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

"Eskin's foray into the twisted identity of an impostor has an absorbing, frightful quality to it. The prose is crisp." -- Ilan Stavans, author of On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language "[A] compelling coda, and a poignant, symbolic rebuttal to what has become a terrible post-Holocaust tragedy." -- Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham and Second Hand Smoke "A riveting account of the already amazing story of Wilkomirski. Eloquent and insightful." "An extraordinary book... Eskin has used this event to uncover aspects of history and the human mind and spirit which have perplexed most people for years." -- Gitta Sereny "Starred Review. An important contribution to Holocaust literature as well as to studies of psychological and cultural trauma." "A fascinating portrait... [Eskin] offers a convincing explanation of why people were so eager to be deluded." "Sad, outrageous, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, always riveting."

In 1997, Binjamin Wilkomirski arrived in New York to read from his prize-winning book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, his memoir of an early childhood lost to the concentration camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz, and to raise money for the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. This orphaned survivor also came as the guest of honor to the family reunion of the Wilburs (once Wilkomirskis). The Wilburs hoped to trace the unrecorded link between the Wilkomirskis of Riga in Latvia and the name that Binjamin remembered. The Wilburs and the media embraced Binjamin as a humanitarian whose eloquent story typified that of many child survivors. One year later, however, Binjamin was publicly accused of being a gentile imposter: on August 27, 1998, a German novelist named Daniel Ganzfried announced to the world that he had uncovered documentary evidence proving that Fragments was an elaborate fiction. Yet Binjamin still insisted his wartime memories carried more weight than the documents against him, proclaiming, "Nobody has to believe me." Those who continued to believe Binjamin included child survivors, psychotherapists, and his publishers. Who was Binjamin Wilkomirski? Why would someone want to be him? And why would so many of us want to believe him? Wilbur family member Blake Eskin recounts the dispute over Binjamin's authenticity through reportage, interviews with Binjamin's acquaintances, and a visit to Riga in search of actual Wilkomirski relatives. In his absorbing narrative Eskin records the reactions of the media, the child-survivor community, and the Wilburs themselves to reveal larger disagreements over the reliability of memory, the value of testimony, and the individual's relationship to history. Part biography, part mystery, and part memoir, Eskin's A Life in Pieces is an important and lasting contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.