New Republic Piece Questions Veracity of New Penguin Title

-- Publishers Weekly, 12/23/2008 3:32:00 PM

In its issue set for release December 25, The New Republic is calling into question the veracity of Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived, set to be published in hardcover by Berkley in February. In the memoir, author Herman Rosenblat tells the story of how when he was in a German concentration camp in 1945 a young girl brought him an apple for seven months. Twelve years later in New York, Rosenblat goes on a blind date, and the woman turns out to be the girl from the camp and the two marry. In the New Republic article, reporter Gabriel Sherman says that a number of Holocaust scholars believe it is impossible that a girl could ever have been able to get close enough to a concentration camp to deliver food to a prisoner.

The article centers around Kenneth Waltzer’s efforts to verify the account. Waltzer is the director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State. According to the piece, Rosenblat’s agent Andrea Hurst, has referred all calls about the book to Berkley. No one at Berkley, aside from a publicist who first said the book had been fact checked and then said she couldn’t talk about it any more, has gotten back to either Sherman or Waltzer, Sherman writes. No one at Penguin was available Tuesday evening when PW contacted the publisher.