Posted on 04/28/2005 9:51:03 PM PDT by nickcarraway
It was the kind of headline that sells. "Michael Chabon's Holocaust Hoax," read the cover of the April-May issue of Bookforum. Inside, the article, by Paul Maliszewski, suggested that Mr. Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, had exceeded the bounds of poetic license in a lecture that he has given perhaps half a dozen times since 2003.
In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Eldest Son's Name Is Napoleon," Mr. Chabon recounts a version of his childhood, laced with some tall tales (saying, for instance, that he has encountered several golems, the clay monsters of Jewish lore), and tells the story of a counterfeit Holocaust survivor he'd once met who turns out to be an ex-Nazi in hiding.
Mr. Maliszewski pointed out that the Nazi character was entirely fictional, and contended that Mr. Chabon had misled his listeners into believing it was real. He suggested that Mr. Chabon had "fashioned a Jewish identity for himself that incorporates - through an utter fiction - the Holocaust."
The lecture's organizers have said the lecture was clearly advertised as a series of yarns. In a letter that will be printed in the next issue of Bookforum, Matthew Brogan, program director for the Jewish literary nonprofit organization Nextbook, which sponsored some of the performances, wrote that Mr. Chabon had "signaled to the audience at every turn that the narrator is not to be completely trusted." Mr. Maliszewski, he added, had "deliberately misread these signs in the hope of stirring up a scandal."
In the Bookforum article, Mr. Maliszewski admits that, as a reporter at a Syracuse business newspaper, he besieged his own paper with parodic letters to the editor. Later, he became the Web editor of McSweeney's Quarterly, a job that his editor said ended when Mr. Maliszewski sent McSweeney's subscribers an anonymous e-mail newsletter full of invented gossip about other writers.
"Hundreds of people around New York were getting some incredibly blasphemous e-mail full of incredible fabrications," said Dave Eggers, McSweeney's editor. "His contention was that people knew it was a joke. Nobody but him thought it was a joke."
Mr. Maliszewski did not reply to several calls and e-mail messages asking for comment. Mr. Chabon declined to comment on the Bookforum article, saying that he "prefers to have his work speak for itself."
BTTT
Chabon is a terrific writer. 'The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay' was fab.
Where are the pie-throwers when you need them?
Sounds like an amusing little literary spat. I recall twenty years ago reading thriller writer Bari Wood's "The Tribe" about a closely knit group of Holocaust survivors (one of whom is a rabbi and Cabbalistic scholar) who fashioned a golem to protect them when they were in a death camp and years later, in Brooklyn, fashion another to take revenge on some teenage punks who murder his son. The Amazon.com reviewers looked down their noses at it but I recall staying up half the night reading it through. Which wasn't easy as being a seaman on the USS DALE I had to spend the night in the head as it was the only spot with the lights on.
The jewish "Exorcist" if you will. I think it would make a great movie.
Sounds like he watched the magnum PI episode where magnum is searching for a man everyone thinks is a holocaust survivor - he has the tattoos and evertyhing - except it turns out he's an SS man on the run from people who have caught up to him.
This would all be worthwhile if it turns out Michael Chabon was cadging from magnum P.I.
I haven't read Kavalier and Klay, but Wonder Boys is absolutely amazing. The film was a pretty good interpretation of it, too.
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