Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  But, one might ask, why not encourage and guide young readers’ responses? Why should they not imagine they have something in common with a girl whose life, so unlike their own protected ones, ended in Bergen-Belsen? Why should the diary not inspire people like Mariela Chyrikins and Norbert Hinterleitner to attempt to rid the world of hatred? Why not emphasize Anne’s optimism if it means that one Argentinian police cadet or one Ukrainian high school student might be more responsive to the humanity of others?

  The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka. In Gitta Serenyi’s book, Into That Darkness, Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, explained that the brutality of the camp routine—the whips, the shouting, the stripping of the new arrivals and the forcing of them to run—was devised not for its effect on the prisoners but rather for the benefit of the guards, who would work more efficiently to the degree that they believed their victims were not human beings.

  In my Amsterdam hotel room, I have what I suppose could be called a change of heart. It no longer strikes me as quite so reductive to see Anne’s “message,” as Otto Frank wished it to be interpreted, as one of tolerance and understanding. Poor Otto! As if losing his wife and daughters were not enough. How he has been reviled for believing that Anne’s diary could leave its readers more conscious and compassionate! How often he has been accused of purging the book of Judaism, of sex, of its ferocious mother-daughter conflict, when in fact all those elements exist in the version he edited. And how he has been vilified for allegedly having turned (in Ozick’s phrase) a “deeply truth-telling work” into “an instrument of partial truth, surrogate truth, or antitruth,” and for having given his blessing to a foundation that has “washed away into do-gooder abstraction the explicit urge to rage that had devoured his daughter.”

  It has yet to be explained to me how the existence of a human rights foundation denies and negates the sufferings of Anne Frank and so many others, how viewing her life exclusively through the lens of her death will bring her back from the dead, or how it will forestall a recurrence of the virulent anti-Semitism responsible for her murder. If it turns out to be even remotely possible to prevent further horrors, surely Mariela and Norbert are doing more to achieve that end than those who mock them as naive do-gooders? Once again, I am struck by the uniqueness—the anomalousness—of Anne Frank’s diary, which still moves people to fierce debate, to talk about the political and social realities of the society they inhabit, and about the life of a girl who hid for two years in an attic until she was arrested and deported and killed.

  THERE is, in the library of masterpieces, an entire subcategory of books whose authors could be said to have been forced into a collaboration with misfortune. Among the depressingly numerous products of that involuntary partnership are Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s account of the terror of life under Stalin, and Into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginsburg’s memoir of that same period. There are the poems of Szymborska, Milosz, and Celan, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, the slave narratives of the antebellum South, all manner of war and prison novels.

  These are books that came into being at a personal cost that no one would be willing to pay. Their authors had no choice but to endure the circumstances that led to their books’ composition, and the books were what they had to show for it, if they survived. It is likely that none of them would have written their novels and poems and memoirs if they could have avoided their subjects, if their subjects had not sought them out, or hunted them down. All of which makes it problematic for us to say how good the books are, and how grateful we are that they exist.

  Given the choice, we would have been willing to live without the diary if it had meant that neither Anne Frank nor anyone like her, or anyone unlike her, had been driven into hiding and murdered. But none of us was given that choice, and the diary is what we have left. Meanwhile, across the equator and around the world, Anne Frank’s strong and unique and beautiful voice is still being heard by readers who may someday be called upon to decide between cruelty and compassion. Guided by a conscience awakened by a girl in an Amsterdam attic, one citizen of Ukraine or one Argentinian policeman may yet opt for humanity and choose life over death.

  SEVEN

  The Play

  THE SAGA OF THE BROADWAY PRODUCTION OF THE DIARY of Anne Frank is so rife with betrayal and bad behavior, so mired in misunderstanding and complication that at least four books have attempted to explain what happened and why. Published in 1973, Meyer Levin’s aptly titled The Obsession blames a leftwing cabal masterminded by Lillian Hellman, a secret conspiracy to purge the diary of everything Jewish, including the six million dead. Levin’s version is supported by Ralph Melnick’s The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank, which likewise sees Hellman as the malevolent puppeteer in the wings.

  Ten years after Meyer Levin’s death, his wife, Tereska Torres, wrote a book, Les Maisons hantées de Meyer Levin, which appeared in France and mingled fiction and memoir to portray a long and loving marriage to a man whose every hour was haunted by Anne Frank’s ghost. The most dispassionate analysis of the controversy can be found in Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank. But though these Rashomon-like retellings of the drama surrounding the drama disagree on the motives of the principal players and the machinations of the supporting actors, all are more or less in accord about the basics of the scenario, in which high-mindedness and slipperiness coexisted in extremely elevated concentrations, and which spanned decades of accusations and counteraccusations, decades in which money, power, and fame were pursued in the name of idealism and of loyalty to a murdered girl.

  Eventually, the unfortunate history of the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary would become as convoluted as the plot of a Dickens novel. Cynthia Ozick compared the story to Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, the protracted court case at the center of Bleak House, and indeed the wrangling, the maneuvering, the charges and countercharges would recall not only the obsessional lawsuit that Dickens so brilliantly portrayed, but also his awareness of what such a fixation costs, even beyond the legal fees.

  WITH eight major characters, a few rooms, one set, a rising arc of family conflict, teenage romance, and terror, Anne Frank’s diary seemed perfect for the stage. Within days of the American publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, Doubleday’s New York office was fielding calls from interested producers. The callers must have assumed that they were getting in at the beginning. But as those who became involved in the production would soon discover, to their chagrin, these early arrivals had actually come to the story late, seven years after it started in the same place where Anne Frank’s story ended, and only a few months after her death.

  A prologue of sorts had been enacted over a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, to which an American writer named Meyer Levin traveled as a correspondent for the Overseas News Agency and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A scrappy Chicago tailor’s son, the child of Eastern European immigrants who had risen, through hard work, to upper-middle-class respectability, Levin had had a gnarled relationship with his Jewish heritage. But those tangles sorted themselves out when Levin witnessed the Allied liberation of the Nazi prison camps.

  By then, he had published several well-received novels, none a commercial success, and had been cobbling together a living by writing journalism, criticism, and short fiction. Too old for active service, he was glad to have found a way to use his skills in the war effort.

  His instincts in the face of catastrophe were generous and energetic. He was known for asking newly freed prisoners if there was anyone they wanted him to contact. Survivors inscribed their names in the dust on his Jeep. Levin vowed to make sure America knew about the destruction of the European Jews, and though he briefly considered writing about their fate, he became convinced that “from amongst themselves, a teller must arise.”

  After the war he helped Jewi
sh refugees trying to reach Palestine, made two documentary films about their plight, and wrote The Search, a three-part memoir about his Jewish-American childhood, what he observed in the camps, and his work to help survivors emigrate to Israel. The book was rejected by every editor to whom Levin showed it, one of whom criticized its excessive whining about anti-Semitism. It was finally printed in Europe at Levin’s expense and by a small publisher in the United States.

  In 1950, Levin and his wife and their two children moved to the south of France so he could work on a screenplay adaptation of an early novel about a musician—a project commissioned by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who wanted to make a movie in Israel. In Antibes, Tereska Torres gave Levin a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, which had just appeared in French. It was a gift that Tereska, a writer whose Polish father had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, would regret.

  As he read the diary, Levin became convinced that Anne Frank’s was the voice he had prayed to hear as he stood over the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen. He felt the excitement familiar to anyone who has ever discovered an unknown masterpiece and been convinced of the importance—the necessity—of its reaching a wider audience. But in fact the book was hardly unknown, having made the rounds of American and British publishers and been everywhere rejected.

  When Levin wrote Otto Frank, praising the diary and offering to help find it a home in the United States, his letter must have seemed to Otto like a reason for fresh hope. Levin reassured Otto that his enthusiasm for the book had nothing to do with money. He himself would translate the diary if Otto thought it might be useful. He mentioned an obvious selling point, the story’s potential as a play or even a film. Otto Frank was less convinced about the diary’s dramatic possibilities, but he gratefully accepted Levin’s offer to broker its sale.

  After the first round of letters, Otto Frank and Meyer Levin became friends. Their correspondence suggests an exchange between a fond uncle and his younger, smarter, savvier—but always respectful—nephew. Promising to make the right contacts and to help Otto navigate the treacherous currents of American publishing without sacrificing the integrity of Anne’s work, Levin began, with Otto’s blessing, a letter-writing campaign to American editors.

  In November 1950, after the New Yorker ran Janet Flanner’s mention of the diary’s French success, Little, Brown offered to copublish the book with Vallentine-Mitchell in the UK, but the offer fell through when Little, Brown insisted on retaining the dramatic rights. Persuaded, presumably, by Levin, Otto had become so convinced of the necessity of controlling these rights that it was the one provision he insisted on in his negotiations with Doubleday, which acquired the book when Little, Brown dropped out.

  Judith Jones’s account of finding the French translation of Anne Frank’s diary in the Doubleday rejection pile and of reading all afternoon and into the evening contains a brief coda describing a conversation that took place after Jones convinced her boss, Frank Price, to publish the diary. When Otto Frank asked to meet with representatives from Doubleday’s European office, Price and Jones invited him to come from Amsterdam to Paris. After a long, leisurely lunch, “he made just one stipulation. He wanted to have a say in the dramatic rights, because he admitted, with tears in his eyes, ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of some actress playing my Annie.’” Time would show that Otto’s misgivings were correct, for more reasons than he could have imagined.

  In the early letters between Otto and his editors at Doubleday, Meyer Levin initially appears as a beneficent presence who wanted the best for the diary and who was to be consulted on decisions about the American edition. Levin’s good intentions became even more apparent, and his intercession more welcome, when his Times review propelled the diary onto the best-seller lists.

  Levin was not responsible, as he would claim, for the diary’s publication, but he was important in its success, and that success was his undoing.

  THE Obsession is a strange memoir, a journal of madness by a madman who has yet to be cured, or for that matter convinced that the pathology that has ruined his life is an illness. It begins with a nod to Dante’s descent into hell: “In the middle of life I fell into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me, these twenty years.” The first scene takes place in the office of the latest of several psychiatrists to whom Levin has gone in search of insight, if not relief. “Amazing, how these writers carry on, running from one analyst to another, the way, after a pessimistic medical diagnosis, one runs to another specialist in search of a different finding!”

  Digressive, discoursing on the evils of McCarthyism and the reluctance of the Soviet Union to let its Jewish citizens leave for Israel, shot through with complaints about the literary establishment’s conspiracy to ignore his latest novel, The Obsession keeps looping back to its central theme in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to talk to the severely depressed. Comparing himself to Solzhenitsyn, a fellow victim of political persecution, Levin exhibits delusions that he never suspects are delusional, any more than he realizes that the opposition lawyer whom he mocks for saying, “Levin has the hallucination that he actually wrote the diary,” could hardly have been more correct.

  “Agreed, it was an obsession. Admitted. There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react, send out protests and petitions. That was all very well for suppressed Russian writers, from prisons, from labor camps…but for a free American writer to complain for twenty years about a so-called act of suppression was obviously obsessional.”

  The Obsession is suffused with Levin’s intense and unconscious ambivalence. He describes Holocaust survivors as “ringed by eternal fire in the unapproachable area of those who have endured an experience that puts them beyond our judgement” and on the very next page reports telling Otto Frank, “You have been my Hitler.” His wife appears to have been a paragon of patience and forbearance until Meyer’s fixation drove her to attempt suicide and nearly wrecked their marriage. “Again and again times have come when she agonizedly cried out, “It’s me or Anne Frank! Choose!” as though this were some rival love I could abandon at will (Masochist, clinging to your pain-giver!). But can one by an act of will banish what invades one’s mind?”

  Levin’s claim to have arranged the diary’s popularity might seem like a wishful fantasy if not for the front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review. We can assume that his review was motivated by unalloyed admiration for a book that went on to be admired by millions, and that he meant his praise wholeheartedly. Yet the cheapening of Anne Frank’s diary had already begun, set in motion, with the best intentions, by a man who dedicated himself to ensuring that it not be cheapened.

  “Anne Frank’s diary,” Levin’s review begins, “is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label ‘classic,’ and yet no lesser designation serves. For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over for insight and enjoyment.

  “The diary is a classic on another level, too. It happened that during the two years that mark the most extraordinary changes in a girl’s life, Anne Frank was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms…The diary tells us the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of being taken by the Nazis. It is, in reality, the kind of document that John Hersey invented for The Wall.”

  Already, the essay has become a kind of pitch, with the pitch’s nod to the latest work on a similar theme that made money. Ironically, Levin had written an article in Congress Weekly arguing that Hersey’s best-seller about the Warsaw ghetto had found an audience that would be denied Anne’s diary and Levin’s In Search because the authors were Jews. In the New York Times Book Review, Levin points out that the diary “probes far deeper into the core of human relations, and succeeds
better than The Wall in bringing us an understanding of life under threat.” Which is true. Today The Wall is hardly read. But for Levin, it was the competition.

  Yet another striking feature of the Times review is Levin’s use, before the first space break, of the word universalities—a term he came to despise as he argued for the particularity of Anne’s experience. “It has its share of disgust, its moments of hatred, but it is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature. These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.” Levin’s emphasis on the people-next-doorness of the hidden Jews would later be echoed by all those who wanted the book, the play, and the film to have the largest possible audience. Universal is not just an adjective, but, in the world of commerce, a projected number, which is why universal would be employed, more and more frequently, as the antonym of Jewish.

  THE New York Times was understandably upset by Levin’s failure to inform them of his connection to the diary. In the Anne Frank Museum archive is a letter from Meyer Levin to the Book Review, expressing his hope that the paper will ask him to write for them again. He understands that the editors have heard he was agenting Anne Frank’s diary, which might suggest that it would have been unethical of him to request the review assignment. But in fact he wasn’t, strictly speaking, the agent. He had no intention of profiting from the book and had been motivated by pure enthusiasm for the diary as literature. Later, Levin would blame Barbara Zimmerman for suggesting he seek the assignment from the Times.