ANNE FRANK: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
Francine Prose
Harper
Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780061430794
When originally released in the United States, Anne Frank’s THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL met with unmitigated enthusiasm, inspiring everyone who read it with its call to understanding and forgiveness. In a new era, civilized people tolerate the intolerable and allow the same book to be labeled false and pornographic by a vocal few. Yet still the book inspires, speaking a universal language with a wisdom that exceeds the years of its writer, teenaged journalist Anne Frank.
This is a book about the book --- a highly favorable critique of its remarkable content and style, and the story of how it came to be. Anne, as it is famously known, was the child of a prominent Dutch Jew, Otto Frank, who converted the attic of his small factory into a cramped hiding place for his family when the deportation of Jews began to take place during the Nazi regime. For two years, the small group woke up, interacted during the night, slept during the day, and successfully kept themselves from discovery with the help of Otto’s trusted factory staff, who brought in supplies and maintained total secrecy. At some point, however, their ruse was discovered and the Nazis finally ripped the Frank family apart.
For the average teenage girl the confining conditions would have been intolerable, and had Anne not been a most unusual teenager, it easily could have been hell. But Anne’s rare talent for writing helped her focus most of her time on composing the story of the everyday events she observed in the attic, along with her musings about love and war. She understood that her suffering was inconsequential compared to what was happening to her fellow Jew and Dutch friends outside, and at times she would even optimistically reflect on nature and life and celebrated small moments of beauty in the pages of her book.
Award-winning fiction author Francine Prose makes the compelling case that Anne Frank was no ordinary teen and no ordinary diarist. A writer from early childhood, Anne, who was fierce in protecting the privacy of her document, continually revised her “diary” much like an adult author would as she intended it for publication after the war. And although the diary would eventually reach its way to readers around the world, it was a posthumous publication for Anne. Believing her parents to be dead (in reality, her father was able to survive the camps) and watching her older sister die pitifully in the camp “infirmary,” Anne passed away a few scant weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen from a combination of typhus, starvation and a broken heart.
Eventually, her father found her diary when he returned to the attic after the war and saw it for the gem that it was. Along with the little book, there were many pages of revisions and additions, so he devoted himself to editing it into a cohesive whole. Transformed into the book we now know so well, the cover was adorned with a picture of Anne’s smiling face, an image that has become an international icon of hope. Prose gives us the back story of the long process of bringing the diary to publication, to the stage and screen, and the serious, often litigious squabbles for the book’s rights. Despite the arduous task in bringing the work to the masses, it was all worth the trouble as it became a beacon for tolerance upon publication.
But tragically, like all beautiful things, it was eventually tainted. The book was marked for destruction by Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers; if Anne’s story is true, then their twisted beliefs would be impossible to defend. Otto Frank, inspired by his young daughter’s spirit, seemed to feel that he needed to uphold her truth by forgiving those who wanted to wrest the story from him, those who claimed he had written the book himself for profit, those who declared that the book was a cesspool of Semitic sex and pedophilic fantasies, and those who wanted the world to believe that Anne never lived and never died. Frank remained curiously passive toward the hate-mongering critics, yet obsessively devoted to the cause of spreading Anne’s story, keeping it alive for all times.
Reading this book brings back memories of one’s first reading of THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, a literate paean to the idealism of youth amidst the terror and bleak reality of war and hate. It will undoubtedly prompt us to re-read young Anne’s diary as a multi-layered work --- not just the chronicle of long-ago events told by a bright youngster, but as a brilliant work of art given to the world by a rare, lost genius.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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