The Case of the Suspect Bios

By Charles Krauthammer

Professor Edward Said is the leading Palestinian advocate and propagandist in the U.S. His influence derives not just from the quality of his prose and the depth of his passion but also from his personal history. For years he has been telling the world that he grew up in Jerusalem but that when he was 12, as the Zionists came to power and established Israel, his entire family became refugees in Egypt.

Not so, says Justus Reid Weiner, who, after three years of research, reported in Commentary that 1) Said grew up in Cairo, son of a Palestinian who emigrated to the U.S. in 1911, became an American citizen, then moved to Egypt; 2) Said was educated in Egypt, not at St. George's Anglican preparatory school in Jerusalem; and 3) "My beautiful old house" in Jerusalem, now lost forever to the Jews and before which he posed for documentary cameras and magazine profiles, was in fact never his.

Why the carefully crafted fabrication? To generate sympathy, of course. But more important, to make his own biography match the mythic biography of his people and thus, by personalizing, dramatize their grievance against Israel. (Said denies misrepresenting his past.)

Said is by no means inventor of the art of the suspect but emblematic personal history. Last year a similar scandal erupted regarding I, Rigoberta Menchu, the autobiography of a Mayan peasant whose story of the horrors wrought by Guatemalan authorities became an international sensation.

Professor David Stoll tracked down her history and found that parts of her book were simply made up. She was not uneducated. She was sent to boarding school. Her father was indeed engaged in a long struggle to keep from being dispossessed of his land--not by rich ladinos (Guatemalans of European descent), as she claims, but by his in-laws. Nor was her brother Petrocinio burned to death by the government death squads.

"So what?" say the professors who have pledged to continue assigning her phony classic in class. "He was killed by death squads, and if he wasn't burned alive, many others were."

True enough. But she says she was there and saw his death. If she wanted to make stuff up, there is an easy way to do so. Call the book a novel (or, as the New Republic's Charles Lane wickedly suggested, We, Rigoberta Menchu). Why didn't she?

Because fact can have far more influence than fiction. How else to explain Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski, a harrowing, much celebrated Holocaust memoir, which turns out to have been fabricated? The author's real name is Bruno Doesseker. He is not a child survivor of Majdanek, the son of Latvian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He is Swiss, the son of a Protestant single mother. He never saw the Holocaust. (He claims his Holocaust memory was recalled while he was in therapy.)

Why the fantastic deception? Because what could be more compelling than a child's eyewitness to the ovens. As fiction, noted Judith Shulevitz in Slate, the book is banal and formulaic. As fact, it becomes harder to dismiss.

And because victimhood has its rewards. Wilkomirski won the National Jewish Book Award. Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize. Why shouldn't they make it up? They know they can get away with it. Their friends and colleagues in the academy and in radical politics will defend them.

"Whether her [Menchu's] book is true or not, I don't care," Professor Marjorie Agosin told the Chronicle of Higher Education. Neither does Arturo Taracenu, who helped edit the manuscript. "Indian people speak collectively," he explains.

The exonerations take various forms. Some speak of a higher truth: These may not be actual events but, the cause being politically correct, no matter. They are symbolically true. Says Professor Allen Carey-Webb: "We have a higher standard of truth for poor people like Rigoberta Menchu." By which he means a lower standard.

For others, the very idea of truth is itself a fiction. Everyone brings to life his own truth. "Real" history is a lie, merely the story of the victor. It does not deserve to be "privileged" above alternative narratives, particularly those of the dispossessed.

And what is truth, anyway? The new Reagan biography features a fictional character, bearing the author's name (Edmund Morris) but with a fabricated past, who encounters Reagan at various junctures. Fiction--with supporting footnotes, no less--in the authorized biography of a living President!

At least Morris is not out to deceive. His invention, unlike those of Said and Menchu and the rest, is just a device, open and bold. Yet that very openness tells us how far we've come in bending the notion of historical truth. Morris' Morris could not have happened 10 or 20 years ago. He stands on the shoulders of giants: the brazen confabulators who make up their histories and the slavish academics who justify them.