A Short Life, A Long Story

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife By Francine Prose Harper Collins 2009, $24.99, pp. 336

Anne Frank has become more than Anne Frank, more than a child hidden in the attic and carried off to her death before her life could begin. She is now a representative of all of the one and a half million children who died in the Holocaust, a victim of the vicious sweep and cruel efficiency of the Nazi machine.

Francine Prose’s fascinating book brings us every aspect of the Anne Frank story and its aftermath: the book, the play, the movie, the way it is taught in schools. She describes the hordes of visitors to the annex in Amsterdam where the family hid for over two years. She thoughtfully explores the issues that have permeated the Anne Frank story. Among them: Did the producers of the 1955 play and 1959 movie try to wash away her Jewishness in an attempt to make her story universal and extend its commercial success? Prose reviews the scandal over the play prompted by the claim of novelist Meyer Levin to have been given the rights to create the script by Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Levin’s anger, disappointment, law suits, outsized ego and concern for his own fortune—all are described in chilling detail, riveting to read.

We hear the purity of Anne’s voice drowned out by competing adults who had their own plans for her work. We see the powerful folk of Broadway and Hollywood working to bring the diary to the attention of all who could buy a ticket for the movie or the play. Commercial interests vied with authenticity along the way.

Prose recounts that some Christian groups objected to the play both because of its religious relativism and the innocent thoughts about sex that Anne reported in her diary. Prose describes how teachers have stumbled over the powerful material, unable to tell their students the terrible facts of the Shoah or to explain clearly what happened to the people in the annex. Prose discusses writer Cynthia Ozick’s attack on the broad brush of universalism that underlies the play and the movie, examining carefully Ozick’s belief that it is a crime to erase the Jewish nature of Anne’s story. Anne’s short life may come to represent the experiences of other peoples at other times, but it is first and foremost a Jewish nightmare, about our own people and what vile acts were done in the name of Aryan purity. Prose tells us what scholars and educators have said about Anne Frank. In an amazing bibliography and in the author’s notes she has gathered the relevant material—all the thinking, all the arguments and counter arguments that surround the diary as well the actual terrors, such as the typhoid at Bergen Belsen that killed Anne in March of 1945, just weeks before the liberation of the concentration camp.

Francine Prose makes a convincing case that the diary is a literary work of art, that Anne Frank was far beyond a typical young victim of Nazi persecution. She was in fact a fine writer, a precocious talent who understood how to correct and improve her style. Since Prose herself is an outstanding writer and sharp critic, she can demonstrate by example what Anne did to improve her work in subsequent drafts. Anne is not simply telling a story; she is writing it. And no one but an accomplished adult like Prose who knows writing in her bones could both analyze so well how passages in the diary were put together and how well they were brought to life.

Did this one death warrant the enormous and continuing attention it receives when so many perished? After reading this book the answer must be yes. Because it is clear that Anne became more than a girl fighting with her mother, or a girl who begins to love a boy. She has now become both herself, a particular individual, as well as every other innocent Jew murdered in those terrifying years.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I kept them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart” is perhaps the diary’s most famous and controversial quote. Anne did write this, but she also said she believed in evil, in man’s rage to destroy man. She was more complicated and interesting than her optimistic quote that ended the movie would imply. We all want to think that the Anne Frank who believed in the goodness of mankind was right. Most of us know that her story proves the opposite.

This book will hold your attention in every chapter and will do more than that. I found myself feeling again the tug at the heart, the clamp of fear, the approaching doom. Prose evokes the dread while filling out the story of Anne Frank with many factual details most readers will not have known.

Prose is eloquent and detailed on the attempts by Holocaust deniers to discredit Anne Frank and the veracity of the diary. These passages are almost too upsetting to read. How dare they? Yet it is important to know that the killers would kill again, and if they can’t kill Anne a second time, they can attempt to erase her enormous effect on those who have read and will read her diary.
Readers can be grateful to Francine Prose for the scholarship, clarity and energy with which she has gathered and interpreted the several storms that still surround one girl’s life and her book.

Anne Roiphe, a journalist and novelist, has written 18 books and is a columnist for The Jerusalem Report.