Eskin, Blake 1970-

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ESKIN, Blake 1970-

PERSONAL: Born November 15, 1970, in New York, NY.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Writers House, 21 West 26th St., New York, NY 10010.

CAREER: Writer and editor. Forward, arts editor.

WRITINGS:

(Compiler) The Book of Political Lists: From the Editors of George Magazine, Villard (New York, NY), 1997.

A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker New York Times Washington Post (magazine), and Newsday; contributor to This American Life, National Public Radio.

SIDELIGHTS: Writer and editor Blake Eskin compiled The Book of Political Lists: From the Editors of George Magazine, a book of trivia that includes Thomas Jefferson's twelve rules of conduct, facts about the U.S. government's special-interest spending, and the most notable Congressional filibusters. Other lists in the book are: "The Dumbest Things Ever Said on the Floor of Congress," "The Ten Biggest Bribes," and "Presidents with Ancestors Who Came over on the Mayflower." In the Virginia Quarterly Review, a contributor called the book an "entertaining and informative book that could sit proudly on any coffee table or commode."

Eskin's second book, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, tells the story of literary fraud, as well as Eskin's personal involvement with the subject. Binjamin Wilkomirski had published, in Germany, a 1995 memoir called Fragments, which purportedly recounted the author's survival of Nazi concentration camps, specifically, Auschwitz and Majdanek. The music teacher and clarinet maker claimed he was smuggled into Switzerland as a child, where a family then took him from an orphanage and raised him as a Christian. When, in his fifties, Wilkomirski said he remembered bits and pieces of those years, friends and mental health professionals urged him to write his account.

Critics hailed the book as an instant classic of Holocaust literature, and it won prizes internationally. Even before its publication, however, a Swiss journalist approached its publisher with concerns as to its authenticity. When it became available in English in the United States, in 1996, Eskin informed his mother; her family, named Wilkomirski, came from Riga, Latvia, and she was eager to learn more of their heritage. So when Wilkomirski toured the States in 1997, well funded, to speak to survivor groups, Holocaust researchers, and the media, Eskin's family invited the author to attend a reunion. He did, but the bloodlines failed to be clearly established and Eskin began to have his own suspicions.

In 1998 Swiss writer Daniel Ganzfried, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote an article that revealed that Wilkomirski was not Jewish and had not been born in Latvia, as he had claimed. He had instead been named Bruno by his mother, Yvonne Grosjean, a poor unmarried Swiss factory worker who placed him with foster families when she could no longer support him, and who eventually gave him up for good. He was adopted in 1957 by the Doessekkers, a Zurich doctor and his wife.

Even as the hoax was confirmed over the following year, so many people and groups had accepted his story that there was resistance to withdrawing the book from publication. Many people viewed the account as an accurate portrayal of a child's view of the horrors of the period, despite revelations about its evident fabrication. Also, supporters felt that some inconsistencies in Wilkomirski's story could be explained by the fact that he had been only three or four at the time he claimed to be in the camps. In addition, survivors feared that if Wilkomirski's story proved false, their own would lose credibility. As a result, a significant contingent refused to believe that it was a hoax, but in 2002, DNA tests confirmed conclusively that it was.

Wilkomirski did suffer as a child, but in a different way: by being shuffled from foster home to foster home. In the Spectator, Theo Richmond wrote, in regard to A Life in Pieces, that "There is much to be said for Eskin's proposition that the man's emotional distress was genuine, and that he took the Holocaust as a metaphor for his own real traumas as a child."

Library Journal reviewer Frederic Krome, meanwhile, called Eskin's book "a cautionary tale about the role of memory in historical investigation." Maurice Walsh wrote in New Statesman that the book "is a triumph of the necessity of thinking and feeling at the same time."

Jonathan Lear wrote in the New York Times Book Review that A Life in Pieces "is much more than an exposé. It is a telling account of our culture's love affair with the victim" and "shows in bold relief . . . how the culture was ready to fall in love with this myth."

In an online review for the Houston Chronicle, Harvey Grossinger wrote that Eskin's "unprejudiced and mesmerizing account is an amalgam of disoriented family history and the history of the mass of European Jews during the war. It's a detective story, a penetrating study of violated trust and incredulous quackery, and a validation of Eskin's tireless efforts as a skeptical reporter to track down the truth. It is also a deeply reflective meditation on the credibility and value of individual testimony."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 1998, Bonnie Smothers, review of The Book of Political Lists: From the Editors of George Magazine, p. 1569; February 1, 2002, Vanessa Bush, review of A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, p. 916.

Bookseller, February 8, 2002, Benedicte Page, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 31.

Foreign Affairs, May-June, 2002, Stanley Hoffman, review of A Life in Pieces.

Library Journal, January, 2002, Frederic Krome, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 122.

New Statesman, May 20, 2002, Maurice Walsh, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 54.

Newsweek International, March 25, 2002, Caille Millner, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 4.

New York, February 4, 2002, Ben Kaplan, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 82.

New Yorker, February 4, 2002, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 81.

New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2002, Jonathan Lear, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, December 24, 2002, Michael Bronski, "PW Talks with Blake Eskin," p. 54.

Spectator, April 27, 2002, Theo Richmond, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 39.

Times Literary Supplement, May 17, 2002, Elaine Glaser, review of A Life in Pieces, p. 33.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1998, review of The Book of Political Lists: From the Editors of George Magazine, p. 140.