I knew that 13-year-old Anne, with her shiny dark hair, lively eyes, and beguiling smile, was spunky, with a romantic streak a mile long; that she and her older sister Margot were close; that she had negative feelings about her mother, Edith, while adoring her father, Otto. During my visit to the annex, I had been especially moved by the charming postcards—Franklin mentions one “with a photo of chimpanzees having a tea party”—and photos of movie stars like Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers. She had also pasted pictures of the British royal family on the wall, as though she were for all the world living in a bedroom in Scarsdale that she could decorate as she pleased.
None of which is to say that I am an expert, but rather to suggest that being a Jewish girl from an observant background as I was, with German Jewish parents who had escaped Hitler, and with a burgeoning wish to myself become a writer, Anne was part of my consciousness growing up. It is all the more surprising, then, that Franklin has written a book that is gripping in its telling of a much-told story, adding nuances and details that weren’t known before. She focuses less on Anne as a person with a heartrending life than on what we, her readers, have made of that life: The idea of Anne Frank, Franklin writes, “has become a mirror of broader cultural and political preoccupations,” so that when we talk about “Anne Frank,” we’re not talking about a person as such, but about the constellation of ideas, based on our own experiences, that swirl around her image.
Anne Frank’s comfortable, upper-middle-class childhood in Frankfurt before the Nazis came to power at the beginning of 1933 makes a striking contrast with the cloistered household described in her diary after her family went into hiding. The details of these years make clear the enormity of the change from an open and gregarious engagement with the “inhabited world,” as Anne once phrased it, to an immensely constricted perch. The Franks lived in a five-room duplex, decorated with antiques, green velvet curtains, and Persian rugs. Otto Frank ran Opekta, a spice business, and both he and his wife, whom he had married in middle age, were doting parents.
At daybreak on Monday, July 6, 1942, the Franks moved to their new quarters, wearing all the clothes they could bring; Anne wore two undershirts, three pairs of underpants, a dress, skirt, wool cardigan, and a coat. Otto managed to protect his firm from “Aryanization” by transferring ownership of Opekta to two non-Jews, Victor Kugler, his second-in-command, and Jan Gies. Throughout the Franks’ time in the annex, the family depended on the unfailing kindness and assistance of Gies and his wife, Miep, as well as on Bep Voskuijl, another of Opekta’s employees. Miep shopped for them and visited daily, bringing news of the world outside; she and her husband even slept for a night in the annex. Eventually, four more people joined: In July, Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their teenage son, Peter, moved in. In November, Miep’s dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, was added to the crew.
Franklin deftly evokes the texture of daily life in the annex, emphasizing the discipline that was required to keep things running smoothly. Wake-up was at 7, and breakfast at 9; there were scheduled slots for the bathroom. Specific times were set aside for reading the library books brought in every Saturday, and others were allotted for chores and the girls’ schoolwork. Anne started her diary in earnest in June 1942, having begun writing in a notebook with a red-checkered cover that she received for her thirteenth birthday. For the first few months, Anne wrote in it only sporadically, until in late September 1942, she decided to recast it as a correspondence, mostly with an invented friend she called “Kitty.” These initial writings would come to be known as Version A of the diary.
Anne turned 14 on June 12, 1943, having lived in hiding for almost a year. She had grown several inches; as a result, “she had to use chairs to extend her bed so that her feet wouldn’t dangle off at night.” Ski boots were the only shoes that fit her, and she had also gained 20 pounds, which left her bursting out of her clothes. Miep came to the rescue with a pair of secondhand red pumps: “She got very quiet then: she had never felt herself on high heels before,” Miep wrote in her 1987 memoir, Anne Frank Remembered. “She wobbled slightly, but with determination, chewing on her upper lip, she walked across the room and back, and then did it again.”
The original manuscripts were discovered by Miep after the Gestapo raided the annex, on a tip, on August 4, 1944, and the Franks were sent to Westerbork. Otto, alone of his family, survived the war, weighing less than 115 pounds by the end of it. “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you,” Miep told him when she gave him the notebooks and the loose pages, which had been scattered on the floor during the raid. “What Otto did with that legacy,” Franklin writes, “is perhaps the most confusing—and contested—aspect of Anne’s story.”
Franklin finds this criticism unfair: “It seems to me that the only real mistake Otto made in the process of preparing the diary for publication was not acknowledging the complicated genesis of the printed text.” In preparing a Version C of Anne’s diary for publication, Otto referred mostly to Version B, but also added selections from the original diaries (Version A) and from some of Anne’s stories. “She didn’t want things to be published,” he told Arthur Unger, a film and television critic for The Christian Science Monitor, in 1978. “Personal things, childish things which she saw as too childish. Sex things ... things like that are left out.” He deleted some of Anne’s harsher remarks about some of the annex residents, especially the van Pelses, and somewhat surprisingly, restored much of Anne and Peter’s romantic saga, which Anne had decided to leave out in Version B. (There would ultimately be a Version D, The Definitive Edition, which became the bestselling iteration in the United States, as well as an 851-page Critical Edition published by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in 1986, which included all the various materials.)
The purely autobiographical impulse has given way to that of a writer creating a shapely, often lyrical narrative.
As a result of Otto’s persistent efforts, the diary was first published in Dutch in 1947 in an edition of 1,500 copies. The German translation appeared in 1950, with further changes made by the translator, Anneliese Schütz, who later explained to Der Spiegel, “A book intended after all for sale in Germany … cannot abuse the Germans.” Anne’s description of Westerbork was deleted, and her line on “heroism in the war or against the Germans” was changed to “heroism in the war and the struggle against oppression.”
“In retrospect,” Franklin observes, “many critics have concluded that for all his intemperance and megalomania, Levin was essentially right to represent Anne as more traditionally Jewish” than she ultimately was in the play, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, a married couple who had adapted It’s a Wonderful Life. Cynthia Ozick, in an essay in The New Yorker in 1997, took the playwrights to task for obscuring the story’s darkness and presenting a spectacle of “uplift and transcendence” (with a sunny Natalie Portman playing the lead). In the process, Ozick argued, they transformed Anne into a generic figurehead against prejudice. Or as the drama critic Frank Rich wrote in 1995, the downplaying of Anne’s Jewishness contributed to the “cultural defanging of Nazi genocide.”
Roth’s treatment was subtle compared to Shalom Auslander’s scabrous novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012), in which an old woman claiming to be Anne Frank utters unlikely declarations like “Blow me” and “I’m sick of this Holocaust shit.” By this time, Anne had achieved full-fledged mythic status, a figure whose virginal purity was begging to be defiled by writers like Auslander, intent on casting aside Jewish pieties about the Holocaust and the nature of survival.
While The Many Lives of Anne Frank is almost too exhaustively detailed, and at times disorganized, Franklin makes a young girl who has mutated into a cultural phenomenon come alive in her own mercurial right. In doing so, she deepens the tragedy of Anne’s end and renders her own book as much an act of devotion as of scholarship. In Anne’s introduction to Version B, she had written, “Neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.” How wrong she was.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( There’s Still More to Learn About Anne Frank )
Also on site :