Book News: Authors Misha Defonseca and Margaret B. Jones Caught in False Memoirs
Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 3/5/2008 7:41:00 AM
- Misha Defonseca admits fabricating 1997 Holocaust best seller
- Drug dealing gangbanger Margaret B. Jones actually valley girl Peggy Seltzer
- Riverhead recalls Jones’s Love and Consequences, cancels author tour
A 1997 memoir of a child surviving the Holocaust and a just-published tale about life in the mean streets of South Central L.A. have been found to be fraudulent. The Boston Globe reports that Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which details her childhood traveling alone through war-torn Europe and living in the forest with wolves, admitted February 28 the story was fiction. She is not Jewish and lived in Brussels with her grandparents during the war after her resistance-member parents were executed.
In a statement issued through her lawyer, Defonseca said “I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality—it was my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness from all those who feel betrayed.” Though a European and Canadian best seller, the book sold poorly in the United States after Defonseca and co-author Vera Lee successfully sued publisher Mt. Ivy Press for failing to fully promote it to U.S. buyers. A WorldCat search shows only 162 U.S. libraries currently holding the book.
Lies & consequences
On the heels of the Defonseca fiasco, bad girl Margaret B. Jones, a half-white, half Native American foster child whose tell-all Love and Consequences unfurled her gritty life of selling drugs and gangbanging with the 
Bloods, has been revealed to be Margaret Seltzer, a Sherman Oaks valley girl. She was outed after her sister saw a newspaper article about the book accompanied by Seltzer’s picture and informed publisher Riverhead Books that the memoir, which received critics’ raves, including a starred LJ review, was fake. In reality, grew Seltzer up with her family in a good home. Riverhead recalled the title and cancelled Seltzer’s author tour. Brilliance Audio also has cancelled and recalled the audio book version.
Where to put it?
While many libraries had the book on order, WorldCat shows 81 U.S. libraries stocking Jones’s title, including the Cold Spring Harbor PL, NY. A spokeswoman there told LJ they are keeping the book under biography until they receive Riverhead’s recall. Laura S. Clover, the Free Library of Philadelphia’s manager of Collection Development and Cataloging, however, told LJ in such cases her facility “reclassifies the material with a call number of ‘Fiction’ and adjusts the access points accordingly.”
