But it’s harder to persuade ourselves of this when, in many classrooms, the Goodrich-Hackett drama is taught as if it were Anne Frank’s diary. The advantages of teaching the play rather than the book are obvious. The drama has been effectively pre-censored and prevetted for an acceptable balance of the upsetting and the uplifting. The references to menstruation have been removed, and Anne’s suffering has been “universalized,” thus facilitating the transition from talking about the text to talking about the students’ lives. It can be employed by both the English and the drama departments in schools where drama departments still exist. First students study the text, then they perform it.
Yet even this can be transformed into a useful exercise. In her intelligent essay, “Drama for Junior High School: The Diary of Anne Frank,” Elizabeth A. Mapes describes assigning students to read both the diary and the play, thus enabling them to discuss the differences between literature and adaptation.
PERHAPS I should explain what I might do if I taught high school and were fortunate enough to be part of a school system that allowed teachers to decide how to present a book and how much time they would have to do so. I’m imagining a dream class, perhaps an honors senior English class in an urban public school such as New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School, a place I mention because I have visited twice, and both times found the students—local kids and the children of immigrants from all over the world—to be bright, eager, well-informed, and several beats quicker than I was.
I might use, or recommend, as a sourcebook, Hedda Rosner Kopf’s sensible and comprehensive Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents, a volume that contains useful bibliographical and background information, a perceptive exposition of why the diary is so extraordinary, a family history of the Franks, and an account of what happened to the Dutch Jewish children caught in the Holocaust. My ideal class would know all about Hitler, but to make sure, I’d spend a preparatory period discussing the rise of Nazism and the final solution.
An excellent essay, Judith Tydor Baumel’s “Teaching the Holocaust through the Diary of Anne Frank,” includes a list of diary passages that can be used to explore the subject of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews. (“Let us take the Diary and begin charting a blueprint by asking some pertinent questions. First, how is Nazi anti-Jewish policy in occupied Holland expressed through the entries written by the young Anne Frank? In what way does her diary chart Jewish response to Nazi policy?”)
Many teaching guides suggest immediately opening up the discussion to other genocides and to the students’ experiences of injustice, here or in their home countries. But in my class the main event would be the diary itself. I would assign my students to read it at least twice and to write about how their responses change from one reading to the next. In the classroom I’d ask them to read aloud whole entries. Perhaps the communal potato peeling, or the sausage making, or the break-in downstairs. We’d look at how Anne begins and ends an entry, at which details she chooses and what she omits. How does she make us see her family members and neighbors as complex human beings? How does she help us understand their perilous situation? We’d talk about suspense, honesty, tone, and style; about how the threads of plot and character are interwoven; about how an author can seem to be speaking directly to us. I’d remind them that Anne Frank was a writer, that the seeming artlessness of her style is an artistic achievement, and that her accomplishment is in no way diminished (or, for that matter, affected) by her age or gender. I would point out that she never wanted her work to be called The Diary of a Young Girl, but, rather, Het Achterhuis. Perhaps we would discuss the ratio between hardship and the speed at which children are forced to grow up.
Doubtless there are teaching guides that propose the approach I’ve described. But in searching the libraries, bookstores, and the Internet, I haven’t found much like it. Rather, I’ve read a wide range of instructions with a few common themes, mostly concerning prejudice and tolerance. Obviously, there is a place for that in the classroom, especially if we acknowledge that the purpose of education is not merely to fill a student’s head with information, however practical and useful, but also to teach them how to live.
Anne Frank’s diary is full of lessons that can help students reach their own conclusions about morality and human kindness. But the talent, determination, hard work, and expertise with which a child created a work of art, and the tragic circumstances that forced that creation, are themselves lessons that should not be ignored because they make us unhappy or uneasy. The fact that a girl could write such a book is itself a piece of information, as valuable as any of the improving moral principles that can be extracted from the words that a lonely child, imprisoned in an attic, confided to her imaginary friend.
WHAT makes one feel even more grateful to teachers who take on The Diary of a Young Girl is the campaign that has been waged to prevent the diary from being taught at all. Anne Frank’s diary is among the most frequently banned or challenged books in American libraries and schools.
In a list compiled by the Online Computer Library Center in 2005, The Diary of a Young Girl was number 13 on a list of censored books. The National Coalition Against Censorship reports that in the summer of 2004, “At Fowler High School in Fowler, CO, first-year teacher Sara McCleary was not rehired because she assigned to ninth-grade English students The Diary of Anne Frank. After a parent objected to a sexual reference, the School Board terminated her contract and removed the book from classrooms, leaving a single copy in the library.”
For some years, these attacks on the book—and on those who taught it—were mostly responses to Anne’s reflections on her changing body and her infatuation with Peter. Such passages, it was argued, encouraged an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness inappropriate in a classroom setting—or, presumably, any setting where teenagers were present. A 1982 survey found that the book had been banned in part because “it describes a young girl’s physical development too explicitly.” These objections unwittingly echo Ditlieb Felderer and others like him who have denounced the diary as a depraved sex book. In fact, one reason the diary has remained so popular with young readers has to do with Anne’s forthright and nonhysterical approach to sex, a topic even the most savvy teenagers often find threatening or embarrassing. How unfortunate that the book should be removed from the curriculum because of something it does well—conveying so accurately an adolescent’s growing awareness of sexuality in a way that still feels honest and true.
Later, as the mood at district school boards shifted further toward the right, charges against the diary would expand to include Anne’s rebelliousness, which was seen as an implicit encouragement of its adolescent readers’ lack of respect for authority. More recently still, the list of parental and community objections has expanded to include the very same moral and spiritual values the diary is regularly used to foster.
In December 1983, seven fundamentalist families sued the public school district of Hawkins County, Tennessee, claiming that a textbook taught in their children’s classrooms exposed students to values and ideas—secular humanism, liberalism, religious diversity, tolerance—that violated the families’ most deeply held beliefs. In the suit, Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, they charged that “the use of certain texts violated their right of free exercise of religion and the fundamental right of parents to control the religious and moral instruction of their children.”
The case began when one mother, Vicki Frost, found her child’s textbook to be rife with references to witchcraft and magic. The opening of Macbeth and a selection from the Wizard of Oz were particularly offensive. She was further incensed by an excerpt from Anne Frank’s diary suggesting that it doesn’t matter which God you believe in so long as you believe in a god.
The passage was from the Goodrich-Hackett play, not from the diary. Ironically, the controversial lines are taken from the same scene that caused Meyer Levin such grief, the discussion in which Anne tell
s Peter that she wishes he had a religion, then says that he doesn’t have to be orthodox, or believe in heaven and hell. “I just mean some religion…it doesn’t matter what.”
How it hurt poor Levin, and later enraged Cynthia Ozick, the deliberate dejudification of Anne and her family, and by implication the millions of others who died in the Nazi camps. The result was no less distressing to fundamentalist Christians, a situation that the play’s creators—so eager to universalize the material’s appeal—could hardly have predicted. One wonders how the fundamentalist community would have reacted to the diary itself, in which it is clearer that the people in the attic are not Unitarians, but Jews, and that Anne does indeed have a preference about which God she worships. Even as some readers and critics decried the ways in which the diary was, in Ozick’s words, “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted” into a plea for understanding and acceptance, others charged the book (or actually, the dramatic adaptation) with being too tolerant.
According to the court documents in the Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education case, “It is this underlying philosophy that offends the plaintiffs who believe that Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation. Plaintiffs reject for their children any concept of world community, or one-world-government, or human interdependency. They also strongly reject any suggestion, by implication, that all religions are merely different roads to God, finding this an attack on the very essence of the Christian doctrine of salvation.”
During the trial, the plaintiffs further charged that the readings fostered rebellion and anarchy, and that both parents and children could face eternal damnation as a result of merely coming into contact with the “evil,” “polluted,” and “heathen” texts.
The court failed to find that either the textbooks or the cited selections were in violation of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Three years later, when the case was appealed, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ children could be permitted to skip the reading classes; the school board was ordered to pay the families over $50,000 in damages.
In 1987, this ruling was reversed by appellate judge Pierce Lively, who made a distinction between reading about other people’s beliefs and being forced to adopt them. While the case lingered in the courts, a theater director asked for permission to stage The Diary of Anne Frank at a Hawkins County high school. The school superintendent refused, out of concern that the production might further offend the fundamentalist parents.
IN the spring of 2008, I was invited to visit an art class at Bell Academy, a public middle school in Queens, a charter school whose students range from gifted to those with learning disabilities. Taught by Andrea Kantrowitz, an artist, the class met for two hours on Friday afternoons, over a period of seventeen weeks. Its students, who represented the spectrum of kids enrolled at Bell Academy, were each given a paperback copy of The Diary of a Young Girl and encouraged to keep a journal into which they could copy their favorite quotes from the diary and write their own responses and stories. Their in-class project—for which they were divided into small groups, working collaboratively—was to produce an anthology of comic strips on themes related to Anne Frank’s work or to discussions it had inspired. They also studied passages from two graphic novels, Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.
It was an elective class—self-selected—and the students seemed happy to be there. Every one was clearly paying full attention, even a few solitary kids who seemed detached from the group. The class included whites, blacks, Latinos, South Asians, and Koreans; one pair of boys appeared to be mildly autistic. These last were among the most interesting students, certainly the most devoted to copying quotes and writing in their journals. One of them had begun a tale of time travel, or “time busting,” a journey that took its characters from the present day back to the Holocaust.
The session I attended was conducted like a studio art class. Kantrowitz tactfully critiqued the students’ cartoon strips and suggested improvements. The plots were allegories about racism, narratives affirming that respect and affection could transcend barriers of color, even of species. One comic strip concerned a giraffe and a donkey playing on the swings on a sunny day in the park when a troublemaking rabbit laughed at them for being friends even though they had different markings; this challenge left the two animals briefly nonplussed, and then more determined than ever to get along.
As I went from group to group, talking to the kids, most of whom had read all or part of the diary, I was struck by the words they used about Anne Frank. Brave, said one. Unselfish. What amazed one boy was that Anne could still think people were good at heart when she was “all cramped up” in the attic. “It made me think that people are always suffering somewhere,” said a girl, “and how lucky we are that we can go to school.”
One little girl said that the diary had comforted her, because she was Jewish, and she’d had a really good friend in grade school, and then one day her friend told her that they had to stop being friends; her dad didn’t want them hanging out because she was Jewish. The girl beside her said she’d had the same experience with the same girl in grade school. “She wasn’t allowed to be friends with us because we’re Jewish. Of course, we’re not in the Holocaust,” she said. “We know that.”
“There’s still racism,” added another girl. “But not here in this class.”
I looked around. I thought, she’s right. I thought of Mariela Chyrikins and Norbert Hinterleitner. Their jobs here would have been easy. These kids weren’t tomorrow’s fascists and skinheads. For them, reading the diary was less of a critical intervention than the widening of their circle of acquaintance to include a girl who lived and died long before they were born and who was right about the fact that hope and suffering, compassion and prejudice will be with us forever.
ELEVEN
Bard College, 2007
The diary is a second kind of Secret Annex, and it is where we remain with Anne, hearing her speak to us only once every few days and sometimes only for a moment because we must keep quiet so as not to let anyone know that we’re there. It is where Anne hides to survive.
—JAMES MOLLOY, Bard College, class of 2010
LATE IN THE FALL OF 2007, I TAUGHT The Diary of Anne Frank to a class at Bard College. It was a course in close reading, in which we’d been studying the works of writers ranging from John Cheever to Hans Christian Andersen, from Mavis Gallant to Leonard Michaels, from Roberto Bolaño to Grace Paley. My students were not only intelligent, passionate, and engaged, but intuitive and remarkably well read, and I was often surprised and delighted by the leaps of imagination and association that led them from literature to the visual arts or music. A discussion of Bolaño had turned into a conversation about Borges. A class on Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” had inspired a discussion of the innocent, perverse, fairy-tale eroticism of the self-taught artist Henry Darger.
I was eager to hear what they would say about Anne Frank, but I wasn’t—nor were they—prepared for the intensity of their responses. I had been thinking and writing about the benefits and the risks of identifying with Anne Frank; my students demonstrated all of the former and none of the latter. Born long after her death, they felt as if she were speaking to them. As if she were one of them. They identified with her humanity, her sympathy, her humor, her impatience, her alienation, her adolescent struggles, without ever losing sight of the gap between their comfortable and privileged lives and the circumstances that had driven her into hiding. They were keenly aware of the gap between what Anne was forced to endure and the trivial setbacks that their contemporaries found nearly unendurable.
A student wrote, “I couldn’t believe how she kept resolving to be happier. She writes about a lot of experiences of joy. Even in those extremes she manages to maintain the psyche of a normal girl. Today such little things turn people into basket cases, they go on Prozac because they can’t pay their credit card bills. It’s hard to believe that she manages to maintain so much of herself. She can look out at Amsterd
am on a sunny day and still be transfixed by beauty.”
I had asked them to send me brief response papers in advance of the class, and, perhaps because we’d placed so much emphasis on how writers wrote, quite a few of them focused on Anne Frank’s eloquence.
Not only was she a fabulous writer, but I felt a special connection to her because my grandparents were in hiding during the war, in France. At one point she says she wants to be a journalist, and I kept thinking that this is one of the best journalistic documents in history. She knows so much. She noticed all the warning signs, Jews are not allowed to do this, Jews are not allowed to do that. When her sister was called up, everyone knew what that meant. It’s amazingly beautifully written, and she does such a good job of making you feel the fear that was at the base of everything, all the time.
Wrote another student, “She creates characters so believable I had to keep reminding myself that they were real.” Another noted, “There’s something eerie and amazing about the level and the kind of details she gives us. Dialogue in chunks, descriptions of actions, and everywhere, character character character. This girl is an amazing writer. I find myself wondering, did she know what she was doing? It’s clear that Anne wrote this diary for herself, and it meant a lot to her, but was it ever anything else? Isn’t all writing inevitably ‘something else,’ meaning, it’s not just for the writer? How can the act of writing not be for someone else? Is it possible to write, to tell a story, without thinking of someone you’re telling it to?”
In class, I encouraged them to talk about the difference between their first encounter with the diary—most of them had read it on their own, or had been assigned to read it in junior high or high school—and how it seemed to them now, especially after having taken a class in close reading. One young woman wryly remarked that she hadn’t read the diary before because she’d grown up in Seattle, where “we did the Japanese internment camps instead.” A few admitted, with embarrassment, that, even though they’d read the diary in high school, they’d had no idea how Anne died, and were horrified to have finally learned the truth.
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