherwise. Sophie is tormented by a horrific past, which she discloses to Stingo, piecemeal, as the two halves of the novel, Brooklyn and Auschwitz, begin to converge. And it is on account of Sophie’s Auschwitz tribulations that Sophie’s Choice has had an enduring reputation as a “Holocaust novel.”
There is some justification for this, at least for the well-researched historical sections dealing with the Final Solution in Poland. Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, affirms that ninety to ninety-five percent of the victims of Auschwitz were Jews, and Styron’s factual passages do not depart from this observation. His information concerning Polish Christians in Auschwitz is far thinner; it is, in fact, nearly absent. He gives us Sophie herself, but fails to surround her with the kind of documentation that he supplies for the deportation of Jews—exact dates of arrival in Auschwitz, for instance, as when he recounts the gassing of a contingent of Greek Jews, or when he enumerates figures for the Jewish population of Warsaw before 1939, or when he notes that the “resettlement” from the Warsaw Ghetto took place in July and August of 1942. Wherever the fingerprint of Styron’s Holocaust research appears—and it appears frequently and accurately—it points to Jews.
When he turns to Polish Christians, he apprises us of the Nazis’ Lebensborn project, which sent “Aryan”-looking Polish children to be reared as Germans in Germany; of the Polish resistance movements, many of them zealously anti-Semitic—though the two resistance workers featured in the novel are passionately concerned for Jews; of a boxcar filled with the corpses of Polish children rejected for Lebensborn; and of the rescinded plan to tattoo Polish Christian prisoners. Sophie’s father and husband are depicted as serious Jew-haters. For the 75,000 Polish Christians murdered in Auschwitz, Styron’s novel provides no data, no detail; or, rather, Sophie alone is the detail. But 75,000 Polish Christians were murdered in Auschwitz, and that is fact enough. If Styron’s Auschwitz research leads voluminously to Jews, it is because the murdered Jews voluminously outnumbered the murdered Polish Christians; yet—incontrovertibly—the factory of inhumanity that was Auschwitz produced complete equality of unsurpassed human suffering. Here there can be no hierarchy, nor may suffering be measured in numbers, or by majorities, or by percentages.
Still, what does it signify—does it signify at all—that the author of Sophie’s Choice chooses as his protagonist an inmate of Auschwitz who is a Polish Catholic? Here is a fictional decision that by no means contradicts a historical reality. It is the truth—but is it the whole truth, the representative truth? And again, under the rules of fiction, why must a writer’s character be representative of a statistical norm? Under the rules of fiction, if Bovary is not typical of most French women, and if Karenina is not typical of most Russian women, why should William Styron’s Sophie be representative of the preponderant female population of Auschwitz? What does the autonomy of the imagination owe to a demographic datum? Or ask instead, what does individual suffering owe to the norm? Will the identity of the norm dare to compromise or diminish or denigrate one woman’s anguish?
Come now to Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, a novel by a practicing judge, a professor of law at the University of Berlin. Its narrator is a law student who is presented as a self-conscious member of the “second generation”—the children of those who were responsible for the Nazi regime. The narrative begins postwar, when an intellectual teenage boy, the future law student, strikes up an unexpected friendship with a streetcar conductor, a woman markedly older than himself. The disparate friends rapidly become lovers, and their affair takes on an unusual routine of added romantic pleasure: in scenes tender and picturesque, as in a Dutch interior, the boy reads aloud to the woman. Only many years later—the occasion is a war crimes trial—is the woman revealed as an illiterate. And as something else besides: she is a former S.S. guard in a camp dedicated to the murder of Jews. An unsuspecting youth in the arms of an unconfessed female Nazi: over this retrospective image falls, unavoidably, the shadow of what some call Nazi porn.
Contemplating the predicament of young Germans after their nation’s defeat, the narrator asks, “What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews?… Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt?” “Our parents,” he explains,
had played a variety of roles in the Third Reich. Several among our fathers had been in the war, two or three of them as officers of the Wehrmacht and one as an officer of the Waffen SS. Some of them had held positions in the judiciary or local government. Our parents also included teachers and doctors and … a high official in the Ministry of the Interior.
In short, an educated generation. To the narrator’s observations let us add Goebbels, a novelist and playwright, Speer, an accomplished architect, and perhaps also Goering, an art collector—or looter—with a taste for masterpieces. None of this can surprise. Germany before the Second World War was known to have the most educated population in Europe, with the highest standard of literacy. Yet the plot of Schlink’s narrative turns not on the literacy that was overwhelmingly typical of Germany, but rather on an anomalous case of illiteracy, which the novel itself recognizes as freakish.
And this freakishness is Schlink’s premise and his novel’s engine: an unlettered woman who, because she could not r
ead a paper offering her a job in a factory, passed up the chance and was sent instead to serve in a brutal camp. After the war, when she is brought to trial, the narrator acknowledges that she is guilty of despicable crimes—but he also believes that her illiteracy can, to a degree, mitigate her guilt. Had she been able to read, she would have been a factory worker, not an agent of murder. Her crimes are illiteracy’s accident. Illiteracy is her exculpation.
Again the fictive imagination presses its question: is the novelist obligated to represent typicality? If virtually universal literacy was the German reality, how can a novel, under the rules of fiction, be faulted for choosing what is atypical? The novelist is neither sociologist, nor journalist, nor demographer, nor reality-imitator; and never mind that the grotesquely atypical turns out to be, in this work by a member of the shamed and remorseful second generation, a means of exculpation. Characters come as they will, in whatever form, one by one; and the rights of imagination are not the rights of history. A work of fiction, by definition, cannot betray history. Nor must a novel be expected to perform like a camera.
If there is any answer at all to this argument (and the argument has force), it must lie in the novelist’s intention. Intention is almost always a private, or perhaps a secret, affair, and we may never have access to it. Besides, the writer’s motivation does not always reveal itself even to the writer. It would seem, though, that when a novel comes to us with the claim that it is directed consciously toward history, that the divide between history and the imagination is being purposefully bridged, that the bridging is the very point, and that the design of the novel is to put human flesh on historical notation, then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force. The investigation of motive is history’s task, and here a suspicion emerges: that Sophie in Styron’s novel was not conceived as a free fictional happenstance, but as an inscribed symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure—Anne Frank, let us say; and that the unlettered woman in Schlink’s novel is the product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur.
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