Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                                    MISERY LIT AND VICTIM STATUS

I’ll begin this week’s sermon with a story that some of you probably already know.

In 1997 there was published a memoir by a Jewish Holocaust survivor called Misha Defonseca. On first publication it was called  Misha – A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, but it was later republished as Surviving With Wolves. Misha Defonseca had a dreadful childhood. Her parents were deported from Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1941 and she was put in the care of a Gentile family. But at the age of seven, she ran away, and between the ages of seven and eleven she walked over 3000 kilometres across occupied Europe in search of her parents. She was for a time incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto but was able to escape. She survived in her long journey by eating roots and things from rubbish dumps. Once, at the age of eight, she beat a sleeping man whom she had seen committing rape. Most extraordinary of all, she was welcomed into a family of wolves which protected and nurtured her and took her in as part of their family.

It was a wonderful memoir. It was translated into many languages. And the author earned not millions, but tens of millions of dollars both from the book and from television appearances and speaking tours. Misha – A Memoire of the Holocaust Years was loudly praised by the Education Director of the North American Wolf Foundation for presenting such a sympathetic and realistic version of the lives of wolves.

There was just one tiny problem.

The book was complete fiction and “Misha Defonseca” was a fraud.

It took ten years for this to be established definitively. “Misha Defonseca” was a Gentile Belgian, Monique De Wael, who had no Jewish ancestry or connections whatsoever. There was one tiny grain of truth to her fabrication. Her Catholic parents were deported to a death camp by the Nazis, because they had been part of a resistance movement. But, staying with grandparents, Monique De Wael survived the war unmolested, went to school with others, undertook no epic journey and definitely had no family relationship with wolves. When her fraudulence was exposed, she lost most of the millions she had made in court cases brought by her publishers and others. At one point she attempted to defend herself by saying of her book “It is not the true reality but is my reality”, the last two words of which statement are now a virtual mantra for those who deny that there is such a thing as objective truth.

In retrospect, we have to ask ourselves why people were taken in by such an unlikely story.

I think there is a simple answer to this. Being humane readers, we will of course, and quite rightly, sympathise with people who have had dreadful lives, whether they are people of a persecuted race, refugees in hostile countries, or victims of sexual or other physical abuse, especially in childhood. So if we read a book that purportedly tells us a true story about such things, part of our critical faculties immediately switches off. We would feel heartless and callous if we weren’t on the side of a little girl who bravely weathered the Holocaust. So we will swallow even tales of mothering wolves and an eight-year-old bashing a rapist. We don’t want to be sceptical of such moving testimony.

The fraudster Monique De Wael is, of course, not the only writer to perpetrate a literary hoax of this sort, and she is not the only one to pretend to have been part of another ethnicity than her own in order to win sympathy and applause. Australia has had two well known literary hoaxes of this sort. (Not to be confused with Australia’s most famous literary hoax, the “Ern Mally” affair of 1944, which had the honest aim of flushing out poseurs, in the field of poetry, who would praise even literary nonsense. Its perpetrators made no money from their hoax and happily revealed who they were as soon as they’d hit their pretentious target.)

The two Aussie literary hoaxes I refer to are Helen Darville’s fake “Ukrainian memoir” The Hand That Signed the Paper, published in 1993 under the fictitious name “Demidenko”; and the long career of Colin Johnson, who wrote for decades as Mudrooroo, writing about Aboriginal characters and claiming Aboriginal ancestry. He was eventually rumbled by real Aborigines who proved that he had no Aboriginal ancestry at all. So why would two white Aussies claim ethnicities that they weren’t? And for that matter why would Monique De Wael claim to be Jewish? Simple. Assuming such identities immediately gave them what is now a much-prized commodity – victim status.

In case you haven’t heard of it, there is a literary genre now sometimes rudely called “misery lit”. Essentially it means autobiographical works written by people who have suffered much – and currently the “misery lit” books most often published have to do with child abuse and sexual violation. I am not belittling the immense suffering such things engender in real life, but often such books come across as an excuse for us to wallow in misery. Hence “misery lit.”

Unfortunately, there is a very dark underside to such literature - it is easy to fake. Writing a “misery Lit” memoir, you don’t have to bother about such things as characterisation and structure – the type of things that bother real novelists. Instead, you can sail along by piling atrocity and abuse upon atrocity and abuse. And if what you write is taken to be true, you get your desired victim status. You will be praised for your courage and candour.

            Many “misery lit.” books have, over the years, been exposed as fabrications. Sadly, the very existence of these fakes has the effect of making discerning readers more sceptical when they read authentic stories of abuse and deprivation.

NECESSARY FOOTNOTE: Only after I had written the above think-piece did I discover on Netflix a documentary called "Misha and the Wolves" which told the whole story of the "Misha Defonseca" fraud, much as I have explained it above. Most of the people involved in it were interviewed (publisher, lawyers, genuine Holocaust survivors etc.) except for Monique De Wael herself, who declined to be interviewed and who was therefore played by an actress, apart from documentary footage of De Wael telling her lies to schoolchildren and enraptured audiences. One thing was news to me - apparently before her first publisher put De Wael's fraudulent memoir into print, she submitted it to an historian who advised her not to publish it as it was filled with completely unbelievable stories and things that were historically false. But the publisher went ahead and published. Apparently her desire for a profit overrode her scruples.