Oh, what tangled webs we weave. Even Oprah & her mighty book club got taken in by the jewish snake oil selling charlatans.
When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of E-lieWiesel. It's as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence. One can easily see why Oprah Winfrey & her advisers saw an Auschwitz excursion in the company of Wiesel as a sure-fire antidote to salve the wounds sustained by Oprah's Book Club when it turned out that James Frey, had faked significant slabs of his own supposedly autobiographical saga of moral regeneration "A Million Little Pieces".
Published in 2003, Frey's irksome book swiftly became a cult classic. Winfrey picked it for her Book Club in September 2005, and it rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists.
For Frey the sky fell in when, on January 7, 2006, the Smoking Gun website, published documents showing that Frey had fabricated many facts about himself, including a criminal record. There were later charges of plagiarism. Frey ran through a benign gauntlet of trial-by-Larry King on January 11, & Oprah called in to stand by her Pick of the Month. She said that what mattered was not whether Frey's book was true (the Fundamentalist claim for the Holy Bible) but its value as a therapeutic tool (the modern Anglican position on the Good Book).
But by now every columnist & books page editor in America was wrestling the truth-or-fiction issue to the ground. Oprah turned on Frey. On her show on January 26, he clung to the ropes, offering the excuse that the "demons" that had driven him to drink & drugs had also driven him into claiming that everything he wrote about himself was true. Publishers including Random House, which has made millions off him, had rejected the book when he'd initially offered it as a "fiction novel". Oprah brushed this aside.
Amazon.com got the message quickly enough. The site had been categorizing the new edition of Night under "fiction and literature" but, under the categorical imperative of Kakutani's "memory as a sacred act" or a phone call from Wiesel's publisher, hastily switched it to "biography and memoir". Within hours it had reached number 3 on Amazon's bestseller list. That same evening, January 17, Night topped both the "biography" and "fiction" bestseller lists on BarnesandNoble.com.
Joshua Cohen reminded Forward readers that in 1996, Naomi Seidman, a Jewish Studies professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, had compared the original 1956 Yiddish version of the book with the subsequent, drastically edited translation of "night".
"According to Seidman's account, published in the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies", Cohen wrote, "Wiesel substantially rewrote the work between editions - suggesting that the strident & vengeful tone of the Yiddish original was converted into a continental, angst-ridden existentialism, more fitting to Wiesel's emerging role as an ambassador of culture/conscience. Most important, Seidman wrote that Wiesel, altered several facts in the later edition, in some cases offering accounts of pivotal moments that conflicted with the earlier version.
PT
