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"
Anne Frank
: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife" by
Francine Prose
; Harper (322 pages,
$24.99
)
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You read
the diary, you've seen the play and the movie, you're
familiar with the Philip Roth remix, "The Ghost
Writer." You toured, or at least read about, the
exhibit at the
Holocaust Museum
. Even if you haven't done all these things, or did them
a long time ago, you're pretty well Anne Frankified.
Surely you don't need to read a new book about her, or
reread the diary.
Well —
surprise.
Francine Prose
will make you feel you have not grasped the full story.
I
expected Prose's "
Anne Frank
: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife" to be some
sort of postmodern take on the haunting of our culture
by the ghost of this long-dead Jewish teenager, now an
emblem of the Holocaust. In fact, Prose does thoroughly
examine the "afterlife" of the diary —
beginning with the challenge of its publication (can you
believe that
Judith Jones
, who rescued
Julia Child
from obscurity, was the angel here?) and moving through
the unworthy stage and
Hollywood
versions. Prose explains how Holocaust deniers, Internet
perverts and American schoolteachers have all used the
text to their own ends.
Most
importantly, Prose takes
Anne Frank
seriously as a writer, applying her crystalline critical
insight to the work itself. She explains that far from
being a piece of "found art" written by an
ingenue, the diary is a consciously crafted work of
literature by someone who was already, at 15, a real
writer — a writer who revised and recopied two years'
worth of entries at the pace of 11 pages a day through
the spring and summer of 1944, until her arrest. Prose
closely examines Anne's literary choices, her
characterization and her storytelling skill. Here's
Prose on the decision to address the entries to the
imaginary "Kitty," an intimate
"you": "Reading Anne's diary, we become
the friend, the most intelligent, comprehending
companion that anyone could hope to find."
When
Otto Frank
returned alone to the attic after the liberation of the
camps, he found both the original entries and Anne's
revision. He created a third version of the text,
reinstating some material Anne had deleted but cutting
elsewhere — often, snipes at her mother and the other
inhabitants of the attic, as well as passages about
sexuality. Prose reverses the tide of criticism directed
at his efforts: "Over the last half century
Otto Frank
has been accused of prudishness, of being too ready to
forgive the Germans, of censoring and deracinating Anne.
... In fact, what seems most probable is that his
editing was guided by the instincts of a bereaved father
wanting to give the reader the fullest sense of what his
daughter had been like."
Prose
continues that work — giving us the fullest sense of
what
Anne Frank
was like — with contagious enthusiasm.
———
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