Phony Holocaust Memoir Won't Be the Last

When James Frey hoodwinked Oprah Nation with his trumped-up tale of debauchery and redemption, the result was a soul-searching debate within the book industry about whether the time had come to institute routine fact-checking for non-fiction narratives. The same conversation flared up again after Margaret Seltzer's memoir about life in gangland L.A. proved to be bogus. Now another heart-string-tugging memoir has been exposed as a heap of bunk -- but don't expect the usual hand-wringing to follow.

Berkley Books has canceled the planning February publication of Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived after skeptics raised serious questions about the author's veracity. Herman Rosenblat had been claiming for years that he survived internment in a concentration camp with the help of a local girl who threw him apples over the fence, and whom he later met by chance and married. The story was good enough to get him book and movie deals and to land him on Oprah's couch twice, but it wasn't good enough for Portfolio alumnus Gabriel Sherman, whose dogged reporting in The New Republic forced the publisher to abandon its initial defensive posture and spike the book. (The film adaptation is still moving forward, but no longer under the guise of "a true story.")

Rosenblat's fabrications never actually made it into bookstores, but the episode is still embarrassing -- particularly because Berkley is part of Penguin, which was also responsible for publishing Seltzer's book. Yet the usual calls for fact-checking of memoirs, if they come at all, will be far more muted this time. With the book business in a deep swoon, no one is going to seriously consider adopting measures that could add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of publishing a title. And the lesson of Frey's A Million Little Pieces was that readers don't necessarily care whether a memoir is true as long as it packs a punch.

Still, while across-the-board fact-checking may be off the table, publishers interested in avoiding future humiliations would do well to take a page from the world of journalism. Here's a little piece of advice every reporter hears not long after starting out: When a story sounds too good to be true, it usually is.