Apples Over the Fence: I've Had My Say and I am Done

I have decided that, barring any new major developments , I will not adding any additional posts about this saga. My previous posts and my opeds [here and here] express all I have to say.

York Publishers sounds like a vanity press. It's possible publication of a book based on a fictionalized movie -- that may itself not be made -- will probably gain no traction.

The lesson of this saga comes to us in the words of John Adams and Emmanuel Ringelblum, both of whom I have quoted previously.

These two men, though separated by continents and centuries, cautioned against the need to embellish the truth in any way. Both were referring to seminal events in history, one glorious and one horrible.

Regarding the depiction of America's moment of creation, Adams wrote:

Truth, nature, fact should be your sole guide. Let not our posterity be deluded by fictions under the pretence of poetical or graphical license.”

Regarding the horrible destruction being faced by Jews during the Holocaust, Ringelblum wrote:

We wanted the simplest most unadorned account possible of what happened in each shtetl and what happened to each Jew [and in this war each Jew is like a world in itself. Any superfluous word, any literary exaggeration grated and repelled.... It is unnecessary to add an extra sentence.

Or, as one anonymous Jew wrote in the margin of a questionnaire Ringelblum's group distributed in the Warsaw ghetto in order to document conditions:

FACTS!**

That's the takeaway from this whole matter.

And now.... Enough.


* I am not, of course, referring to the serious historical work on Buchenwald and its sub-camps being conducted by various historians.

** Kassow, Sam, Who Will Write Our History?