Six Million Little Pieces?

Days after Oprah Winfrey's last Book Club selection was unmasked as fraud, triggering a national conversation among literati and lay readers alike about the definition and significance of memoir, the talk show host and cultural arbiter announced her next choice: "Night," Elie Wiesel's seminal autobiographical account of his experience during the Holocaust.

Wiesel is, of course, a Nobel Prize winner, canonized as an international voice of conscience. Still, Winfrey's imprimatur assures the book and its writer a fresh financial success, not to mention millions of likely new readers-the kind of jump in stature that might make even the venerable Nobel committee blush.

Then again, Wiesel clearly had something to offer the television hostess in return. As public relations strategy, the move is near genius. Winfrey is acknowledged as a demigoddess in publishing. Her Book Club, an offshoot of her wildly popular television talk-show, is credited with almost single-handedly reviving American book sales. Right now, however, she seems to be smarting from the shrapnel of last week's debate over "A Million Little Pieces," James Frey's 2003 account of his descent into drug addiction and violence-and Oprah's most recent Book Club selection. As disclosed by a Web site called The Smoking Gun, the memoir contained a host of inconsistencies. Frey has since been subjected to numerous attacks in op-ed pages and the blogosphere, an uncomfortable session with Larry King and a class-action lawsuit.

Given all this, it stands to reason that Oprah might have been in need of a little credibility. The rehabilitation of truth requires a trusted voice-a true survivor.

There is no one more closely identified with the term survivor than Elie Wiesel.

There is no doubt that Wiesel survived the Nazi genocide with which his name is nearly synonymous. Born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. "Night," his first book, was published in French in 1958, and came to prominence as an enormously popular and influential accounts of a young man's experience in the Holocaust.

But there is a problem. As E.J. Kessler reported in these pages, even "Night" has raised red flags. In 1996, Naomi Seidman, a Jewish Studies professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., compared the original 1956 Yiddish version of the book, then titled "

("And the World Kept Silent"), with the later 158-page French version ("

), which is the text that was translated and constitutes the Oprah-book as we now know it.

_Related Features

Frey's True Lies and Mine Is Pinnochio Passé? Big Lies, No Big Deal?

Continued on page 2: »