When is a good yarn just a big fat lie? Jewish author Michael Chabon (the Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) delivered a series of lectures as part of Nextbook‘s Writers Series called “Golems I Have Known or, Why My Elder Son’s Middle Name is Napoleon” that contained a story about a pulp fiction writer Chabon befriended as a boy. Chabon regaled audiences with the unraveling mysterious identity of the writer, whom he reveals to be a Holocaust survivor penning an account of his incarceration in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Chabon asked audience members if perhaps they remember the scandal that followed the publication of Adler’s book, that Adler was in fact not a Jew at all but a Nazi journalist who faked the whole thing, including the number tattoo on his arm. Audiences nodded; yes, they do seem to remember reading about this somewhere, and anyhow, it sounds true.
Problem is, Chabon made it all up. There’s no Adler, no book, no scandal. Of course, that’s what he does—write fiction—but some critics are positively furious, calling it “Michael Chabon’s Holocaust Hoax.”
In defending their site and Chabon, Nextbook’s Matthew Brogan writes that there is a long literary tradition of “fiction masquerading as memoir” and anyone attending a lecture about actual golems an author has known should suspend their disbelief at the door.
We’re torn—we love Chabon. If we’d read this tall tale as part of one of his novels, we would have marveled. But in the context of a lecture of an author addressing his readers, we probably would have believed it actually happened to Chabon—and experienced a sense of betrayal at when our gullibility was revealed to us.