Stein Benjamin, (Die Leinwand (2010) / English: The Canvas [pb, Open Letter Books, 2012, translated from the German by Brian Zumhagen]) 978-1934824658 [- a fictional reworking of the real Wilkomirski affair — the 1998 scandal in which Binjamin Wilkomirski’s celebrated 1995 Holocaust memoir “Fragments” was exposed as fabricated by a man with no Jewish or camp background. Stein’s novel is a genuine literary-fraud/crime story: it’s built as two interlocking novellas printed back-to-back (you flip the book over to read the second half), one narrated by Amnon Zichroni, a psychoanalyst who encourages a patient, “Minsky,” to write his childhood-camp memoir, and the other by Jan Wechsler, an Orthodox Jewish writer who sets out to expose Minsky’s memoir as a forgery — and then finds a suitcase and evidence suggesting his own memories may be equally unreliable. Reviewers have explicitly called it “a literary detective story as well as a subtle psychological novel.” The “crime” is testimonial fraud rather than violent crime or state espionage, but it’s a Jewish author using a real Jewish-memory scandal as the engine of a mystery/detective plot about identity, deception, and who has the right to claim a Jewish victim’s history. – Claude]
International · Fiction author
Benjamin Stein
Benjamin Stein (born 1970 in East Berlin, now residing with his family in Munich) [After finishing school he worked until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a night porter in a retirement home, and later studied Jewish studies and Hebrew studies at the Free University of Berlin. He had already begun publishing poetry and short prose in 1982. In 2010 he published the novel Die Leinwand (The Canvas), an intricately structured book readable from either end, with two interlocking narratives meeting in the middle, dealing with memory, identity, and Jewish life in the shadow of the Wilkomirski affair, in which a celebrated Holocaust memoir was exposed as fabricated. Beyond fiction, he worked as an editor and correspondent for various German and American computer magazines between 1994 and 2000, and since 1998 has worked as an information technology consultant. Since 2008, he has run his own small press, Edition Neue Moderne. He is often described as a distinctive voice in contemporary German-Jewish literature — not defining his Jewishness primarily through the Holocaust, but exploring Orthodox Jewish identity, memory, and authorship in a broader, more pluralistic way within German letters.