Stolen Suffering
ON a March day four years ago, a very old lady, striking, snowy-haired, unsmiling, was looking at me with disgust.A Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust, she‟d been telling me how she and her young son had managed to keep a step ahead of the people who were hunting them down, and at the end of this stupefying tale of survival I‟d looked up at her and said, “What an amazing story!” It was at that point that she flapped her spotted hand at me in disdain.“„Amazing story,‟” she mimicked me, tartly.She fetched a heavy sigh.“If you didn‟t have an amazing story, you didn‟t survive.”
She was referring to literal survival, of course — survival at its meanest, most animal level, the mere continuance of the organism.At a time when Jews throughout Europe were being rounded up like livestock or hunted down like game, survival indeed depended on feats of endurance or daring so extreme, on accidents or luck so improbable, that they can seem too far-fetched to be true.
A Jewish couple who hid in the attic of a Nazi officers‟ club, forced to listen as the soldiers below joked and drank after a day‟s slaughter; two young brothers who hid in a forest, strapping the hooves of deer to their feet whenever they ventured into the snow to confuse those who were trying to find them; a youth who, the day before the Germans entered his Polish hometown, left home and just kept walking east, until he reached ...China.
I heard these stories firsthand five years ago, while researching a book about relatives of mine who didn‟t survive.But still they keep coming.Last Monday, I heard about an orphaned Jewish girl who trekked 2,000 miles from Belgium to Ukraine, surviving the Warsaw ghetto, murdering a German officer, and — most “amazing” of all — taking refuge in forests where she was protected by kindly wolves.
The problem is that this story is a lie: recounted in a 1997 international bestseller by Misha Levy Defonseca, it was exposed last week as a total fabrication — no trekking, no Warsaw, no murder, no wolves.(No Jews, either: the author, whose real name is Monique De Wael, is Roman Catholic.) To be sure, phony memoirs aren‟t news: in 1998 the acclaimed child-survivor memoir “Fragments” was proved a fake, and more recently James Frey‟s credibility infamously exploded into a million little pieces.But the trickle now seems to be a flood.Just days after the revelations about Ms.De Wael‟s book yet another popular first-person account of extreme suffering turned out to be a fraud.(This one, “Love and Consequences,” purports to be the autobiography of a young half-white, half-American Indian woman who was raised by a black foster mother in the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles.) This trend sheds alarming light on a cultural moment in which the meanings of suffering, identity and “reality” itself seem to have become dangerously slippery.
Each of the new books commits a fraud far more reprehensible than Mr.Frey‟s self-dramatizing enhancements.The first is a plagiarism of other people‟s trauma.Both were written not, as they claim to be, by members of oppreed claes (the Jews during World War II, the impoverished African-Americans of Los Angeles today), but by members of relatively safe or privileged claes.Ms.De Wael was a Christian Belgian who was raised by close relatives after her parents, Resistance members, were taken away; Margaret Seltzer, the author of “Love and Consequences,” grew up in a tony Los Angeles neighborhood and attended an Episcopal day school.
In each case, then, a comparatively privileged person has appropriated the real traumas suffered by real people for her own benefit — a boon to the career and the bank account, but more interestingly, judging from the authors‟ comments, a kind of psychological gratification, too.Ms.Seltzer has talked about being “torn,” about wanting somehow to ventriloquize her subjects, to “put a voice to people who people don‟t listen to.” Ms.De Wael has similarly referred to a longing to be part of the group to which she did not, emphatically, belong: “I felt different.It‟s true that, since forever, I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community.” (“Felt Jewish” is repellent: real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.)
While these statements want to suggest a somehow admirable desire to “empathize” with the oppreed subjects, this sentimental gesture both mirrors and exploits a widespread, quite pernicious cultural confusion about identity and suffering.We have so often been invited, in the past decade and a half, to “feel the pain” of others that we rarely pause to wonder whether this is, in fact, a good thing
Empathy and pity are strong and neceary emotions that deepen our sense of connection to others; but they depend on a kind of metaphorical imagination of what others are going through.The facile
aumption that we can literally “feel others‟ pain” can be dangerous to our sense of who we are — and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too.“We all have AIDS,” a recent public-awarene campaign declared.Well, no, actually we don‟t: and to pretend that we do, even rhetorically, debases the anguish of those who are stricken.
四年前三月的那一天，一位引人注目的、满脸严肃的银发老妇人愤愤地瞪了我一眼。
四年前三月的一天，一个老太太，醒目，白雪皑皑的头发，表情严肃，看着我的厌恶。是一个波兰犹太人的大屠杀中幸存下来，她告诉我，她和她年幼的儿子是如何设法保持领先一步的人猎杀它们，在这种愚民的生存故事的结束，我看着她说，“这是一个惊人的故事！”这是在这一点上，她拍着斑的手在我不屑。 “令人惊讶的故事，”她模仿我，刻薄。她取出一个沉重的叹息。 “如果你没有一个惊人的故事，你也无法生存。”
她指的是文字生存，当然最“惊艳”的所有没有徒步旅行，华沙，没有谋杀，没有狼。 （没有犹太人，无论是作者，他的真名是莫妮克瓦伊勒阿布，是罗马天主教）。可以肯定的是，不是假的回忆录的消息：在1998年，著名的儿童幸存者回忆录“记忆碎片”被证明是假的，并最近詹姆斯·弗雷的信誉臭名昭著的爆炸成万的小件。但涓涓细流，现在似乎是洪水。仅仅几天后，约女士德瓦伊勒阿布的书的启示，另一种流行的第一人称帐户的极度痛苦竟然是一个骗局。 （这其中，“爱与后果”，看来是一个年轻的半白，半美国的印度女人提出一个黑色的养母在该团伙出没的洛杉矶街头的自传）。这种趋势揭示惊人光的时刻，痛苦，身份与“现实”本身的含义似乎已经成为了危险滑的文化。
的新书中的每一个都犯了欺诈行为更应该受到谴责比先生弗雷的自我戏剧化的改进。第一个是抄袭别人的创伤。两人都写的，因为他们声称，被压迫阶级的成员（犹太人在二战期间，贫困的非裔美国人今天在洛杉矶），但相对安全或特权阶级的成员。德瓦伊勒阿布女士是一个基督徒，比利时被带走后，她的父母，抵抗运动成员，近亲属提出的，“爱与后果的作者，玛格丽特Seltzer的”长大了托尼洛杉矶附近，并出席了主教的一天学校。
然后，在每一种情况下，一个比较特权的人拨了真正的她自己的真实的人而且，更令人震惊的，别人是谁，太。最近的公共宣传运动宣布：“我们都有艾滋病”。哦，不，其实我们不和假装，我们甚至反问，那些没有遭到贬低的痛苦。
