Holocaust Memoir Scandal Redux Vox Tablet

In the mid-1990s, East German novelist Benjamin Stein crossed paths with then-celebrated Holocaust memoirist Binjamin Wilkomirski at a literary conference, in a pleasant enough encounter. Soon after, Wilkomirski was exposed as a fraud who had invented his identity as a child Holocaust survivor; in fact he was Christian, born and raised in Switzerland.
In The Canvas, a novel just translated from German into English, Stein takes that encounter and builds from it a riveting story, told in two parts, about two fictional men who become intimately involved in the rapid rise and subsequent fall of a Wilkomirski-like character named Minsky. One protagonist is Amnon Zichroni, who is sent away from his ultra Orthodox Jerusalem community after he’s discovered reading secular literature. Zichroni remains religious but also pursues training as a psychotherapist and later aids Minsky in delving into his traumatic past. The other protagonist is Jan Wechsler, the writer who exposes Minsky only, it...
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