PLEASE STOP MAKING SOPPY STORIES OUT OF THE HOLOCAUST

The recent admission by Herman Rosenblat that his Holocaust memoir “Angel at the Fence” contains significant fabricated material has created another Freyian scandal for the luckless Oprahcorp. Hopefully, it has also sent a blaring clarion call to the world to please, please, please stop making soppy love stories and human compassion tales forged by the tragic events of the Holocaust.

I don’t know why there exists this urgent need to turn the Holocaust into a paint-by-numbers genre. At the time that this deception was uncovered, there was already a children’s book based on the memoir published last September called “Angel Girl”, and a $25m film adaptation in production called “Flower of the Fence”. So high was the Holocaust hubris (or so wretched the metaphor) among the marketing mandarins that both of these projects were greenlighted before the book was even published. And how could you blame them when Oprah, with only a tinge of overstatement, exclaimed that Rosenblat’s memoir was “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air”?

As with many of these cases, people believe it because they want to believe it, because they’re told to. How else could you explain the mass naivete that fueled Madoff’s decades-long Ponzi scheme? Not long ago I managed to shock a friend with my vociferous denunciation of the film “The Boy in Striped Pajamas” (tagline: “A timeless story of innocence lost and humanity found”), yet another in a long line of faux-profound, mawkish melodramas that prey upon our intrinsic sympathies with human suffering and condemnation of human brutality. I think this calls for a corollary to Godwin’s Law: As the amount of time after the last award-winning, harrowing Holocaust drama lengthens, lesser Holocaust dramas will follow inversely.

As many of the so-called "Greatest Generation" begin to die off, the tendency to reify their sacrifice and use the Holocaust as our great moral centre has reached a fever pitch. (This is nothing new, as the reframing of our Civil War as the war against slavery attests.) This trend has proven irresistible to lazy novelists and screenwriters looking to imitate the success of “Schindler’s List” or “Life Is Beautiful” or “The Pianist”. Has the prestige and easy draw of these films, together with the enduring popularity of such classics as “The Diary of Anne Frank”, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, made the temptation to cash in on Jewish suffering too great? At what point does the public decide that what is before them resembles neither good storytelling nor a necessary educational document?

My personal experience with the Holocaust goes no further than visiting Auschwitz a decade ago. But seeing a small roomful of glasses piled nearly five feet high said more about the atrocities than anything I have ever come across written or filmed. The Holocaust is in no danger of being forgotten (see the hue and cry over Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust Industry”), but we must reconsider letting it be trivialised beyond all recognition (I’m talking to you, Tom Cruise). Still, my own Holocaust fatigue won’t stop me from seeing the movie based on Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader”, a novel concerned with our ability to process an historical event like the Holocaust; I’m hoping that it will signal a smarter and less patronising wave of remembrance for the future. ~ DANIEL ARIZONA