Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  No sensible person would argue that books should be reviewed by their agents. But The Diary of a Young Girl may be an anomalous case that encourages us to view even this dubious event in light of its result. What if the diary had been assigned to a critic who, like the reader at Knopf, thought it “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions”? Even though Eleanor Roosevelt had praised the book, a lukewarm review might have arranged a slow trip to the remainder table, where, with luck, it might someday be rediscovered for the Holocaust Studies series of a university press. Arguably, Levin’s review represented a breach of ethics that worked out for the best.

  Should Doubleday have told the Times not to run the review because Levin wanted to write the play? The publisher believed in the book; it would have been self-defeating. The letters between Otto Frank and Barbara Zimmerman exulted over Levin’s essay, which Zimmerman praised for its beauty and for the space it got in the country’s most influential paper. Buoyed by the book’s success, everyone chose to ignore the fact that Levin was in touch with at least two Hollywood studios and that Variety described him as “agenting the tome for possible filmization or legit treatment.”

  Though Levin pitched the diary as being better than The Wall, a successful pitch needs a successful precedent, and in this case there was none. There had been nothing quite like it, and no evidence suggested that adult readers would buy a girl’s diary. Meyer Levin argued that the book should be read: “There is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. But through her diary Anne goes on living. From Holland to France, to Italy, Spain. The Germans too have published her book. And now she comes to America. Surely she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.”

  Levin’s review ends with a hook designed to drag the reader out of his chair and straight to the bookstore when it opened on Monday morning. Which is exactly what happened. Who can say how many of us would have read Anne Frank if not for Meyer Levin’s review, a brilliant, if suspect, piece of publicity that got the diary into the shops, into the hands of readers, and onto the desks of the Broadway producers who would engineer his downfall?

  FROM the start Levin believed, and told Otto, that he was the ideal choice to turn the book into a play. He was Jewish, he felt a powerful sense of Jewish identity and of responsibility to the victims of the Nazis, he had been to the camps, he was among the diary’s earliest and most devoted fans. But as the book’s reputation and popularity grew, names more famous than Levin’s began to be mentioned in connection with its theatrical adaptation.

  More than fifty years later, one can hear the tone of the conversation change as the principals—Otto Frank, Meyer Levin, the publishers and producers—realized that a hot property was about to get hotter. Doubleday asked Otto if they could negotiate the theatrical rights for a 10 percent commission. Meyer Levin agreed. If Barbara Zimmerman was Otto’s lost daughter, Levin was still the loyal, supportive nephew, and no one had forgotten the importance of his review. Confidently, Levin agreed to let the publisher make the best deal. Otto wanted everyone to be happy—for Levin to be rewarded and feel included, and for his publisher to maximize the book’s potential without distorting Anne’s work.

  It was at this point that Levin wrote Otto Frank a fateful letter reiterating his desire to do the adaptation. He had no interest in an agent’s commission. All he wanted was to remain Otto’s first choice as writer. Betraying a fatal failure of the imagination, Levin volunteered to step aside in the event that his withdrawal was the only way that a famous dramatist would agree to adapt the play.

  Otto Frank’s consent to let Doubleday sell the dramatic rights stipulated that the sale be approved by Levin. And even if Levin was beginning to seem like a troublemaker, everyone still imagined that everything would work out. Doubleday offered Levin half of their 10 percent agent’s commission, and again Levin agreed.

  Otto was reassured. The book would find the most prestigious and sensitive producer, Levin would either write, or collaborate on, the script. But one by one, the principal parties began to wish that Meyer Levin would just go away. In a letter to Frank Price, Barbara Zimmerman wrote that Levin’s motives didn’t seem mercenary, but that he was “screwing up the whole deal.” In subsequent letters, Zimmerman, clearly at the end of her tether, described Levin as “impossible to deal with on any terms, officially, legally, morally, personally” and claimed “he seems bent on destroying both himself and Anne’s play.” Levin couldn’t help but sense the growing disaffection with his role in the negotiations, and he slowly began to see himself as a desperate character, a failed writer, a poor Eastern European Jew surrounded by rich German-Jewish snobs, personified by Otto Frank.

  In fact, Otto had been in a shaky financial position for much of his life, struggling to shore up a failing bank, and, with his cousin’s help, running a modest dealership in jam-making products. Hitler had taken everything and murdered his wife and children. On his return to Amsterdam, he’d once more had to rely on the loyalty and charity of his former employees. And now it seemed that his daughter had not only given the world a literary classic but had provided him with a way to finish out his life in security and comfort. Who could blame him for wanting that after all he’d been through?

  As the diary remained on the best-seller lists, the discussions about the selling of the dramatic rights began to include the magic words that sealed Meyer Levin’s doom: Famous writer. Important playwright. Or sometimes, more coarsely, big name. The big names bandied about included Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, and Joshua Logan. Three weeks after the book’s publication, Variety ran a list of possible producers.

  At first Levin’s resistance was gentle. Every time a famous playwright was suggested, Levin helpfully explained why this or that celebrity was wrong for the job. Levin claimed that, as early as 1950, Otto Frank had agreed that Levin would serve as his American agent, negotiate the theatrical rights to the diary, and write the dramatic version. To which Frank replied that their understanding was not as formal and binding as Levin believed.

  Otto reassured Levin of his faith in him and in Doubleday. But the first notes of desperation began to sound in Levin’s letters to Otto. His advice grew more unreasonable and manipulative. He warned Otto that a famous playwright might leave too heavy a stamp on the material, and besides, some of the writers mentioned were has-beens with strings of failures. A few of the playwrights and producers Doubleday was considering had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee; such candidates should be avoided lest the diary be caught in the political crossfire.

  When Maxwell Anderson was suggested, and refused to collaborate with Levin, or with anyone else, Levin panicked. Anderson’s “heavy-handed” work, Levin wrote Otto, had fallen out of favor. And his reputation might overshadow the diary: “If he writes the play, it will undoubtedly be known as Maxwell Anderson’s play about the little girl, what was her name? It seems to me that the play should be identifiable as Anne’s work.” Finally, Levin claimed, Anderson was unqualified because he was not a Jew.

  Otto Frank, who would spend the rest of his life ensuring that people not be judged and excluded on the basis of their color or race or religion, was offended by Levin’s suggestion that non-Jews need not apply. In June 1952, he wrote back: “I always said that Anne’s book is not a warbook. War is in the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is the background. I never wanted a Jew writing an introduction for it. It is (at least here) read and understood more by gentiles than in Jewish circles. I do not know, how that will be in the USA, it is the case in Europe. So do not make a Jewish play out of it! In some way of course it must be Jewish, even so that it works against anti-Semitism. I do not know if I can express what I mean and only hope that you won’t mi
sunderstand.”

  Otto was right to worry that he might have failed to explain himself clearly. His letter is filled with contradictions—Anne’s story is Jewish, it isn’t Jewish, it shouldn’t be a Jewish play but should combat anti-Semitism.

  Another recurring debate surrounding the diary has centered on the Jewish identity of Anne Frank. Did she think of herself as Jewish? Was she aware of what was happening to her fellow Jews? The answer is yes, and yes. Did the Franks keep a kosher house? A diary entry is devoted to Mr. Van Pels’s expertise in making pork sausage. Did she believe in God? One of the things that surprised Otto Frank when he read his daughter’s diary was how often, and how fervently, she wrote about God. Were the Franks “assimilated”? Yes. They celebrated Hanukkah and St. Nicholas Day. When Otto Frank asked Kleiman for a copy of the New Testament so that Anne could learn about it, and a “somewhat perturbed” Margot asked if he meant to give Anne a Bible for Hanukkah, Otto agreed that it might be better as a present for St. Nicholas Day, since—as Anne writes in her revisions and as Otto keeps in the published diary—Jesus didn’t seem to go with Hanukkah. Like many modern parents, the Franks had, as their gods, their children.

  Of course Anne’s story was Jewish, and, despite his assimilated German-Jewish background, so was her father. His objection to making it “a Jewish play” was too complex to chalk up to his upbringing, his views on religion, or the postwar desire to return to normalcy and forget the catastrophic singling out of the Jews. It must have begun to occur to Otto that Anne’s story could reach a much wider audience than the drastically reduced Jewish population. Of course the diary was read by more European gentiles than by Jews; there were so few Jews left. And even the forebearing Otto was clearly irritated by Levin’s “nationalistic” objection to Maxwell Anderson. Beneath Otto’s unease is an instinctive shrinking back from Levin’s impulse to control him and the diary. As it rapidly became clear that Levin was not an impartial adviser but had a fierce personal stake in the diary’s future, Doubleday began to leave him out of the loop.

  Meanwhile, Levin was busily writing his own dramatization of the diary, which was finished by the time Doubleday engaged a producer, a seasoned Broadway veteran named Cheryl Crawford. Initially, Levin liked Cheryl Crawford, though again there seems to have been a misunderstanding about his role. Crawford initially suggested that Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets adapt the diary, but when she heard about Otto’s loyalty to Levin, she gave Levin two months to come up with a draft.

  That summer, Levin worked on the play, taking a break to write a half-hour radio adaptation of the diary for the American Jewish Committee, which was slated to be broadcast in September. During this time, another producer—Kermit Bloomgarden—suggested himself for the project and proposed that Arthur Miller write the adaptation. At least Miller was Jewish, said Levin. But he wasn’t Jewish enough.

  In the fall of 1952, Otto arrived from Europe—on Yom Kippur, as it happened. Barbara Zimmerman met his boat at the pier. The next day, Cheryl Crawford told Levin that she liked his first draft. But two days later she informed him that she had reread it in the middle of the night and now had serious reservations. She agreed that he should be given time to revise it. Too little time, he argued. That Levin was given a weekend to rework the entire thing suggests that Crawford had already decided against him. The playwrights who were chosen would eventually write eight drafts.

  With Doubleday’s encouragement, Otto Frank engaged a lawyer, Myer Mermin. Though Mermin determined that Levin had no formal rights to the play, he did acknowledge that his casual arrangements with Otto might support a legal challenge. Mermin suggested that Levin be given a month to submit his script to an approved list of producers. If none was interested, Levin would renounce all rights to the drama.

  When no willing producer could be found, Levin argued that his play was being discriminated against for being too Jewish, a quality that offended the “doctrinaire” political sensibilities of the anti-Semitic Stalinists, among them Lillian Hellman, who was advising the production team. The period in which this censorship occurred, Levin would later write, coincided with the height of Stalin’s campaign against Jewish writers and cultural figures. Not wanting to give the House Un-American Activities Committee more fuel for its fires, Levin claimed, he kept silent about the reason for his work being suppressed and wound up pinned between Josef Stalin and Joseph McCarthy. Others, including Crawford and the play’s eventual producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, blamed Levin’s play for being insufficiently dramatic to work on the stage. Levin argued his case in letters that the New York Times and Variety refused to print, and in an increasingly testy correspondence with Otto Frank. In one letter to Otto, Levin called Cheryl Crawford a “castrating homosexual.”

  By now a larger cast of characters had been assembled to weigh in: Hellman, Bloomgarden, Elia Kazan. Here is where Levin (and Ralph Melnick) see the heavy fist of Lillian Hellman crashing down as she arm-wrestles the production away from Levin, with his narrowly sectarian (that is, Jewish) slant on Anne’s story, and conspires to hand it over to a team who will be more in harmony with her own anti-Semitic, extreme-leftwing program. Melnick finds abundant evidence supporting Levin’s claims that Hellman manipulated the situation to achieve her Stalinist agenda. But that seems unlikely, since, in Lillian Hellman, personal ambition appears to have trumped politics. Lillian Hellman wasn’t Stalin’s agent, but her own. She knew the most important writers, she knew theater people, she could make things happen in a way that Meyer Levin could not.

  The other so-called co-conspirators and dupes—producers, writers, directors—intuited, early on, that the play might turn a profit. Even if the principal architect of the “cabal” against Levin was a Communist, rarely has Communism achieved such capitalist cash-cow success, and it seems unlikely that Hellman and her cohorts conspired to funnel the profits from Broadway to the Kremlin. Regardless of the political views of the players, the drama of the diary’s adaptation was not about Communism but about capitalism working exactly the way it’s supposed to, cutting the dark stuff, the Jewish stuff, the depressing stuff, emphasizing the feel good—and making money. This was 1950s America, the war was over, the “healing” well under way, and it was time for the sitcom teen, together with Mom and Dad and Sis, to head off to the secret annex.

  In early conversations between Lillian Hellman and Garson Kanin, who would eventually direct the Broadway production, Hellman made a telling remark that would probably have been lost on Levin had he heard it. While acknowledging the diary’s literary importance, Hellman explained that she was the wrong person to adapt it. Such an adaptation, she said, would be so depressing that the producers would be lucky if the play ran for one night. They needed a playwright with a “lighter touch.” Later, the chosen writers—Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett—were instructed to emphasize Anne’s humor. “The only way this play will go will be if it’s funny,” advised Kermit Bloomgarden. “Get (the audience) laughing…That way, it’s possible for them to sit through the show.”

  Once again, Levin got it wrong. His approach to Anne’s diary may have been “too Jewish” but it was also, more problematically, too serious. Ironically, the ponderousness and sententiousness of his own adaptation meant it might have had a better chance of being produced in the state Socialist system he despised and feared, a climate in which art, however wedded to propaganda, was divorced from commerce, and less dependent on a theatergoing public who could choose to buy, or not buy, expensive Broadway seats. Only in a capitalist society were ticket sales related to a play’s ability to make its audience feel chastened but uplifted, sad but hopeful. The play’s producer and director understood that a drama confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and the political ramifications of Nazism, Zionism, and Jewish spirituality was unlikely to pack the house night after lucrative night. Whatever the strengths and virtues of the play that Meyer Levin wrote, and that can still be read in a version performed by the Israel Soldiers Theatre, levity and humor
were not among them.

  AT SEVERAL points in The Obsession, Levin the novelist takes over from Levin the memoirist and Levin the polemicist, and we read scenes, drawn from life, that suggest a different explanation for his disappointments than the one that he is (or believes he is) providing. Several excruciating passages detail his bruising encounters with Joseph Marks, the vice-president of Doubleday, who was deputized to handle dramatic rights to the diary.

  In his elegant office, Marks reads a list of famous producers who have made offers and informs Levin that the deciding factors will be the track record of the producer and the fame of the adapter. Obviously, he is saying this to a virtually unknown writer. Levin points out that the diary is his project, and Marks says he understands that, but a “big-name dramatist would virtually assure a Broadway success.” Again, it’s difficult to link this conversation to the Stalinist ideology that, Levin claims, engineered his failure. On the other hand it’s all too easy to imagine the unease of potential backers listening to Levin’s plans for the adaptation: “The very origin of our theater was in religious plays of martyrdom…the play, if done, must be a reincarnation. In the persistence of the living spirit each spectator would feel a catharsis. When the spirit reappeared before him, indestructible, the crematorium was negated…I saw the form almost as a ballet, a young girl’s probing, thwarted at each impulsive moment while she strives for self-realization.”

  To read Meyer Levin’s adaptation of the diary is to confront the pitfalls of basing a work of art on Big Ideas: martyrdom, reincarnation, self-realization. As Levin’s drama begins, a group of mourners in black raincoats chant the Hebrew prayer for the dead. A narrator, employed throughout to apprise the audience of historical developments—the implementation of the final solution, the construction of the camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the German incursions into Russia and Africa, the Allied invasions, as well as the shifts in time between the acts—outlines Otto Frank’s background and his emigration from Frankfurt to Holland.