A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Story
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately unsatisfying
Review: 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).

Rating:
Summary: Me, Too
Review: In a word, too much "me", too little on the affair Wilkomirski. As the author recounts, Wilkomirski repeatedly refused to be interviewed, and despite valiant, pushy attempts, Eskin never succeeds in cornering his quarry. But descriptions of these nonencounters do not make for compelling reading. Nor do long ramblings about the extended Wilkomirski family. With little to write about, Eskin falls back on writing about himself, and neither he nor his relatives have a story to tell that merits book length treatment. This is essentially a family memoir piggybacked over the Wilkomirski affair. Eskin plays up his tangential connection to the curious Fragments episode, but the family connection is based on hope, not reality, and the writing, amorphous and rambling, reflects the lack of content.

Most important, I miss entirely a moral viewpoint. The crux of the issue is evaded: is there an objective truth, or is being a Holocaust survivor an entirely subjective matter of "feeling" like a survivor? The payoff at the end - the discovery of a tangible connection to distant relatives in Israel - is awfully thin stuff for the overlong buildup that preceded it.

Rating:
Summary: Archetypal
Review: 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