More Memoir Doubt: Angel at the Fence

This is part of a long New Republic post on December 25.

The battle over Angel at the Fence is part of a larger struggle for control over the Holocaust narrative. Scholars like Waltzer and Lipstadt are disturbed by the media blitz pushing Herman's story to the masses. "My hair is standing on edge," Lipstadt told me. "He has instrumentalized the Holocaust. This is the worst possible thing you can do on so many levels." To them, selling the Holocaust as Hollywood kitsch sanitizes its horrors. "It makes it nice," Lipstadt says. "I just wait to hear in the movie for the violins."

Salomon, the movie producer, disagrees. He believes that the mass appeal of Herman's story is precisely what makes it so important to be told. "The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America," 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."

From the New Republic. On Saturday, December 27, Berkley Books announced that it is canceling publication of Angel at the Fence.


And here's today's NYT update:

This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.

In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat’s editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke, director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate beyond the company’s brief statement announcing the cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to comment.

An Unidentified Narrative Object, Gomorrah, & The Hindu

The Hindu on the nature of the new narrative.

In the mid-19th century, an angry not-so-young man, wishing to write his “complete representation of reality” had been, in the words of biographer Francis Wheen, “pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage — juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports”, injecting his long, detailed narrative with hardboiled newspaper reports as well as using devilish metaphors (a favourite of mine from an earlier publication: “...all that is solid melts into air” to describe dislocation).

In a way, Gomorrah, with its contemporary descriptions of “capital [being] dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” is the mini Das Kapital of our times. And to mistake Saviano’s masterpiece as just ‘journalism’ would be to mistake Marx’s tumultuous classic as simply ‘economic theory’. It might not be everything that’s fit to print. But that’s our problem of defining the ‘fitness’ of things.

So not the new "The Queen" then?

Among the film’s most literally incredible moments are those that show President George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), played by James Cromwell without the slightest effort to resemble the man, being decisive, authoritative, forceful, and even manly, qualities he managed to keep under wraps during three decades in the public eye. Playing the title role, Josh Brolin misreads the president’s stiff, just got-off-a-horse body language as a reason to stay in motion at all times, notably during his initial encounter with Laura (Elizabeth Banks, who gives the only restrained performance) at a barbecue. Here and elsewhere W.’s body flits around as if he’s undergoing shock therapy; here and elsewhere, W. speaks, disgustingly, with his mouth open as if he just blew in from the trailer park instead of Skull and Bones.

Pajamasmedia kaels over. Where is Helen Mirren when you need her to play Barbara Bush?