Product Description

A searing account of the rise and fall of the author of Fragments, told by a descendant of the Wilkomirskis of Riga.

In 1997, Binjamin Wilkomirski came to New York to read from his prize-winning Holocaust memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, raise money for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and meet his perhaps-relatives, the Wilburs (once Wilkomirskis). The Wilburs—and the world—embraced Binjamin as a humanitarian whose eloquent and haunting tale of childhood stood for untold others. A year later, however, Binjamin was publicly accused of being a gentile impostor. He insisted his memories outweighed the documents against him but proclaimed, "Nobody has to believe me." Journalist and presumed cousin Blake Eskin recounts the dispute through riveting reportage and memoir, interviewing Binjamin's acquaintances and visiting Riga in search of actual Wilkomirskis. The reactions of the media, the child-survivor community, and the Wilburs themselves shed light on debates about the reliability of memory, the nature of identity, and the uses and misuses of history. 7 b/w photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1627271 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
HWhen Binjamin Wilkomirski published his childhood Holocaust memoir, Fragments, in 1996, it was met with both popular and critical praise. Soon, however, people began to voice concern over its authenticity , which ended in a full-fledged debunking on 60 Minutes in 1999. While much has been written about Wilkomirski, this stunning analysis by journalist Eskin is not only the best and most compelling account of the case, but places it in a broader social, political and cultural context that raises vital issues about history, identity, as well as personal and political responsibility. While the frame of the book is a fascinating personal memoir/journalistic investigation (Eskin's family, immigrant Jews from Latvia, contact Wilkomirski thinking they might be related to him), the power of the work comes from the author's ability to marshal the central arguments over Wilkomirski's life and work in order to illuminate the more important and interesting question of how humans deal with trauma. Moving from the specific, Eskin touches on such broader and controversial topics as what happens when Holocaust memoirs are exposed as fiction, thus giving fuel to Holocaust deniers; how Wilkomirski's book helped assuage Swiss guilt over Switzerland's actions during WWII; how Holocaust literature has become emblematic of human suffering, allowing even non-Holocaust survivors to identify with and take on the metaphors of "the survivor." This is brought home in Eskin's discussion of Lauren Grabowski, a Christian woman posing as a Jewish survivor who, under the name of Lauren Stratford, wrote an enormously popular, and discredited, memoir of child sexual abuse, Satan's Underground. A mixture of thrilling detective work and astute cultural criticism, this is an important contribution to Holocaust literature as well as to studies of psychological and cultural trauma. (Feb.)Forecast: This is bound to get major media attention, as Wilkomirski's story did, and will have brisk sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1997, Wilkomirski won acclaim for Fragments, his memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a young Jewish boy and was then accused of being a gentile who made the whole thing up. Here, journalist Eskin, who is related to the Wilkomirskis the author claimed as his own, tries to penetrate the mystery.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
This is ostensibly a retelling of the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss musician who deceived the world with a wholly invented "memoir" of a childhood destroyed by the Holocaust. But, while Eskin offers a fascinating portrait of Wilkomirski in all his piteous self-delusion, the real importance of his book lies in its critical look at the broader so- cial and historical forces that allowed his hoax to flourish, including the recovered-memory movement, the community of Jewish child survivors, the intricacies of Switzerland's relationship with Nazi Germany, and the seemingly irresistible trend toward the sentimentalization of the Holocaust. After meeting Wilkomirski (before his unmasking), Eskin embarked on a quest to discover what had happened to his mother's relatives during the Second World War. In acknowledging his own hunger for some connection to historical catastrophe, he offers a convincing explanation of why people were so eager to be deluded.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A Fascinating Story
I enjoyed "A Life in Pieces" very much! Far from the narrative being jumbled, I found Eskin's weaving together of his personal search for his family's roots, along with the related story of the Wilkomirski hoax, very skillful. The story is told on 2 levels. It was the fraudulent claims of Bruno Grosjean/Doessekker, AKA Binjamin Wilkomirski, which ironically awakened interest in the author's ancestors, since his mother's family name was originally Wilkomirski. After a family reunion to meet the bogus 'relative', the author details his attempts to learn of his family from elderly relatives. This leads ultimately to a visit to Riga, Latvia, where the family's forebears came from. He then moves on to Israel, where long lost relatives, descendents of that remnant of the family that remained in Europe, are located. Eskin's own experience as a 3rd. generation Jewish American mirrors those of many, like myself, whose families had relatives who escaped from or who became victims of the Nazis. This book was written as part memoir. Therefore, his use of 'I', 'me' and 'myself' is wholly appropriate. It is a fascinating story which raises all sorts of troubling philosophical issues. These issues include the plight of former child survivors, false memories, victimhood, and family. Unfortunately, these issues more than ever before, took form with 'Wilkomirski' and his claims. I very strongly recommend this thought provoking work.

Archetypal
When I read Fragments I could not understand how anyone could have believed Binjamin Wilkomirski's story. It was incredible that a child as small as he claimed to have been could have survived a Nazi death camp (much less two) or recalled the things he claimed to remember. By the time I read it, the book had been exposed as fiction. But the tale seemed to me so weak that I doubted I would have found it any more convincing had I read it in 1996, before the scandal broke.

As a longtime student of the Holocaust, I was therefore fascinated by Wilkomirski's exposure as Bruno Doessekker, the Swiss birth-child of Yvonne Berthe Grosjean, who surrendered her son for adoption in 1945; he was ultimately adopted by the Doessekkers.

Stefen Maechler's Wilkomirski Affair (2001) provided a superb and thorough expose of the fraud Bruno Grosjean Doessekker perpetrated. Maechler pursued every possible lead, compared each minute detail in Doessekker's narration of "events" with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer and accounts of other child survivors. He interviewed members of the Doessekker and Grosjean families and more. The most damning evidence Maechler unearthed was that in 1981, Doessekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." He received a third of her estate.

Wilkomirski/Doessekker had also used Laura Grabowski, who claimed to have known him in a children's home in Krakow, to "corroborate" his story. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Sideshow: The Real Story of Lauren Stratford. Lauren Stratford's Social Security number is the same as that of Grabowski, who used it to make a false survivor's claim. Maechler even found similarities between Satan's Sideshow and Fragments. But Maechler did not answer the question of how Wilkomirski/Doessekker drew people in.

Blake Eskin masterfully picks up that loose strand from a personal perspective: His maternal great-grandmother Anna Wilbur had immigrated in 1929 to New York from Riga--the Latvian city Wilkomirski/Doesseker said he was from. Her family had changed their surname name from Wilkomirski to Wilbur on their arrival in New York. Moreover, Anna Wilbur's brother and sister-in-law had in 1926 lived at 80 Moskva Street, the same address Wilkomirski/Doessekker claimed as his. Thus was Eskin's family taken in.

They understandably longed for news of distant relations left behind in Riga, years before the Holocaust. They knew existentially what the Holocaust had done. They had not yet personalized the loss, however. In that context, it is not surprising that Eskin's mother, Eden Force Eskin, and her first cousin once removed, Miriam Vim, wanted to believe that Wilkomirski/Doesseker was Anna Wilbur's long lost nephew.

Eskin takes readers on his two-fold journey, as he discovers both Doessekker/Wilkomirski's fraud and his family's roots in Riga and Israel. He covers some of the same ground as Maechler, but he adds a human dimension of which Maechler's sturdy reportorial account is devoid.

This book opens new intellectual and emotional understanding to losses suffered by the world's Jewish community during the Holocaust. Even now, families that once believed they had completely escaped that terrible trauma are discovering whom and what they lost--family, culture, language, and an entire world. Though but one example of that discovery, Eskin's investigations prove somewhat archetypal.

The Nazi Holocaust extinguished the lives of roughly a third of the Jewish people. Some families, like Eskin's, remained for years oblivious to their personal losses. But Eskin shows that very few were untouched. In that context, it's easy to see why families still hope to find their members among the living. And that context is the only thing that can lay the Wilkomirski/Doessekker fraud to its final and necessary rest. Alyssa A. Lappen

Ultimately unsatisfying
I was so much looking forward to reading this book to learn the details of the author of Fragments, but ultimately this book left me with more questions than I had before I read it, not to mention bringing up more issues and then leaving them unresolved. For example, was Binjamin tattooed with a number on his arm? We are told that Varena is not Binjamin/Bruno's wife, but then are never told who she is or what connection she has to him. Was any DNA evidence ever made public, or is Binjamin/Bruno's true identity an ongoing mystery? I am reading the article in Granta #66 by Elena Lappin, and in the first few pages have learned that Binjamin/Bruno was married prior to his relationship with Varena and has three children! What a shocker. Why was this not mentioned in Eskin's book? Where are the children now and what do they think about the whole Wilkomirski affair? In any case, this book is passable as an introduction to the case, but I do agree with another reviewer here who stated that Eskin's personal history, other than being the catalyst to his investigation of the Wilkomirski affair, is really not very interesting (and this from a lover of memoirs and family history).