Wiesel’s Night, Oprah’s fog
Elie Wiesel must be heartened that Oprah Winfrey selected his 1960 book Night for her monthly book club. Anointment by Oprah sends a book’s sales into the stratosphere. Wiesel doesn’t strike me as a writer who is chasing either fame or money, but I expect he savors the opportunity to raise Holocaust awareness among millions of new readers.
I’d feel better, however, if the selection weren’t tied to Oprah’s spin control over the James Frey controversy. When an investigative Web site reported that Frey embellished the facts for his 2003 addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, Oprah, who had promoted the book in October, was unapologetic. Despite the author’s inventions, she wrote, “the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me.”
Frey’s fabrications set off a round of navel-gazing about the nature of Truth and autobiography, and Oprah upped the ante when she announced her selection of Night. For Wiesel, it may be a case of being careful what you wish for.
The choice immediately set off an old argument about whether to classify Night as fiction or nonfiction. Barnes & Noble and Amazon both said they were removing Night from its fiction lists and labeling it nonfiction. The Forward brought up a story from 1996 about Jewish studies professor Naomi Seidman, who found discrepancies between the Yiddish and French versions of Wiesel’s book — although the differences were more in tone and philosophy than the actual facts of Wiesel’s experiences at Auschwitz.
Wiesel himself was forced to clear the air in an interview with The New York Times. Night “is not a novel at all,” Wiesel said. “All the people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone mentions it as a novel.”
And yet, in the past, Wiesel hasn’t helped matters in this regard. In 1972, Hill & Wang packaged Night with two other books, Dawn and The Accident, which Wiesel clearly identified as novels. The set’s cover refers to the works as “Three Tales by Elie Wiesel.” In a later edition of the same volume, Wiesel refers to all three books as “narratives,” although he calls Night a “testimony,” and the other two “commentaries.”
I suspect that Wiesel is being neither coy nor deceptive, but in fact modest about the aspirations of memoir. He appears to be saying that Night is a true “testimony” about what he experienced at Auschwitz, but that all memoirs are by their nature subjective. In shaping raw material into a narrative, a writer must also decide what to leave out and leave in. Acknowledging this is humility, not post-modernism.
And it is a far cry from Frey’s deception, in which he inflated a brief detainment into a three-month incarceration and apparently altered details of his drug and alcohol rehabilitation in ways that can’t simply be chalked up to poor memory or a matter of interpretation.
Still, the person who seems to have suffered most from Frey’s deceptions is Frey himself. The stakes in a debate about Holocaust memoirs are infinitely higher. The Forward doesn’t mention this, but Seidman’s article has become, unwittingly, a favorite among Holocaust deniers. Anticipating this, some historians, like Peter Novick, suggest that survivors’ memories “are not a very useful historical source. Or, rather, some may be, but we don’t know which ones.”
Manhattan attorney Menachem Rosensaft, chair of the editorial board of the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, rejects Novick’s thesis out of hand. “Novick and others who dismiss the survivors’ accounts basically are saying they rely more on German documents regardless of accuracy,” Rosensaft told me. “They give greater weight to the diaries of Goebbels or Eichmann than they do to the memoirs or diaries of the victims.”
Rosensaft’s Memoirs Project does submit the manuscripts it publishes to historians at Yad Vashem, where they are vetted for “glaring inaccuracies.” The testimonies’ worth, said Rosensaft, is what they reveal beyond the statistics and impersonal facts of history. “‘This is what it was like,’ they say. ‘This is what it felt like, this is what I experienced.’”
Of course, Frey uses a similar defense, defining a memoir as “an individual’s perception of what happened in their own life.”
So how do you decide when a memoirist breaks his pact with the reader and the truth? It’s a matter of degree. After allowing for simple mistakes or events that can honestly be interpreted in different ways by different witnesses, you need to trust that the writer attempted to get the “gettable” facts right — dates, locations, participants. I hesitate to compare Frey to Wiesel, but there is no question that Wiesel was at Auschwitz when he says he was.
Oprah blurs these clear distinctions. The timing of her choice seems to be a challenge to readers and reporters, as if to say, “Frey is no different from Elie Wiesel in that all memoirists shape the raw materials of reality in highly personal ways. I dare you to call Night a fraud.”
Oprah is holding up Night — and by extension, the Holocaust — as a shield against her critics. If that was her intent, it’s incredibly, even obscenely, cynical. And if it wasn’t her intent, someone on Team Oprah should have anticipated that it could only be interpreted that way.
Menachem Rosensaft would not be drawn into criticism of Oprah and prefers to dwell on the vast audience that will be introduced to Wiesel’s Holocaust testimony. “As a result of Oprah’s choice,” he said, “millions of people will read one of the most important first-person accounts of the Holocaust and will have a window opened into the most cataclysmic experience of the 20th century.”
I hope Oprah is one of those readers and learns that there are some experiences that are larger than her reputation.