Wanted: The Next Herman Rosenblat
By Eleanor Goldberg
Herman Rosenblat certainly wasn’t the first to fake a Holocaust memoir, and since it’s unlikely that he’ll be the last, Heeb magazine is soliciting such “talent” before Oprah inadvertently gets her hands on them.
The magazine recently unveiled its Fake Holocaust Memoir Competition — soliciting would-be authors to pen their very own faux first person Holocaust tale. The panel is accepting submissions until April 1; the winner will be announced on April 21, which, not coincidentally, is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The winning entry will be published in the subsequent issue of the quarterly magazine. Not quite “Oprah,” but still…
January 19, 2009, 5:07pm
Oprah Speaks Out on Holocaust Memoir Hoax
By Eleanor Goldberg
It’s been nearly a month since Berkley Books pulled Herman Rosenblat’s fictionalized Holocaust memoir, “Angel at the Fence.” But only now is the defamed author — whose Nazi-era love story was exposed as a hoax in the New Republic — facing an even more daunting consequence of his actions: Oprah Winfrey’s verdict.Oprah had interviewed Rosenblat and his wife, Roma, twice on her show; she hailed their tale as “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on air.”
But aside from a December 27 disclaimer on Oprah.com, the talk show queen only recently opened up about the incident. “I’m very disappointed,” she told her audience, during the taping of a January 15 episode. “That’s what happens with lies. They get bigger and bigger and bigger.”
According to Oprah, Rosenblat offered to “explain himself” on her popular daytime show, but his lawyer ultimately squashed the plan.
Oprah’s response to Rosenblat was a mere peep in comparison to her on-air chastising of “James Frey, whose memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” was discredited after it had been featured prominently on “Oprah.”
Fool Oprah Once...
By Gabrielle Birkner
Oprah is a woman of many talents, but spotting fakes, apparently, isn’t one of them. Three years after selecting James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” for her on-air book club — only later to learn that the so-called memoir contained more than a few fabrications — the “Queen of Talk” has, once again, been had.
Over the weekend Berkley Books canceled the memoir of Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor whom Oprah twice featured on her daytime show. Rosenblat’s book “Angel at the Fence” recounted a Nazi-era love story and post-war reunion. But after the veracity of that tale was called into question in The New Republic, the author recanted his story and the publishing house nixed plans for the book’s February 3 release.
Rosenblat had written about the little girl who helped save his life by tossing apples over the fence of the concentration camp where he had been imprisoned; as the story goes, the two would meet on a blind date more than a decade later. They have been married for 50 years.
The Rosenblats appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1996 and 2007 — and the talk show host deemed their romance “the single greatest love story” she had ever heard.
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