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LITERARILY HOAXED
Pieced together
BY NINA WILLDORF

In 1996, when a man named Binjamin Wilkomirski penned Fragments, a harrowing — and well-received — memoir of his childhood as a Jewish Holocaust survivor, no one felt more connected to the story than Blake Eskin, then arts editor of the Forward, whose family’s name was Wilkomirski. Accounts soon emerged that Fragments’ author was a fake, neither Jewish nor a Holocaust survivor. A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (W.W. Norton, 2002) is Eskin’s personal, historical, and psychological account of his family’s perplexing encounter with its "long-lost cousin."

Q: When did you first start to feel skepticism?

A: All along I was struggling with both wanting to embrace him and wanting to interrogate him. The more I heard him talk, the more I began to doubt that he could be who he was ... in part because of my training as a fact-checker [at the New Yorker].

Q: How about your family?

A: I was unusual among my relatives. My mother and some of my cousins really felt a strong connection to this person. One said, "If he’s not a cousin, we’ll make him a cousin."

It turned out what ended up being more important was not whether he wanted to be embraced, but why we wanted to embrace him — and that was the most interesting aspect of the story.

Q: So he’s not a Wilkomirski; what’s the big deal?

A: His story is so spectacular, in the sense that it has more elements of an action film than cinéma vérité. A story with so much drama and spectacle ends up undercutting the real stories that don’t quite have that. I think it does a disservice, sets up the wrong expectations, sets the bar too high.

Q: Why do you think he did it?

A: There are some prevailing theories ... conspiracy, delusion. I think that people are really complex, and in a way, this is an unanswerable question....

The more helpful question to ask is not why did he do it, but why did we [react to him the way we did]. People seem to want to have a connection to something. I came to understand that my desire to identify [with him] is related to his desire to identify with or portray this character. People have that desire to connect to history through these emblematic characters. That’s an inevitable human impulse.

Blake Eskin will read from A Life in Pieces at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 16, at Boston College, Gasson Hall, room 206, 140 Comm Ave, in Boston.

Issue Date: April 11 - 18, 2002
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