Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  “When I had finished it was nighttime, and I was astonished to find that the lights still worked, and we still had bread and tea, that I could hear no airplanes droning overhead and no pounding of army boots in the street—I had been engrossed in my reading, so carried away back to that unreal world, now almost a year behind us.”

  After Romein’s essay appeared in Het Parool, Otto Frank was approached by several publishers, among them Contact, located in Amsterdam. Its managing director was interested in the book but objected to passages in which, he felt, Anne wrote too freely about sex and about her body. Otto agreed to their deletion. Perhaps he was relieved to omit those entries, which Anne herself had left out when she revised her diary. Excised from the Dutch, these sections would be reinstated when the English-language edition appeared.

  In the summer of 1946, five selections from the diary were published in a journal with which the Romeins were associated. The editing continued. On the request of the Dutch publisher, roughly twenty-five pages were cut from the manuscript, including a reference to menstruation and another to Anne and a girlfriend touching each other’s breasts.

  Het Achterhuis was published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an edition of 1,500 copies and with a subtitle that read: Diary Letters June 12, 1942-August 1, 1944. Annie Romein’s introduction featured a somewhat more moderate estimation of the book’s merits than the rave, by her husband, that helped arrange its publication. Her preface was the first of many responses to the diary that praised the book while dismissing it as the unaffected, unpolished scribblings of an unusually gifted child.

  This “diary of a normal child growing up in exceptional circumstances…will disappoint anyone who hopes to experience a ‘wonder ’…this diary is not the work of a prodigy.” The diary “is not the work of a great writer, but the awakening of a human soul is drawn so purely, precisely, and uncompromisingly that one seldom sees the like in the memoirs of the greatest writers.” Like the children in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, wrote Romein, Anne Frank sees the world and especially herself “with a candid frankness, unjudgemental and down to earth.”

  Without knowing that she was weighing in on a soon-to-be controversial question—the issue of whether or not Anne’s diary was, strictly speaking, a Holocaust document—Romein observed, “This diary is also a document about the war, about the persecution of the Jews. The life of those in hiding is beautifully described by this child who had in any case that one essential quality of a great writer: to remain unbiased, to be unable to get used to, and therefore blinded by, the way things are.”

  The other thing Romein seems not to have known was how carefully Anne revised her diary, nor does she seem to have taken seriously Anne’s reflection, in the aftermath of the Dutch minister’s radio broadcast, on how interesting it would be if the romance of Het Achterhuis were published.

  “The diary is pure conversation with herself. There’s not one disturbing thought about future readers, not one faint echo of…the will to please.”

  Favorably reviewed, Anne’s book did moderately, if not extremely, well in the Netherlands. It was reprinted again at the end of the year, twice in 1948, once in 1949, and not again until 1950—after which it went out of print until 1955, when its success in the United States created new demand. However modest, the book’s reception in Holland helped interest editors elsewhere in Europe. The Dutch edition was in its sixth printing when Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank was published in Germany in 1950.

  In an attempt to capture Anne’s voice, the German translation made mistakes in tone, and, for fear of alienating its projected audience, omitted references to the anti-German sentiment in the secret annex. The prohibitions against listening to German radio stations and speaking German—a problem for Mrs. Frank and Mrs. Van Pels, who had never become entirely fluent in Dutch—appear nowhere in Das Tagebuch, and a reference to the hatred between Jews and Germans was changed to read “these Germans.”

  In an April 1959 interview in Der Spiegel, the original Dutch-into-German translator, Anneliese Schütz, explained. “A book intended after all for sale in Germany cannot abuse the Germans.” This reluctance to offend readers in a country whose leaders had murdered the book’s author was one gauge of the speed at which the diary had already become a commodity that the public might, or might not, choose to buy. Despite the editing changes, the first printing was not a commercial success in Germany.

  IN THE United States, Anne Frank’s diary was initially rejected by nearly every major publishing house. “It is an interesting document,” admitted an editor in the American branch of the international firm Querido, based in Amsterdam, “but I do not believe there will be enough interest in the subject in this country to make publication over here a profitable business.”

  Ernst Kuhn, a friend of Otto’s who worked at the Manufacturers Hanover Bank in New York, took on the challenge of trying to find the diary an American home. Just as in Europe, the book was viewed as being too narrowly focused, too domestic, too Jewish, too boring, and, above all, too likely to remind readers of what they wished to forget. Americans did not want to hear about the war. “Under the present frame of mind of the American public,” an editor at Vanguard wrote Kuhn, “you cannot publish a book with war as a background.”

  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. turned down the manuscript on the grounds that it was “very dull,” a “dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely…I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.” While recognizing that “so few contemporary books or documents (are) as genuine or spontaneous as this one,” Viking decided that it was an infelicitous moment for the diary to appear. “If times were normal I would do an edition and translation,” wrote one editor, “but times are not normal.”

  In Great Britain, the reaction was similar. At Secker and Warburg, it was felt that “The English reading public would avert their eyes from so painful a story which would bring back to them all the evil events that occurred during the war.” As proof, an editor there noted that The Wall, John Hersey’s novel about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was “not doing as well as expected.”

  In one of her “Letters from Paris” that appeared in the New Yorker, Janet Flanner referred to the current popularity of a book by “a precocious, talented little Frankfurt Jewess.” Yet despite the New Yorker mention, and despite the book’s reception in France, Anne’s diary was in the reject pile in the office of Frank Price, the director of Doubleday’s foreign bureau, when a young assistant named Judith Jones—who would go on to become a legendary editor at Knopf, working with authors including Julia Child—found it. In her memoir, The Tenth Muse, Jones recalls:

  One day, when Frank had gone off into the heart of Paris for a literary lunch, I set to work on a pile of submissions that he wanted rejected. As I made my way through, I was drawn to the face on the cover of a book that Calmann Lévy was about to publish. It was the French edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. I started reading it—and I couldn’t stop. All afternoon, I remained curled up on the sofa, sharing Anne’s life in the attic, until the last light was gone and I heard Frank’s key at the front door. Surprised to find me still there, he was even more surprised to hear that it was Anne Frank who had kept me. But he was finally persuaded by my enthusiasm and let me get the book off to Doubleday in New York, urging them to publish it.

  It didn’t take much urging, and we were given the go-ahead to offer a contract.

  Among those who, early on, recognized the book’s importance was Robert Warshaw, an editor at Commentary, a highly regarded Jewish-interest magazine that printed excerpts from the diary in advance of its American publication. “Let me say again,” Warshaw wrote Otto Frank, “that I have read no document of the Jewish experience in Europe that seemed to me so expressive, so moving, a
nd on so high a literary level as your daughter’s remarkable diary.”

  But despite the enthusiasm of Warshaw and other early readers, Doubleday’s ambitions for the book were modest. The publisher agreed to pay Otto Frank a $500 advance, and a small print run was ordered

  The book’s American editor was a young woman named Barbara Zimmerman, later Barbara Epstein, later still a founder of the New York Review of Books, who was then around the age that Anne Frank would have been had she lived. Her correspondence with Otto Frank is a model of personal affection, professional savvy, and faith in the importance of the project on which they were collaborating. On November 5, 1951, Zimmerman wrote Otto Frank, “I love the book and feel that it has a value for me beyond matters of business.”

  Every decision concerning the packaging and the launch of The Diary of a Young Girl, which was published on what would have been Anne’s twenty-third birthday, turned out to have been an inspired one. Good fortune and serendipity appeared, at every stage, to arrange Anne’s diary’s American success.

  Some of the credit is Doubleday’s, and some is Otto Frank’s, who rather quickly caught on to the publishing business and to the business of publicity in particular. He realized that his daughter’s diary was not in fact the relic of a saint, not the sanctified remains of what Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Review of Books, called the “Jewish Joan of Arc,” but simply a book. Pained at first by the unpleasant side effects of commercialization, Otto learned to steel himself to the discomfort of having his daughter talked about as if she were a fictional character. As always, he was determined to support his family, which would soon include his second wife, Elfriede “Fritzi” Markovits Geiringer, whom he married in November 1953.

  When it became clear to Otto that the diary was becoming not merely a commodity but a lucrative one, he decided to channel some of the profits it generated into the human-rights causes that would become, to him, as much of a religion as the Reform Judaism he practiced after the war. As soon as Otto saw what the diary could accomplish, he became quite single-minded—practical, focused, and at least partly immune to second thoughts or distractions.

  IT MUST have been an obvious choice to put Anne’s face on the cover, and Otto Frank sent his publishers a photograph of his photogenic daughter. Before the war, he had been a passionate amateur photographer. With his Leica camera, one of the first to be sold commercially, he documented births, birthdays, family holidays, and vacations, marking each stage of his daughters’ development with dozens of formal portraits and snapshots of the girls brushing their teeth, combing their hair, playing with friends, sunbathing, building sand castles. Scores of photos survived the war, striking visual images that would contribute to Anne Frank’s celebrity.

  For the American edition, Otto selected a picture taken in 1939. In the photo, among the most sedate of Anne’s portraits, her beautiful face conveys a wistful intelligence and a piercing sweetness. It was the picture that Anne had pasted in her diary, with a note remarking that such a portrait might improve her chances of getting into Hollywood. In real life, she added, she often looked quite different. She was probably correct, if we assume that the majority of her photos—in which she is shown laughing or smiling impishly, more animated and funny faced than conventionally pretty and composed—provide a more accurate likeness. But she preferred to be seen as a serious, lovely girl, and in choosing the picture that she herself picked, Otto may have felt that he was again fulfilling her wishes. In later versions of the diary, the current paperback edition, and other books about Anne, more cheerful images have been used.

  In a review in the New Statesman in May 1952, Antonia White responded, as so many have, to the photo: “What she has left behind is a book of extraordinary human and historical interest, as living as the mischievous, intelligent face in the photograph which confronts the middle-aged reader with the same shrewd pertness that must so often have been turned on her parents and the Van Daans.”

  It’s impossible to overestimate the power that Anne Frank’s image has had. She is instantly identifiable, whether we see her face on a book or projected (to coincide with a visit of the Anne Frank traveling exhibit) on a tower in Great Britain where Jews were tortured during the Middle Ages. It is an understatement to say that she is the single most commonly recognized and easily recognizable victim of the Nazi campaign against the Jews, or of any genocide before or since. The passions that she has invoked cannot be separated from the fact that we know what she looked like.

  Anne’s author photo was a publisher’s dream. At Doubleday, Donald B. Elder wrote to thank Otto for the “very charming” picture. Pleased by the portrait, Barbara Zimmerman must have felt her hope for the book take another quantum leap when she managed to secure a brief introductory essay from Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Over fifty years later, this preface still introduces the book, even though Americans have since learned and forgotten that many Jews—including Otto Frank’s family—failed to find refuge in the United States in part because of the policies of Mrs. Roosevelt’s husband. Meanwhile, the teenage author’s fame may have outdistanced that of her introducer; by now, it seems likely that more American schoolchildren have heard of Anne Frank than of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  The essay of just over a page begins, “This is a remarkable book. Written by a young girl—and the young are not afraid of telling the truth—it is one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.” The prologue stresses the triumph of the spirit that the diary documents and the ways in which its author’s concerns resemble those of teenagers everywhere. “Despite the horror and humiliation of their daily lives, these people never gave up…Anne wrote and thought much of the time about things which very sensitive and talented adolescents without the threat of death will write—her relations with her parents, her developing self-awareness, the problems of growing up.”

  The words “Jew” or “Jewish” are never mentioned. It has been remarked that Eleanor had grown up in a milieu pervaded by what Roosevelt biographer Geoffrey C. Ward termed a “kind of jocular anti-Semitism.” After a friend of the Roosevelts caught a large jewfish on a 1923 fishing expedition, Eleanor quipped, to her husband’s amusement, “I thought we left New York to get away from the Jews.”

  Moved by the former first lady’s preface, Otto Frank wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, thanking her for her kind words: “Reading your introduction gives me comfort and the conviction that Anne’s wish is fulfilled: to live still after her death and to have done something for mankind.”

  Like so much else about Anne’s diary, this preface has been the subject of controversy, in this case involving the charge that the book’s American editor wrote the introduction for the former first lady and asked Mrs. Roosevelt to sign it. But if that were true, Barbara Zimmerman didn’t say so to Otto Frank, to whom she conveyed her delight in Mrs. Roosevelt’s foreword. And Otto’s letter of thanks to Mrs. Roosevelt (who would encourage him to allow a stage or film version to be made from the diary, so that Anne’s message could reach a wider audience) was purely sincere. He described his sense of “mission in publishing her ideas, as I felt that they help people to understand…that only love not hatred can build a better world.” It’s a touching correspondence, as is a later exchange in which Otto declines an invitation to meet the first lady during her stay at the Park Sheraton in Manhattan on the grounds that he has recently suffered a nervous breakdown and needs to take a little rest.

  Less sweet was Mrs. Roosevelt’s readiness to believe the charges in a letter she later received from a writer who accused Otto of, among other things, having moved to Switzerland to avoid paying high Dutch taxes. The writer of that letter was an American novelist named Meyer Levin, who had given the diary a rave review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

  THE BOOK was an instant sensation. Meyer Levin’s review sold it.

  Not since Zelda Fitzgerald critiqued (pseudonymously and negatively) a book by her
husband had there been a literary review assignment—given, accepted, or, in this case, requested—in which questions of conflict of interest so blatantly arise. Meyer Levin was not only a close friend of Otto Frank’s, but he was acting as Otto’s adviser, and, informally, as the diary’s agent. In addition, he was convinced that he was the perfect choice to adapt the play for the stage.

  Nevertheless, he asked permission to write the essay, and Francis Brown, the assigning editor, agreed, then later gave him more space for line after line of praise: “For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form, the drama of puberty.” While acknowledging the painful subject matter, Levin anticipated his readers’ reservations, which he preemptively dispelled, assuring them that “this is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors…Anne Frank’s diary simply bubbles with amusement, love, discovery…These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.”

  The variant versions of the diary, including Anne’s revisions, would not be available in English for another thirty years, and Levin perpetrated the most common myth—or partial truth—about Anne’s work: “Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.”