Tracing the Many Lives of Anne Frank and Her Still-Vivid Wartime Diary

Book Review by Janet Maslin

ANNE FRANK

The Book, the Life, the Afterlife

By Francine Prose

322 pages. Harper. $24.99.

When Francine Prose taught Anne Frank's diary to a class at Bard College two years ago, one of her students reported getting funny looks from students not in the class. “They acted as if he were assuming some sort of ironic-regressive pose that involved carrying around a children’s classic, the equivalent of using his grade school lunch box as an attaché case,” Ms. Prose reports in her new book about Anne (as this book refers to her). Her dogged and impassioned scholarship will dispel many such misimpressions about this subject.

Ms. Prose uses her formidable powers of discernment to write incisively about many facets of the Anne Frank phenomenon, from the life itself to the various ways in which it has been willfully distorted. And although Ms. Prose jokes she could hear friends opening magazines as she expounded on Anne Frank over the telephone, she turns her thoughts into a lively and illuminating disquisition.

If there is a central point about Anne here, it is that she was a precociously self-aware writer rather than a spontaneous, ingenuous diarist. It takes a real writer, Ms. Prose points out, to hide the mechanics of her work and make it sound as if she is simply talking to her readers. Similarly, it takes a gifted explicator to make it sound as if she is presenting her arguments conversationally rather than creating elaborate, research-heavy diatribes to back them up.

Ms. Prose’s “Anne Frank” has no frills or illusions. It surely does not pretend to be the definitive work on this subject. Instead, it draws upon and synthesizes some of the keenest observations made about Anne by writers like John Berryman, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Judith Thurman and Harold Bloom, seeming to extract the most succinct and provocative thoughts from each one.

Ms. Prose’s book uses a forthright structure, beginning with a chapter explaining the circumstances that led Anne to spend over two years hidden in the secret annex to a building in Amsterdam. She then devotes chapters to the publication of the book; the adaptation of that book into a Broadway play; the further adaptation of it into a Hollywood movie; the way the book has been used in schools; and the way it continues to excite antipathy in some quarters. Above and beyond a normal research effort, Ms. Prose has examined the worst of the Internet hate sites, the ones that favor the word hoax or call Anne Frank’s book a work of kiddie pornography.

That opening section about Anne’s life provides “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife” with a relatively unsurprising introduction. Yet Ms. Prose picks up on the less familiar aspects of Anne’s character (a friend’s mother would remark that “God knows everything, but Anne knows better”). And she fills in the final months that Anne, nearing 16 and incarcerated at Bergen-Belsen, could not immortalize on paper. She also fills in blanks about what became of the four other people who shared the annex with Anne, her parents and her sister, Margot. And she emphasizes the heroism of those who helped these Jews survive for as long as they did.

When Ms. Prose writes about the book, she pays careful attention to Anne’s set of revisions and to what they reveal about her writerly choices. She admires the diary’s way of using small household details to reveal each resident’s character and underscores how ably she transformed those around her into larger-than-life personalities. She goes on to describe the difficulties in getting the diary published, not only in the United States (where someone at Alfred A. Knopf rejected it as a “dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions”) but also in Europe.

Of the 1950 German translation that omitted anti-German references, Ms. Prose writes coolly: “This reluctance to offend readers in a country whose leaders had murdered the book’s author was one gauge of the speed at which the diary had already become a commodity that the public might, or might not, choose to buy.” In dealing with stage and screen versions of Anne’s story, Ms. Prose tracks the attempts to make the story happier, fluffier, more dramatic and more “universal.” As she puts it, “The adorable was emphasized at the expense of the human, the particular was replaced by the so-called universal, and universal was interpreted to mean American — or in any case, not Jewish” for all kinds of reasons, not least of them commercial ones.

As she provides her blow-by-blow account of the denaturing of the Anne Frank story, Ms. Prose remains impressively fair. She believes the book to be a masterpiece written by a complicated artist who died too young. But she by no means clings to the idea that every word of its text should have been inviolable, and she recognizes the occasional improvements that were made. The deletion of a 13-year-old girl’s “bubbly longueurs,” she says, must be seen as an improvement even by Anne’s most devoted fans.

This seemingly narrow work is an impressively far-reaching critical work, an elegant study both edifying and entertaining. In a book full of keen observations and fascinating disputes (the craziest of which involves Meyer Levin, who had no qualms about both reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review and trying to act as its agent), Ms. Prose looks in all directions to find noteworthy material. And when she writes of how Anne’s diary, which according to a 1996 survey was at one point required reading for 50 percent of the schoolchildren in the United States, keeps on finding its way “onto the desks of teachers who discover that the book most certainly does not, as they say, teach itself,” she underscores the importance of keen analysis. This is a Grade A example of what a smart, precise and impassioned teacher can do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/01maslin.html?ref=books