"It's not the true reality, but it is my reality.” — Misha Defonseca
In 1997, Misha Defonseca published her completely fabricated Misha: A Memoir Of The Holocaust Years, in which she claimed to have escaped the Warsaw ghetto and been raised by wolves. Its preposterousness was almost immediately called out, and a year later Defonseca (a Belgian-born woman living in the U.S.) admitted the fraud, although holding out for her book’s emotional authenticity, whatever that may mean.
The minor hubbub surrounding Defonseca’s Kamala-and-Amala-by-way-of-Adolph-Eichmann hoax was dwarfed by the tumult surrounding the 1995 publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.’ Along with laudatory reviews in influential European and North American publications, this ‘Holocaust memoire’ won a handful of prestigious Jewish book awards. It purported to narrate, from a young child’s perspective, the terrors of deportation and extermination camp ‘life’ . . . the traumatic witnessing of the unspeakable. Unfortunately, Fragments was as false as Defonseca’s improbable concoction. Binjamin Wilkomirski was really a Swiss musician named Bruno Doesseker (born Bruno Grosjean), who had spent his World-War-II childhood in middle-class gentile safety near Bern, rather than being a miraculous little-boy survivor of Auschwitz and Maidenek.
Translated into English in 1996, Wilkomirski’s haunting ‘memoir’ was much more believable than Defonseca’s macabre fantasy. As the top illustration shows, though, Defonseca’s work had the dubious distinction of being made into a French movie, Survivre avec les loups.
Both Wilkomirski and Defonseca held to their self-crafted Jewish victim identities even in face of hard evidence to the contrary. Another Holocaust poseur, ‘Laura Grabowski’ [Laurel Rose Willson] evidently valued the general idea of horrific-childhood ‘experience’ more than the imagined specifics: before she went on the talk circuit as a ‘victim’ of Joseph Mengele’s experiments, she (as Lauren Stratford) wrote Satan’s Underground (1988), her ‘memoir’ of being raised in a Satanic cult, subject to all sorts of devilish atrocities.
Laurel/Lauren/Laura (1941-2002) may have been lost in identity thickets of her own making.
Wilkomirski’s case is the most complex, as he really seemed to believe his manufactured victim pedigree (and his work engendered vigorous debate about the line between truth and fiction in memoirs, and whether literary value could adhere to works published under false pretenses). Defonseca seems more delusional (raised by wolves in the war-torn forests of Eastern Europe? Really?), and Willson/Stratford/Grabowski appears to be either a crass opportunist, jumping aboard whatever crazy victim train was puffing around our cultural terrain at at the time, or completely bonkers.
What these authors do appear to have in common is a real experience of childhood trauma, emotional or physical or both. Rather like the media sensation of the moment: Rachel Dolezal. (For readers who’ve been so immersed in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, or Presidential candidate announcements, or the hunt for escaped criminals in New York State: Rachel Dolezal is [accordingly to her biological parents)] a white-woman-claiming-to-be-black — who (until yesterday) led the NAACP in Spokane WA, has taught Africana college courses, and has parlayed her imaginary ‘mixed race’ identity into other municipal appointments.)
Rachel Dolazel’s wedding, 2000; her adopted siblings are in the front the photo.
According to what one can glean from the news, Dolezal’s childhood was difficult. Her parents, if one believes her ‘biological’ brother’s own memoir, were fanatic Pentecostal Christians who lived in primitively prayerful, isolated conditions in the Pacific Northwest. When Rachel Dolezal was a teenager, her parents adopted a quartet of African American and mixed-race children. Part of the reason her parents outed her a few days ago seems to be a custody dispute (over one of these adopted siblings, whom Rachel Dolezal is passing off as her son), which is connected somehow to molestation charges against the memoir-writing brother. This does not sound like a healthy family. But it does sound like the real-life childhoods (abandonment, adoptions, hardships, accusations of abuse) endured by the false-memoirists mentioned above, and it does sound like fertile ground for identity confusion and for embracing historically sanctioned narratives of victimization to validate frightening and ultimately incomprehensible early years.
A complicated family: Rachel’s adopted brother whom she now claims as her son,
Rachel, and Rachel’s biological son.
Like those who have falsely laid claim to the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, Dolezal has publicly tried to connect herself to the horrors of the African Holocaust and their racist legacies by, it seems, staging race-motivated death threats and related harassments.
This, to me, is the most distressing aspect of Dolezal’s imposture, on two counts. First, it undercuts or occludes the very real legacies of violence still endured by African Americans, including policing and incarceration practices that —until the Dolezal story grabbed headlines — were edging their ways into serious national discourse. Also, Dolezal’s inventions provide fodder for those who want to bash affirmative action, the NAACP in general, or honest discussions of this country’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and their present-day effects. Holocaust hoaxers/impostors/wanna-be’s also have had these sorts of effects, giving raw material to Holocaust deniers as well as to debunkers of people like Anne Frank and Elie Weisel (although there is a question about catastrophe memoirs and the line between fiction and non-fiction, as exemplified well by Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird — but that’s another blog).
Iron Eyes Cody, actor and ‘Crying Indian’ advertising model, was originally a second-generation Italian American named Espera Oscar di Corti. He totally embraced his ‘adopted culture,’ supporting American Indian causes and wearing his braided wig and buckskins until his death in 1999.
As a side note, Dolezal’s invented biography includes a fantasmagoric American Indian heritage, that encompasses being born in a teepee and having to forage for food with a bow and arrow. As opposed to people who claim Indian heritage in order to gain some sort of get-ahead advantage (Elizabeth Warren, or is that unfair?) or to cash in on casino profits, Dolezal appears to gravitate toward auras of hardship and oppression.
The second point: Dolezal’s intense personal identification with suffering and victimized others (rather than, say, with Black, White, or Indian freedom fighters or political leaders or just with social justice advocacy that doesn’t assume being the recipient of a particular form of injustice) suggests an unfortunate pathology. Because Rachel Dolezal seems to share with prominent Holocaust impostors a difficult childhood during which she felt (to say the least) alienated from her family, she has concocted a life story that vampirizes history to make sense of her own psychic pain and perhaps to seek validation for that anguish.
The mother of ghost child Kyra, in M. Knight Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), is afflicted by Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and eventually kills her daughter.
This may be a corollary of Munchausen Syndrome, where a person repeatedly makes herself (sorry, it’s almost always a female disease) sick in order to gain attention and sympathy. In Dolezal’s case, it may also shadow Munchausen By Proxy, in which a mother makes her young child sick — again, to gain attention and sympathy. Dolezal has involved her adopted brother/son in threateningly racist scenarios she appears to have created.
‘Black’ people passing as ‘White’ have been well-documented, in literature and in lived history. ‘White’ people passing as ‘Black’ have been less known, and no doubt less prevalent. The only ones that come immediately to mind (outside the ‘black-faced minstrelsy’ tradition) are white politicians and white journalists.
(Top) Very white Republican Dave Wilson represented himself as Black in order to win a Houston election a couple of years ago.
(Bottom) Black Like Me (1961), by John Howard Griffin, traced a white man’s travels through the segregated South disguised as a Black man.
I’m not qualified to comment sensibly about the issue of transracial identification, although Dolezal’s story does bring up how and for what reasons race is constructed. Neither am I qualified to comment on how gender is constructed (a corollary frequently mentioned, given recent news). That said, the current discussion of transgender may shed some light on Rachel Dolezal’s transracialism. Does Dolezal resemble a person like Caitlyn Jenner, who has always felt ‘that way’ without ‘that way’ being a biological mandate? Or does she resemble other famous maybe-not-transgender people ranging from Saint Pelagia to jazz musician Billy Tipton: born females who adopted male identities for practical purposes and apparently, gradually ‘became’ the identities that they’d assumed?
(Top) The 4th-century St. Pelagia adopted male clothing and become a monk, the only way she could escape her sinful courtesan past. Her female sex was discovered only upon her death.
(Bottom) Dorothy Lucille Tipton adopted male clothing in order to pursue her career as a jazz pianist, under the name of Billy Tipton (playing piano on this album cover). He had several long-term relationships with women with whom he adopted sons; his female anatomy was discovered by loved ones (and doctors) only upon his death in 1989.
Dolezal, however, went from up to down on the socio-cultural power scale, white to black as opposed to female to male or black to white. That this trajectory had to do with toxic family dynamics as well as with well-meaning empathy (or self-serving manipulation of identity politics) seems pretty obvious. And, as I noted earlier, it may have something to do with a specific pathology that translates masochistic, narcissistic needs into self-affirming pedigrees.
The whole episode, to me, is rather sad — less worthy of outrage than of pity.
References
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Crockett, Zachary. “The True Story of ‘The Crying Indian.’” Priceonomics 9 September 2014.
Donadio, Rachel. “Stranger Than Truthiness.” New York Times Online 4 March 2008. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/stranger-than-truthiness/?_r=0
Eskin, Blake. “Crying Wolf: Why did it take so long for a far-fetched Holocaust memoir to be debunked?” Slate 29 February 2008. http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Wilkomirski/OUP0803.html
Gibbons, Fiachra, and Stephen Moss. “Fragments of a Fraud.” The Guardian Online 14 October 1999. http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/oct/15/features11.g24
Holloway, Lynette. “Rachel Dolezal Wasn’t The First — Here Are 6 More Whites Who Passed For Black.” NewsOne 12 June 2015. http://newsone.com/3122057/rachel-dolezal-other-whites-who-passed-for-black/
Howley, Patrick. “Candidate Wins Election in Houston by Pretending to be Black.” The Daily Caller 10 November 2013. http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/10/candidate-wins-election-in-houston-by-pretending-to-be-black/
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Moyer, Justin William. “‘Are you an African American?’ Why an NAACP official isn’t saying.” The Washington Post Online 12 June 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/12/spokane-naacp-president-rachel-dolezal-may-be-white/
—-. “Rachel Dolezal’s brother, author Joshua Dolezal, faces trial for alleged sexual abuse of a black child.” Washington Post Online 16 June 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/16/rachel-dolezals-brother-author-joshua-dolezal-faces-trial-for-alleged-sexual-abuse-of-a-black-child/?tid=pm_pop_b
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Perkins, Rebecca. “The Golden Age of Trannies in Medieval Europe: Pope Joan, Bearded Women and Other Saints to the Tragedy of Jeanne d’Arc.” Polaris February 1995; republished gendercentre (Australia) October 2013. http://www.gendercentre.org.au/resources/polare-archive/archived-articles/golden-age-of-female-trannies-in-medieval-europe.htm
Scrase, David. “Review of The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth by Stefan Maechler (New York: Schocken, 2001).” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 (2003) 161-163. http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Wilkomirski/OUP0803.html
Smith, Dinitia. “One False Note in a Musician’s Life; Billy Tipton Is Remembered With Love, Even by Those Who Were Deceived.” New York Times Online 2 June 1998. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/02/arts/one-false-note-musician-s-life-billy-tipton-remembered-with-love-even-those-who.html?pagewanted=1
Walters, Guy. “Could there be anything more twisted than these Holocaust fantasists? How more and more people are making up memoirs about witnessing Nazi crimes.” Daily Mail Online 21 June 2013. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346193/Could-twisted-holocaust-fantasists-How-people-making-memoirs-witnessing-Nazi-crimes.html
Wilhelm, Maria. “Whether He's Black or White, the Voters Want Stebbins to Stay.” People Online 11 June 1984. http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20088031,00.html
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