A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski - Hardcover

Eskin, Blake

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048713 ISBN 13: 9780393048711

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2002

Synopsis

The story of a faked Holocaust memoir by Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of the award-winning Fragments, is exposed by the author, who tracks down the real survivor family that was impersonated in the hoax.

About this title

About the Author

Blake Eskin has written for The New Yorker, the Forward, and other publications. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

HWhen Binjamin Wilkomirski published his childhood Holocaust memoir, Fragments, in 1996, it was met with both popular and critical praise. Soon, however, people began to voice concern over its authenticity , which ended in a full-fledged debunking on 60 Minutes in 1999. While much has been written about Wilkomirski, this stunning analysis by journalist Eskin is not only the best and most compelling account of the case, but places it in a broader social, political and cultural context that raises vital issues about history, identity, as well as personal and political responsibility. While the frame of the book is a fascinating personal memoir/journalistic investigation (Eskin's family, immigrant Jews from Latvia, contact Wilkomirski thinking they might be related to him), the power of the work comes from the author's ability to marshal the central arguments over Wilkomirski's life and work in order to illuminate the more important and interesting question of how humans deal with trauma. Moving from the specific, Eskin touches on such broader and controversial topics as what happens when Holocaust memoirs are exposed as fiction, thus giving fuel to Holocaust deniers; how Wilkomirski's book helped assuage Swiss guilt over Switzerland's actions during WWII; how Holocaust literature has become emblematic of human suffering, allowing even non-Holocaust survivors to identify with and take on the metaphors of "the survivor." This is brought home in Eskin's discussion of Lauren Grabowski, a Christian woman posing as a Jewish survivor who, under the name of Lauren Stratford, wrote an enormously popular, and discredited, memoir of child sexual abuse, Satan's Underground. A mixture of thrilling detective work and astute cultural criticism, this is an important contribution to Holocaust literature as well as to studies of psychological and cultural trauma. (Feb.)Forecast: This is bound to get major media attention, as Wilkomirski's story did, and will have brisk sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

This is ostensibly a retelling of the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss musician who deceived the world with a wholly invented "memoir" of a childhood destroyed by the Holocaust. But, while Eskin offers a fascinating portrait of Wilkomirski in all his piteous self-delusion, the real importance of his book lies in its critical look at the broader so- cial and historical forces that allowed his hoax to flourish, including the recovered-memory movement, the community of Jewish child survivors, the intricacies of Switzerland's relationship with Nazi Germany, and the seemingly irresistible trend toward the sentimentalization of the Holocaust. After meeting Wilkomirski (before his unmasking), Eskin embarked on a quest to discover what had happened to his mother's relatives during the Second World War. In acknowledging his own hunger for some connection to historical catastrophe, he offers a convincing explanation of why people were so eager to be deluded.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

When Eskin learned of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1996), a prizewinning Holocaust memoir, he wondered if the author might be a distant relative. The Wilburs, a branch of his family, were Jewish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust and whose name had once been Wilkomirski. While the Wilburs, including Eskin's mother, embraced the author, Eskin was skeptical. Wilkomirski's memoir, a moving account based on traumatic memories recalled from very early childhood, was eventually deconstructed by an array of journalists and Holocaust researchers. Early on, Eskin was torn between family loyalty and his own journalistic imperatives. He also recounts the ambivalence among survivors--some castigating the hoax, fearful that it would feed skeptics, others appreciative of Wilkomirski's eloquent rendering of their suffering. Eskin began probing Wilkomirski's early life (and that of the Wilbur family), as well as the controversies of identifying Holocaust survivors and the legitimacy of recovered memories from childhood. This is an incredibly absorbing look at Holocaust survivors and family identity. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In 1997, Wilkomirski won acclaim for Fragments, his memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a young Jewish boy and was then accused of being a gentile who made the whole thing up. Here, journalist Eskin, who is related to the Wilkomirskis the author claimed as his own, tries to penetrate the mystery.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393048713
• ISBN 13: 9780393048711
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320