Over at The New Republic blog The Plank, the magazine’s editors offer a helpful recap of how their reporter successfully exposed a Holocaust memoir as a hoax. The memoir, authored by Herman Rosenblat, describes how as an internee at Buchenwald during the Holocaust, a young girl would throw apples to him over the fence. In New York after the war, the two met on a blind date and married.
On Saturday, the book’s publisher pulled the plug after initially defending Rosenblat in the face of the TNR expose. A film version of the story will go forward as a fictional account.
And they’re not the only ones with egg on the face. Oprah Winfrey, who has some experience with fabricated memoirs, hosted the author twice — twice! — on her show, and called the memoir the greatest love story she had ever encountered.
The original TNR piece by Gabriel Sherman is here.
