| Author |
Message |
    
Robynmarie
Veteran Poster
Username: Robynmarie
Post Number: 716
Registered: 04-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 01, 2008 - 09:23 pm: | 
|
At a time when many talented writers of color are struggling to breaking into the writing biz, bigtime publishers are just giving away millions to frauds and liars. Why didn't she just call it fiction? And who the heck would believe a child was raised by a pack of wolves? Gawd!
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling "memoir" depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.
Misha Defonseca's book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," has been made into a French film.
Misha Defonseca's book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.
"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed," Defonseca said, according to a written statement the lawyers gave to The Associated Press.
Defonseca, 71, now lives in Dudley, Massachusetts. Her husband, Maurice, told The Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment.
Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.
In the statement, Defonseca acknowledged the story she wrote was a fantasy and that she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.
Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters, the statement said.
"This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving," the statement said.
"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost," the statement said.
The statement said her parents were arrested when she was 4 and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle. She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a "daughter of a traitor" because of her parents' role in the resistance, which she said led her to "feel Jewish."
She said there were moments when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."
Nathalie Uyttendaele said she and her brother contacted the author last weekend to show her material discovered by Belgian daily Le Soir, which questioned her story.
"We gave her this information and it was very difficult. She was confronted with a reality that is different from what she has been living for 70 years," Nathalie Uyttendaele said.
Pressure on the author to defend the accuracy of her book had grown in recent weeks.
"I'm not an expert on relations between humans and wolves but I am a specialist of the persecution of Jews and they (Defonseca's family) can't be found in the archives," Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg told RTL television. "The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish."
Defonseca had been asked to write the book by U.S. publisher Jane Daniel in the 1990s, after Daniel heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue.
Daniel and Defonseca fell out over profits received from the best-selling book, which led to a lawsuit. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer Vera Lee $22.5 million.
Lee, of Newton, Massachusetts, said she was shocked to hear Defonseca made up the story.
"She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case," Lee said.
Defonseca's lawyers said Daniel has not yet paid the court-ordered sum.
Daniel said Friday she would try to get the judgment overturned. She said she could not fully research Defonseca's story before it was published because the woman claimed she did not know her parents' names, her birthday or where she was born.
"There was nothing to go on to research," she said
|
A_womon
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: A_womon
Post Number: 2167
Registered: 05-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 01, 2008 - 09:33 pm: |
|
I agree Robymarie. I don't see why people insist on writing fiction and calling it "true life". Maybe they feel it won't get sensationalized as much and therefore will generate less interest from those in the position to write them a big check if they don't present their lies as truth... |
Robynmarie
Veteran Poster
Username: Robynmarie
Post Number: 719
Registered: 04-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 01, 2008 - 09:37 pm: |
|
^5 A_womon. I wonder if a writer of color had presented such a cockamamy story if it would have been bought, hook line and sinker?
After more reading it turns out this "author" sued her publisher for not promoting this garbage enough. Ironic, isn't it? |
A_womon
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: A_womon
Post Number: 2168
Registered: 05-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 01, 2008 - 10:02 pm: |
|
Now we already know the answer to that one don't we? They would have had people checking and rechecking and checking again, and they STILL would have found some little thing that wasn't quite factual enough! LOL!
But you know, I think I read a year or so ago about an Asian writer that was accused of doing something very similar, if not exactly this same thing! |
Emanuel
Veteran Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 524
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, March 02, 2008 - 12:04 am: |
|
Seems like the fabricated memoir has been around for a long time and will continue to be around. Why fabricate a memoir when you can present it as fiction? Controversy sells and memoirs are more sensational than novels that's why. In James Frey's case, I read somewhere that he was indeed trying to get his work published as fiction but was getting rejected, which is why he fabricated the memoir and got in trouble on The Oprah Winfrey Show after becoming a bestseller with Oprah's help. Seems like these type of writers should just call it fiction based on a true story like many screenplay writers do it.
The other side of the coin are the plagiarizers who claim someone else's work as their own.
What we do for fame...
As a reader, I'd be upset if I read a book that was supposed to be a memoir by someone who wrote about their personal struggles with racism, sexism, classism, etc. Imagine a writer who fabricated his experience in the Civil Rights Movement or an older work that falsified slavery incidents. I imagine the Jewish people who actually experienced Nazi persecution must feel the same way in regards to this author's case. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 6384
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 06, 2008 - 01:06 pm: |
|
At a time when many talented writers of color are struggling to breaking into the writing biz, bigtime publishers are just giving away millions to frauds and liars. Why didn't she just call it fiction? And who the heck would believe a child was raised by a pack of wolves? Gawd!
(Plenty of people--they were unconsciously accessing the Mowgli story--they get these stories of wolf boys and people raised by apes all the time in the tabloids.
What about the white girl who wrote about being a dope dealer in South Central?) |
|
Email This Page