COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Then suppose it had further come to light some years later that the diary was a fake. It was in fact a work of fiction written by a Jew who had indeed lived in Germany but escaped. Once discovered, the writer said that, essentially, the facts were true, the situation real for many Jews at that time. It simply hadn't happened to her. Or to anyone in her family.

Suppose, by now, that the book had been used in history classes around the world, had sold millions of copies, had even been made into a film. Now it appeared that the provenance of the book had been exposed as a work of fiction. In fact, a beautiful hoax.

Try another one: Suppose that another book was published. This one purported to tell the story of a single man and how he lived for a single day in a Communist prison camp in Siberia in the 1940's. The name of the book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Suppose then we found out that the book, while essentially true, did not happen just like that to the writer himself. It was really a composite of several stories, some of which were actually witnessed by the writer, others which were not, were in fact invented. This writer went on to win the Nobel Prize for another book he had written called The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. How would we feel about this writer and his work? If we knew he was lying about One Day... then what would we think of the much longer, more detailed Gulag...?

Both books would almost certainly be yanked instantly from the curriculum by every academic who had been teaching it. They would be outraged. Yes, they would say, it was basically true, the facts -- some of them anyway, were attestable, but others were not, and besides it could not be taught as history. They would not be falling back on things like "oral tradition" even though there is a long history of it in the Urals and other areas of the Siberian Plateau. They would not be saying that, even though it's not completely true, nonetheless its message is just too important to be ignored, etc. etc.

But that is not the history of the above-mentioned books. No one has yet disproved the provenance of Anne Frank's diary, though it has come to light that they were heavily edited (the complete diary has been recently published in France). And Solzhenhitsyn never pretended that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was about him personally even though he was in fact sentenced to the Siberian gulag and lived a very similar existence there. He maintained his integrity. Not so Rigoberta Menchú.

By lying, Menchú has compromised all that she has said, all that has been written. Not because we don't think that some of what she has said is true, but because she felt the need to pretend to know things which she did not, relied on invention and exaggeration, and worst of all she pretended to be someone she was not.

It's a shame: Not so much what Menchú did, but what the academic minions are doing in support of her even though she didn't write the book herself. (It was written by Marxist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, wife of Regis Debray, who, in the Sixties, was one of Che's political strategists in Bolivia. RIP Che. Nice strategy, Reg).

Concocting stories to further political ends is not new. But when it is done as flagrantly as this, it should be recognized. Menchú's "story" should have a caveat: this book and the origins of everything in it, should be understood as a fictive narrative. Some things in this book are true, some are not. It is up to you, dear reader, to sort them out.

-- Edmond Keenan Wynn, Writer (posted 3/31, 11 a.m., E.S.T.)

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