Please welcome Penelope Holt, author of The Apple. Penelope will be chatting on LibraryThing until November 16th.

I look forward to receiving an early advanced copy of your book soon. Does your book, The Apple ,address the Holocaust Hoax that I saw on Oprah? Is the subject guilty of James Frey like embelishments? Did you find it difficult to defend his story?

Thank you for your question. I did not want to defend Herman, rather I wanted to try to reveal different aspects of him and let readers decide for themselves who they think he is and what his motivations are. It's my understanding that Herman incorporated the anecdote of the apples into his story many years ago for personal rather than commercial reasons, which become more clear when you read the story of his childhood. Unfortunately, the apple story began to snowball, and became the hook that landed Herman on Oprah and in the spotlight, even though it represented only a handful of pages in his original memoir. From what I understand, Herman was initially coaxed into going on Oprah and into a publishing contract, but he willingly went along and the big mistake he made, and is accountable for, was presenting the embellished love story as real, along with his and his brothers' harrowing true story of survival, which is well documented. Herman's real story is more meaningful than the embellishments, which left everyone perplexed and dismayed. I wanted to bring a little balance to the situation, to tell the story of Herman's childhood and his journey through the camps, and to remind readers that the apple story came out of a very dynamic situation that evolved over years. After reading the book, some readers find Herman more sympathetic and his actions more understandable, while others continue to see his fabrications as unforgivable. It is a very polarizing subject. Many claim to know Herman and his motivations, which I think are very complex, but I doubt anyone does really, including myself. What I do know to be real is the suffering that he experienced as a child and this is the main focus of "The Apple". It is not a justification for his bad behavior, but it does shed more light on the matter.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Nov 10, 2009, 8:41am.

Hi Penelope . . .

I'm wondering if you might share a bit about how you went about researching your book, and how the historical material affected you?

Hi Marie, I researched everything I could find on the Internet about the original story and the "hoax". I reached out and spoke w/ a number of parties involved in exposing the "hoax". I met and had numerous phone interviews w/ Herman Rosenblat and read source materials of his life story and survivor account. I spoke w/ other family members. I read Holocaust memoirs. Three key sources were "The Buchenwald Report," "The Chidren of Buchenwald" and "The Boys". The latter is a collection of accounts of child Holocaust survivors, including Sam Rosenbalt, Herman's brother. The story of the hoax was very complicated and intense and polarizing. It was very dynamic and went on over 15 years, involving many people and places and decisions. I did not take it as a primary focus of the book. To focus on that aspect would have required more investigative research. Instead, "The Apple" tells the story through the eyes of Herman as a boy in Poland and Germany and as an old man in America. What happened to him, what he survived; how his "love story" evolved from being a personal anecdote to the center of a publishing scandal, and how he sees and rationalizes things set against the criticisms and attacks. I found the research very painful and affecting, especially accounts from "The Boys". These firsthand accounts gave me real insight into the emotional suffering and numbing that these child survivors endured. It is very shocking and distressing and created shifts in my world view. I would like to close by saying that I think Herman's story is typical of what can happen in public debate: It runs to black and white from a broad brush. I think it presents an opportunity for a more meaningful debate and with that in mind, I would like to present these questions for others in this conversation:

1. Will readers tolerate certain hoax memoirs better than others?

2. Is there more back lash for "messing" with the Holocaust?

3. Should Holocaust survivors who embellish be made an example of by their community because they aid deniers and compromise a legitimate mission: the fight against "erasure" and for the right to exist.

4. Did people want Herman's life-affirming story to be real because it helped ease their existential agony about human evil? Did they want to savage and punish him after they realized they had been duped?

5. Do we live in such an anxiety-ridden society that nuance and ambiguity are intolerable and spawn a reductionism that leads to answers that are only black and white? Is Herman really good and sympathetic because his fantasies and poor judgement are a byproduct of his encountering and enduring human evil at a young age? Or is he what his attackers call a "lying greedy Jew trying to make a buck off the Holocaust?" If he is a real and nuanced person, then perhaps he could have both dimensions--good and bad--in his character, but we increasingly live in a society that does not debate these things.

6. Herman could have written a memoir in which he talked about his fantasy and drive to romanticize what had happened to him to make it more tolerable (and perhaps profit from it) and then the label "memoir" would have been so beautifully realized would it not?

Memoir is supposed to reflect and convey through a personal and subjective lens the world surrounding the writer. Herman's "memoir", along with the fall out, presents an almost perfect reflection of the world we live in and how much of it is so darkly unconscious. In daylight, Herman's story is a phony apple-tossing incident, but look at what is lurking in the shadows--a snapshot teeming with the forces that drive our culture, our lives and our social and political debate.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Nov 11, 2009, 4:11pm.

What is your book about? (in your view, why did you write it?)

Herman Rosenblat is a Polish Jew who spent his childhood during WWII in ghettos, concentration and slave labor camps. For years he repeated an anecdote of a girl who helped him to stay alive by throwing apples over a camp fence and whom he says he met on a blind date and married, after the war. The story circulated and landed him on Oprah twice, as well as a garnering a book and movie deal. When the tale was revealed to be embellished, his memoir was canceled and Herman was disgraced. The Apple simultaneously tells the story of what happened to Herman as a child and as an old man when the scandal broke. The backlash was intense, because Herman's fabrications involved the Holocaust and because of the Oprah connection. I wrote the book because of the interesting confluence of themes of survival, Holocaust, memoir, romance, scandal and pop culture and to try to bring a more measured point of view to the subject. Was Herman damaged, hapless and well intended? Motivated solely by personal gain? Or a combination both? The reader should decide. It's a caution about our society's need to rush to judgment and paint with a broad brush.

Mensagem editada pelo seu autor, Nov 11, 2009, 11:24pm.

Why did you write it?

nice pictures of herman rosenblat and the author on youtube. i read the book and think it is really awesome. herman rosenblat is a man who should inspire of all us. the love story was so beautiful. what a wonderful job writing a story about a wonderful man.

youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aju4dybTZ...