Contrary to many of the posts I just glanced through, I appreciated this book. I thought the author did a good job of not only telling the story of Herman and the girl with the apple, but perhaps more importantly of showing how an old man who survived a horrible ordeal with a sense of humor and a desire to show the existence of good in the world could have caused the controversy he did. What memoirist is PERFECTLY honest in every detail of their written account? If you were writing your own memoir, wouldn't you highlight some facts, hide others, and try to share some meaningful message that you have learned from life? Otherwise, why write a memoir? What Herman Rosenblat did was only an exaggeration of what we all do, authors or not. His mistake was simply a matter of degree. I do not believe that his "lie" was told with a harmful intent. I do not think that his error in judgment has harmed the historical record of the Holocaust. (There were crackpots who denied the Holocaust (Shoah) long before Herman's story.) Rather I think that The Apple helps to elucidate further the imaginative, sensitive, and humorous character of Herman Rosenblat and adds to the picture of the Holocaust as happening to real people, not saints. Real people with all their strengths and all their faults. Real people who struggle long after emancipation to make sense of their experience and to explain the existence of good and evil. Well done, Herman, to still believe in love. ( )

I was excited to receive this book through LT's early review programme. My expectations were that it would explain the controversy surrounding this book in a palatable way but in this respect I found it lacking.

I expected a more rounded explanation of what happened when the subject of the book, Herman Rosenblatt, was revealed to have concocted the original story of how he first met the woman who would become his wife. The tragic events of the Holocaust are described through Herman's eyes but it was difficult for me to remember that this particular story is a fiction. As a reader, I can't have it both ways - I'd like to know - which parts are true and which aren't. When there's no clear delineation between them, it sort of ruins the story for me - it's a distraction. If I had not known about the controversy surrounding this book perhaps I would be able to look at it differently.

The other problem I had with this book was the writing. It seemed to be written in the style of a YA book and again that wasn't something I expected and so was disappointed. Having said that though, I think this book would be perfect fit for a young audience and I could see how it would fit well into a high school curriculum. ( )

Because I teach memoir writing, (and research the field of memoir writing), I did know about the controversial origin of Herman Rosenblat's "true" love story. And really, it's because of the story's background that I wanted to read The Apple. However, I found that this novel disappointed me in many ways. First, as a reader, I never really did get the full answers for Rosenblat's deceit. Second, I found Holt's prose flat, and often rushed. There were so many missing pieces, and I felt that if the author had just spent more time writing, these pieces would have been found. Still, with that said, the story of Rosenblat's life during the Holocaust is worth reading, and at times, tense and haunting. ( )

I read The Apple a couple of weeks ago as part of LibraryThing's ARC program. My summation of the premise: Herman Rosenblat and his brothers were in concentration camps (several) during the holocaust over six years. They survived because they had each other. Herman probably only survived because of his brothers being there to watch over him. After the war he met a very beautiful girl who had survived the war because her family had passed as Christians.

One day she, Roma, told him a story of going to a camp near her home and tossing an apple over the barbed wire fence to a young boy there. She wanted to help him. Herman imagined the scene, she being a beautiful angel and he said, "That boy was me." He was saying (I'm paraphrasing...) that they were somehow destined to meet, that her love could now save him, that it could "stretch into the past and save the boy that eh had been, stretch into the future and save the man that he would become." p. 152 BUT, it wasn't really him. He was not that boy. From there, however, he internalized the apple story and made it his own. He imagined her saving him with her apples and it became a part of their love story, a part of their truth.

So years later, when his mother came to him in a dream and asked him to tell his story so that everyone would know about his grandfather and how he died, Herman included Roma and their love story and her apples. It became part of the overall story because he decided that the most important lesson in the holocaust story was love. And the apples were part of that tapestry of love and survival. "It began one way - a story that he told himself to feel better, but then, inch by inch, it had gotten out of hand and ended another way." p. 175

I understand the media blitz and why they went crazy about this one lie. When there is one lie among an entire story, how is it known that the entire story isn't false?

The Apple is a story of triumph. Six years of horror in the camps but those siblings were not going to let each other down. The book chronicles Mr. Rosenblat's story, but also tells about the difficulty that he faced trying to understand why everyone was so angry. He and Roma had been on Oprah as she declared theirs the "greatest love story ever told" and now she wanted him to come back and explain why he had told this lie in front of millions of viewers.

I think The Apple is worth reading and Mr. Rosenblat's story is worth hearing. It sounds as if he has, in Ms. Holt's version of the telling, cut back on some of the falsehoods I have read about that were going to be published in his memoir Angel at the Fence. ( )

This is an odd book, with a controversial origin that I knew nothing about when I requested it from the Library Thing Early Reviewers program. I am probably the only person in the western world who didn’t know that Oprah had gushed about Herman Rosenblat’s original Holocaust story as ‘the greatest love story ever to air on her television program’ and I was equally ignorant about the subsequent revelations that Herman Rosenblat had made it up. I discovered all this when I wandered about in cyberspace to find an image of the cover and stumbled on websites that revealed all…

The book begins with Rosenblat’s hesitation about reappearing on Oprah’s show to explain the reasons for the hoax, then launches into his story of the persecution of the Jews in Poland, his family’s imprisonment in the Warsaw Ghetto and eventual transfer to a concentration camp where his mother was murdered. It’s when he reveals how he met his wife Rosa when she (as a child of about nine) threw apples to him over the fence at Schlieben (part of the Buchenwald concentration camp complex) that the scepticism antennae sound the alarm. Well, you don’t have to be a Holocaust scholar to know that this is rubbish. It’s very fashionable these days to claim that there were countless humane and kindly Germans who were not Nazis, but it beggars belief that guards would (a) not have noticed and (b) allowed it to happen, especially not repeatedly. I was dubious too when I read Rosenblat’s claim that the Jews knew from outside the camps that the Germans were using gas to exterminate their victims. In everything I have ever read about the Holocaust Jews went submissively into those infamous shower blocks because they did not know what they were…

In a simplistic muddle of pop psychology and fable, Holt then covers the story of how Rosenblat’s tale came to be written and celebrated in the media. It’s written in a cloying childlike prose, with no differentiation in style between the story about the hoax and Rosenblat’s story about his experiences. Holt admits in the introduction that her account is also fictionalised in places, weaving in ‘other authentic individual or composite accounts from survivors who were in the same places.’ She also claims to explore ‘the story behind the story – what happened after [Rosenblat's] account became public and created a perfect pop-culture storm, complete with gotcha journalism, adventures in culture making, publishing dilemmas, modern victimhood, freedom of speech and storytelling, new media and the power of the Internet to explode a story’.

If in fact Holt had done this, hers would be the book that is needed to explain this tawdry collision between individual wrongdoing and corporate laxity. The real issues are:

Why did Rosenblat invent his story?
What circumstances coalesced for his publisher not to verify the story?
Why was Oprah so gullible?
Why did her viewing public accept the whole improbable story anyway?
Why is this fantasy so damaging to the history of the Holocaust?
Only a wise and humane psychiatrist could possibly hope to disentangle Rosenblat’s motives, but I suspect that he has never really come to terms with the evil that confronted him as a child, and somehow needed to believe that there was humanity and compassion in his childhood amongst Nazis. I can understand this: knowing all that I do about what the German genocide under the Nazis I still find their wickedness incomprehensible.

The publisher’s failure to detect the hoax deserves much greater investigation and the Oprah phenomenon does too. The whole sordid story feeds into the Holocaust denial industry, at a time when younger generations are either ignorant about this shameful event in human history or subjected to revisionist versions of it.

For all its pretensions, The Apple, it seems to me, is a shabby exploitation of a notorious hoax. It doesn’t explore the complexities of Rosenblat’s motives, it doesn’t clarify the role of the publisher and its marketing machine, and it certainly doesn’t tackle Oprah’s gullibility. I think it’s a pity it was written at all.

Author: Penelope J Holt

Title: The Apple

Publisher: York House Press, 2009

ISBN: 9780979195648

Source: Library Thing Early Reviewers copy ( )