// essays //
Spring 2006
Night and Frey: The Politics of Oprah's Book Club
Marc Tracy
Leave it to Oprah to invert Marx's famous maxim about all great events occurring twice. For the Frey debacle—with its grotesque exaggerations of fact, Oprah's inveterate flip-flopping, and, hovering over it all, the deer-in-headlights glare of James Frey (who, to be perfectly honest, looked stoned during most of Oprah's follow-up show)—was nothing if not high farce. But what follows could turn out differently. Oprah's Book Club now tackles Elie Wiesel's Night. And to lose Night, one of the most articulate and vital testaments of the Holocaust, to a self-appointed truth squad whose motives may be far more sinister than they would have us believe would be nothing short of tragedy.
Although Oprah's selection of Night did not—indeed, given the advance notice she certainly gave to Farrar, Straus & Giroux to print hundreds of thousands of new copies, could not—have anything to do with the revelation that Frey was lying. Yet the media and the public at large nonetheless perceive the selection of Night as inextricably tethered to the events surrounding its immediate predecessor in Oprah's Club. Night is a memoir—the same designation initially given to Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which has turned out to contain numerous deliberate falsehoods. "Days after saying that the 'underlying message' of a memoir was more important than its truth, Oprah Winfrey announced yesterday that her next book club selection was Night," was how The New York Times began its announcement. The Times further felt the need to ask Wiesel about the Frey fiasco. And then there was that wire that ran the headline, "From furor to Fuhrer for Oprah." Cute.
The initial reaction to this linking of Night to A Million Little Pieces has been a vigilant insistence that Night is, of course, actually the truth. On the January 26th Oprah telecast, the Times's Frank Rich made the connection explicit: "It's really important," he told his host, "first of all, given what your next Book Club selection is, that you make these distinctions" between fact and fiction. Even before Rich made this point, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, faced with the Frey catastrophe, loudly and publicly changed Night's classification to non-fiction. (Barnes & Noble had shelved it under fiction, apparently due to its novelistic style). Wiesel himself weighed in, with justified irritation. "But it is not a novel at all," he told the Times, adding, "I know the difference." He should, as he has written several novels, in addition to Night's sequel, Dawn.
I wonder if there's an element of protesting too much in these declarations. Under the circumstances they are appropriate and necessary. The public must not get the idea that the accuracy of Night is remotely near that of A Million Little Pieces; I am by no means blaming Rich, Wiesel, or anyone else who now deliberately affirms Night's veracity. When it turned out that Stephen Ambrose had extensively plagiarized in some of his immensely popular tomes, no one felt the need to go around insisting that the Civil War did in fact occur. If you feel the need to go out of your way to insist thatNight is fact, not fiction, you already have lost the battle.
And there is a battle. Many of those who have attacked and will attack Night are not just threatening the particulars of Wiesel's story, but much bigger facts that Wiesel describes in general. The Frey trouble "puts Night in a difficult position," Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, who literally wrote the book on Holocaust denial and deniers, told me. "You've just had this situation where people took apart a memoir point-by-point, and now you have a follow-up, a memoir about which there is a whole crew of very prejudicial, very hateful people who have been proven, over and over again, to be complete liars." Lipstadt successfully defended herself against a libel suit brought by the anti-Semitic Holocaust denier David Irving. She proved not only that the Holocaust occurred, but also, under plaintiff-friendly British libel laws, that Irving had used deliberate falsehoods to argue that it did not. And Night is one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal against those who diminish or deny the Holocaust. But Frey's fabrications have opened the door to criticism of Night, some of which might be legitimate, but some of which may be the product of those who, motivated by bigotry, would criticize the veracity of anything that purports to describe, truthfully, an event they (falsely) argue never happened.
There have been some questions about small facts—details, word choices, abridgements—in various volumes of Night, a discussion of which might have proved fruitful in a non-Frey context. The copies of Night you can see stacked in the front of your neighborhood bookstore contain a new translation, from the French, by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife. (Wiesel wrote the manuscript in his original Yiddish, and then translated it himself into French in which it was first published.) This updated translation, Wiesel asserts in a new preface, permitted him "to correct and revise a number of important details." Whether Wiesel smashes the mirror into which he peers at the end of the book; the sexual activity of young Jews on the train to Auschwitz; how old he was when he arrived at Birkenau: there remains some dispute over these questions, and others. A respectful debate, one that sought to arrive at the facts while recognizing the overall and more important truth of Wiesel's experience in the Holocaust, could only have furthered Wiesel's famous dictum that we must "never forget." Now, any such legitimate queries are likely to be seized upon and used in a slippery-slope fashion by people who wish to tarnish Wiesel's credibility, the better to impose doubt as to whether the Holocaust itself occurred.
And one need not be a full-blown Holocaust denier to assault Wiesel's character, and thereby join in the deniers' project. "The author of Night has gone from being a great victim of war crimes to being an apologist for those who commit them—all while invoking his moral authority as a survivor," wrote Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation, in The Los Angeles Times. Shatz, in what must have doubled as his application for the Shanda of the Year Fellowship, goes on to accuse Wiesel of denying the Nazi mass murders of Gypsies and gays as well as the Armenian genocide, and further criticizes Wiesel's skeptical view of the withdrawal from Gaza (bet you didn't see that coming). "As a historian and political commentator, however," Shatz concludes "Wiesel has been a specialist in denial, a man who has contributed far more to the blurring of fact and invention than the author of A Million Little Pieces." Whether Shatz actually believes his own bullshit is beside the point. What's significant is that the general public, which would,sans Frey, have been very unlikely to entertain such nonsense, might now lend it just a bit of credence. The Frey event "puts Elie a little bit on the defensive," says Lipstadt, which he "otherwise wouldn't have been." Otherwise, yes—but the door has been opened, and all the bugs and rodents are getting in.
So what is to be done? The Frey situation's infection of Oprah's selection of Night may have forced the book's defenders into a corner. A sturdy, able defense of Night's veracity may be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of attacks upon it, some of which are decidedly illegitimate; our silence lets those attacks have the last word. It is a shame that as Night receives by far the largest exposure it has had, indeed ever will have, its presenters cannot focus on the book itself, but are compelled to address not only the micro-events the book depicts, but even its larger macro-event. But fire must be fought with fire. Oprah and Wiesel now must not only dispel the myths of the deniers, but expose them as the lying frauds they are. Happy will be the day when James Frey is associated not with Elie Wiesel but with David Irving.
Although Oprah's selection of Night did not—indeed, given the advance notice she certainly gave to Farrar, Straus & Giroux to print hundreds of thousands of new copies, could not—have anything to do with the revelation that Frey was lying. Yet the media and the public at large nonetheless perceive the selection of Night as inextricably tethered to the events surrounding its immediate predecessor in Oprah's Club. Night is a memoir—the same designation initially given to Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which has turned out to contain numerous deliberate falsehoods. "Days after saying that the 'underlying message' of a memoir was more important than its truth, Oprah Winfrey announced yesterday that her next book club selection was Night," was how The New York Times began its announcement. The Times further felt the need to ask Wiesel about the Frey fiasco. And then there was that wire that ran the headline, "From furor to Fuhrer for Oprah." Cute.
The initial reaction to this linking of Night to A Million Little Pieces has been a vigilant insistence that Night is, of course, actually the truth. On the January 26th Oprah telecast, the Times's Frank Rich made the connection explicit: "It's really important," he told his host, "first of all, given what your next Book Club selection is, that you make these distinctions" between fact and fiction. Even before Rich made this point, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, faced with the Frey catastrophe, loudly and publicly changed Night's classification to non-fiction. (Barnes & Noble had shelved it under fiction, apparently due to its novelistic style). Wiesel himself weighed in, with justified irritation. "But it is not a novel at all," he told the Times, adding, "I know the difference." He should, as he has written several novels, in addition to Night's sequel, Dawn.
I wonder if there's an element of protesting too much in these declarations. Under the circumstances they are appropriate and necessary. The public must not get the idea that the accuracy of Night is remotely near that of A Million Little Pieces; I am by no means blaming Rich, Wiesel, or anyone else who now deliberately affirms Night's veracity. When it turned out that Stephen Ambrose had extensively plagiarized in some of his immensely popular tomes, no one felt the need to go around insisting that the Civil War did in fact occur. If you feel the need to go out of your way to insist thatNight is fact, not fiction, you already have lost the battle.
And there is a battle. Many of those who have attacked and will attack Night are not just threatening the particulars of Wiesel's story, but much bigger facts that Wiesel describes in general. The Frey trouble "puts Night in a difficult position," Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, who literally wrote the book on Holocaust denial and deniers, told me. "You've just had this situation where people took apart a memoir point-by-point, and now you have a follow-up, a memoir about which there is a whole crew of very prejudicial, very hateful people who have been proven, over and over again, to be complete liars." Lipstadt successfully defended herself against a libel suit brought by the anti-Semitic Holocaust denier David Irving. She proved not only that the Holocaust occurred, but also, under plaintiff-friendly British libel laws, that Irving had used deliberate falsehoods to argue that it did not. And Night is one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal against those who diminish or deny the Holocaust. But Frey's fabrications have opened the door to criticism of Night, some of which might be legitimate, but some of which may be the product of those who, motivated by bigotry, would criticize the veracity of anything that purports to describe, truthfully, an event they (falsely) argue never happened.
There have been some questions about small facts—details, word choices, abridgements—in various volumes of Night, a discussion of which might have proved fruitful in a non-Frey context. The copies of Night you can see stacked in the front of your neighborhood bookstore contain a new translation, from the French, by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife. (Wiesel wrote the manuscript in his original Yiddish, and then translated it himself into French in which it was first published.) This updated translation, Wiesel asserts in a new preface, permitted him "to correct and revise a number of important details." Whether Wiesel smashes the mirror into which he peers at the end of the book; the sexual activity of young Jews on the train to Auschwitz; how old he was when he arrived at Birkenau: there remains some dispute over these questions, and others. A respectful debate, one that sought to arrive at the facts while recognizing the overall and more important truth of Wiesel's experience in the Holocaust, could only have furthered Wiesel's famous dictum that we must "never forget." Now, any such legitimate queries are likely to be seized upon and used in a slippery-slope fashion by people who wish to tarnish Wiesel's credibility, the better to impose doubt as to whether the Holocaust itself occurred.
And one need not be a full-blown Holocaust denier to assault Wiesel's character, and thereby join in the deniers' project. "The author of Night has gone from being a great victim of war crimes to being an apologist for those who commit them—all while invoking his moral authority as a survivor," wrote Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation, in The Los Angeles Times. Shatz, in what must have doubled as his application for the Shanda of the Year Fellowship, goes on to accuse Wiesel of denying the Nazi mass murders of Gypsies and gays as well as the Armenian genocide, and further criticizes Wiesel's skeptical view of the withdrawal from Gaza (bet you didn't see that coming). "As a historian and political commentator, however," Shatz concludes "Wiesel has been a specialist in denial, a man who has contributed far more to the blurring of fact and invention than the author of A Million Little Pieces." Whether Shatz actually believes his own bullshit is beside the point. What's significant is that the general public, which would,sans Frey, have been very unlikely to entertain such nonsense, might now lend it just a bit of credence. The Frey event "puts Elie a little bit on the defensive," says Lipstadt, which he "otherwise wouldn't have been." Otherwise, yes—but the door has been opened, and all the bugs and rodents are getting in.
So what is to be done? The Frey situation's infection of Oprah's selection of Night may have forced the book's defenders into a corner. A sturdy, able defense of Night's veracity may be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of attacks upon it, some of which are decidedly illegitimate; our silence lets those attacks have the last word. It is a shame that as Night receives by far the largest exposure it has had, indeed ever will have, its presenters cannot focus on the book itself, but are compelled to address not only the micro-events the book depicts, but even its larger macro-event. But fire must be fought with fire. Oprah and Wiesel now must not only dispel the myths of the deniers, but expose them as the lying frauds they are. Happy will be the day when James Frey is associated not with Elie Wiesel but with David Irving.
// MARC TRACY, a native of Bethesda, MD., is a junior in Columbia College. This is his first article for The Current.