As a ghostwriter working on a Holocaust memoir, Vera Lee wanted to go that extra mile. She not only listened to Misha Defonsca recall her childhood story of wandering across Europe, she wanted to experience some of the same things.
In an interview with the Boston Globe’s David Mehegan, Lee says when she heard Defonseca had eaten mud to survive, she went out and tried a little mud. When Defonseca said she had scaled the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto, Lee, who was in her 70s at the time, tried climbing a brick wall in front of a neighbor’s house in Newton.
“I really wanted to understand what she was thinking,” Lee tells Mehegan. “She wanted me to taste raw meat, which I did after she assured me it was from Bread and Circus.”
In the wake of last week’s revelation that “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” is a hoax, you would think Lee would be a little peeved with Defonseca. But according to her lawyer, Frank Frisoli, she’s not. Frisoli says the two women get along just fine; it’s their publisher Jane Daniel who’s the adversary.
Back in 2001, Lee and Defonseca sued Daniel, claiming that she had withheld royalties, hid profits in offshore accounts and that she failed to adequately promote the book in the United States. The jury awarded the two women nearly $11 million. Several months later, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Fahey found that the business practices of Daniel and her tiny publishing business, Mt. Ivy Press, were “extremely egregious” and “any reasonable business person would find Daniel and Mt. Ivy’s conduct reprehensible.” Fahey tripled the damages and ordered Daniel to pay the women $33 million.
Fahey wrote that Daniel had, among other things, run a scam transaction to withhold money, failed to provide accurate royalty statements, fraudulently pilfered copyrights and intentionally caused emotional and psychological injuries to Defonseca.
Daniel insists that none of this is true and that she did everything according to the standard publishing contracts that were signed at the beginning of the project. And as far the charge of not promoting the book goes, Daniel points out that she had arranged an appearance on Oprah for Defonseca. But that fell through when Defonseca started putting up roadblocks and the lawsuits started to take shape.
Daniel says in hindsight she realizes that Defonseca knew she couldn’t appear on a television show broadcast overseas because someone might recognize her. But back in 2001, during the 10-day trial, no one wanted to listen to any of that, says Daniel.
“It’s almost impossible when you are up against a Holocaust survivor,” she says.
“That mantle became a bullet-proof vest or a Teflon coat with an assumed air of moral superiority.”
Actually, it was even worse. Defonseca didn’t come to court just as a Holocaust survivor; she came as a Holocaust survivor losing her home to foreclosure because her publisher had withheld the royalties from the book that told her painful story.
With Lee it was a little different. Frisoli says that as the book was going through its final edit, Daniel tried to cut Lee out. She decided not to run Lee’s name on the cover and tried to buy out all her interest in copyrights.
“Look, it’s really simple,” says Frisoli. “Jane Daniel hired her best friend and then tried to blow her off.”
Daniel says the problems with Lee arose when she read the final draft of the manuscript and found pages of historical errors. And there were other problems. Daniel didn’t think the book was written well. She says she tried to work with Lee to edit the manuscript but Lee refused. So, Daniel rewrote it herself.
Frisoli says that Daniel changed a word here and there but it was still essentially Lee and Defonseca’s manuscript that went to press. “She completely lacks credibility,” says Frisoli. “If Jane Daniel tells you it’s Monday, go and look at the calendar. To me, she cheated her friend.”
Daniel appealed the enormous judgment but lost and since that time, Frisoli has been doing his best to collect for his client. At one point Daniel was order to spend 10 days in MCI Framingham because she had fallen behind on her $2,000 a month payments to Lee. Friends scraped together the money and got her out after one night.
Daniel now runs a bed and breakfast overlooking Gloucester harbor. It’s a beautiful historic house built around 1845, and Frisoli has been trying to sell it to get the money Daniel owes Lee. The house isn’t up for sale now because the market is lousy, he says. “But when I find a buyer, I’ll sell it and I’ll even give some of the money to Jane,” he says.
Frisoli says the news that Defonseca’s story was a hoax doesn’t change anything about the case. But Daniel thinks it changes everything. And while she hasn’t had much luck or found much sympathy from the courts yet, she’s hoping that will change. She plans to head back in and ask that the $33 million judgment be dismissed.
“By law, one way to overturn a judgment is to prove it was based on fraud,” she says.
Every trick in the book
Literary hoaxes are nothing unusual. In the past week, we’ve had two of them exposed. First Misha Defonseca confessed that her 1997 book, “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years,” was a fantasy. A few days later we learned that “Love and Consequences” — Margaret Jones’ memoir about what it was like to grow up as an abused half-white, half-native American teen living with a black foster family in a gang-ridden neighborhood of south Los Angeles — was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, a 33-year-old middle class white woman who grew up with her biological family and attended private school.
“Writers have been passing off hoaxes for centuries,” says Marblehead’s Roberta Kalechofsky, who has written seven books, two collections of essays, a prose poem and a monograph on George Orwell. Kalechofsky also runs her own small publishing business, Micah Publications, which specializes in Jewish literature, Jewish Vegetarian Books and works about animal rights.
Kalechofsky says hoaxes have been so common, they’re almost a literary tradition in their own right. But that doesn’t mean we should accept them.
“It’s deception,” says Kalechofsky. “If it happens enough times it really affects the public trust in the written word.”
Kalechofsky hasn’t read “Misha,” but she says it sounds like “deception, deception and still more deception.” And while she doesn’t condone it, she does say the publishing world is set up in a way that almost encourages these types of hoaxes.
“It’s very hard to get a novel published,” she says. “It’s hard to get your foot in the door if you are a fiction writer.”
And when you publish something, it’s either fact or fiction. There’s no category for a little bit of fact embellished by creative writing. So, people try to pass off what might be good novels as true accounts.
And there’s something else, says Kalechosky. As a culture we crave verisimilitude. The fact that a story is true gives it that extra edge.
Kalechofshy recently faced this very problem when she published “Finesilver’s Gold,” a story about a Russian Jew who walks from the Ukraine to the Yukon to take part of the 19th century gold rush. Author Ruth Shallet Littman used her grandfather’s diaries as the basis of the story. But a lot was missing, so she used her imagination and some historical research to fill in the blanks.
Kalechofsky didn’t feel she could market the book as non-fiction, so she lists it as “A Fictionalized Memoir.” Problem solved — well, maybe.
Kalechofsky says Defonseca didn’t have to say her story was true, but she probably felt she would get more attention that way. That’s pretty much what happened with another notorious Holocaust memoir hoax, “Fragments,” written by Binjamin Wilkomirski in 1996. The book, which describes a child’s memories of being in two Nazi death camps in Poland, picked up a National Jewish Book Award and was praised as a masterpiece until it was discovered that Wilkomirski was actually Bruno Grosjean Dessekker, born in Switzerland and raised there by an adoptive family.
Kalechofsky says both “Misha” and “Fragments” succeeded in part because they involved stories that played on the public’s sympathy. The same could probably be said for “A Million Little Pieces,” James Frey’s account of his struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. After the hoax was exposed, Frey admitted he was having trouble selling the book as a novel, so he turned it into a memoir.
As for Jane Daniel, the publisher who helped turn “Misha” into an international bestseller before the truth came out, Kalechofsky says the book business is a cutthroat marketplace and there’s probably more to the story that we don’t know.
“She sounds very clever,” says Kalechosky with a good-natured laugh. “I’d like to hire her.”
— Barbara Taormina
