Prose takes us back to the familiar story,
focusing our attention precisely on the physical details of Anne’s text-making
efforts. She reminds us that on June 12,
1942, Anne’s thirteenth birthday, her parents gave her “the famous checked
diary…the red, gray, and tan cloth-covered book.” Just three weeks later, the Nazis issued a
summons to Anne’s sixteen year old sister Margot to report to Westerbork. The Dutch-built refugee camp had a new
purpose that July, housing passengers who would fill cargo trains headed for Auschwitz
every Tuesday. Margot’s summons triggered
the Frank and van Pels families’ move into the not-quite-finished secret annex
above Otto Frank’s office.
Over
the next two years, Anne described life with seven other people hidden behind a
bookcase in the tiny attic. Like many
adolescent girls, she used her diary to express feelings and adjust to changes,
albeit of an extreme nature. During the
day, the annex residents blacked out all the windows, living soundlessly. Anne filled the
first diary by December 5, 1942 and wrote no new entries for a year. On December 22, 1943, she began a fresh black
composition book, finished four months later.
On April 17, 1944, she started her third and final notebook, her last
entry written August 1, 1944, three days before the betrayal and arrest of the
secret annex residents.
Prose
has rescued Anne Frank from another kind of betrayal, proving beyond doubt that
she wanted her diary published. In the
spring of 1944--perhaps driven by one of several premonitions--Anne worked
feverishly to prepare her manuscript for publication. She rewrote the entire text from the start,
filling 324 loose sheets of colored paper.
She framed and refined the story, closing narrative gaps from the
unwritten year.
Prose states that
until she began this research, she, like most readers, thought of the diary as “the
innocent and spontaneous outpourings of a teenager,” published after the war
with her father’s minor, understandably protective omissions. Yet Anne Frank’s story has had many
incarnations. There is the original
diary as Anne first drafted it and then the revised version she wrote on loose
pages. Her father combined both texts to
produce a third version, which, after bitter fights with writers and producers,
formed the basis for the 1955 Broadway play and the film, released in 1959.
After
tracing the diary’s complicated provenance, Prose, the author of fifteen books
of fiction and numerous nonfiction works, including Reading Like a Writer, closely examines Anne Frank’s
craft. Her glowing appraisal notes “how
much art is required to give the impression of artlessness, how much control is
necessary in order to seem natural, how almost nothing is more difficult for a
writer than to find a narrative voice as fresh and unaffected as Anne
Frank’s.” Mozart was composing at five, she
reminds us, but we are not attuned to girl genius.
What
could be more trivial than a diary written by a moody teenage girl? When he led the raid on the secret annex,
Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer dumped out the contents of Otto Frank’s
briefcase (notebooks and loose papers), so he could carry confiscated cash and
jewelry.
After
surviving Auschwitz, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and reconstructed the
diary, published in the Netherlands in 1947.
It went out of print in 1950.
Almost every major publishing house in the U.S. rejected it. Two very young women saved the diary from
obscurity. Judith Jones, assistant to
the director of Doubleday’s Paris office, read it and implored her boss to send
it to New York. Later at Knopf, Jones
would edit another distinctive female voice—Julia Child. Doubleday, which
paid Otto Frank a $500 advance, would not have promoted the diary without
prodding from Barbara Zimmerman, a twenty-three year old editor, who wrote to
Anne’s father: “I love the book and feel
that it has value for me beyond matters of business.”
Anne
Frank envisioned her book, Het Achterhuis
(The House Behind), as an epistolary novel.
Doubleday published it as The Diary of A Young Girl, with a
photograph of Anne Frank’s sweet, inquisitive, upturned face. Key to Prose’s argument that the diary’s
literary merit has been overlooked, are the many ways that the world “uses” Anne
Frank: to portray the bumpy passage from
childhood to adulthood; to make the Holocaust more vivid for younger
generations so they “never forget;” to temper the racial horror of the “Final
Solution” by universalizing her story; to highlight contemporary atrocities;
and to comfort ourselves that “people are really good at heart.”
The
restoration of the full text surrounding Anne’s most famous remark is particularly
bracing. Anne’s clear-eyed, beautiful,
and dark meditations on hope and despair reveal her as a complex moral thinker,
who chose a positive attitude not out of denial but as a survival mechanism.
Similar
to the diary, Francine Prose’s book also refuses tidy philosophical conclusions
and catharsis. Its structure is
idiosyncratic and sometimes forced to serve Francine Prose’s mission. She rightly and mercilessly reminds us of the details of Anne Frank’s journey through Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen
Belsen. There Anne and Margot died of
typhus, just weeks before the liberation.
Confronted with the brutal details of Anne Frank’s death, we can derive only one clear but considerable consolation. She got what she wanted: Anne Frank lives on brilliantly through her own writing.
