Anne Frank (10 page)

Less sweet was Mrs. Roosevelt’s readiness to believe the charges in a letter she later received from a writer who accused Otto of, among other things, having moved to Switzerland to avoid paying high Dutch taxes. The writer of that letter was an American novelist named Meyer Levin, who had given the diary a rave review on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review.

T
HE BOOK
was an instant sensation. Meyer Levin’s review sold it.

Not since Zelda Fitzgerald critiqued (pseudonymously and negatively) a book by her husband had there been a literary review assignment—given, accepted, or, in this case, requested—in which questions of conflict of interest so blatantly arise. Meyer Levin was not only a close friend of Otto Frank’s, but he was acting as Otto’s adviser, and, informally, as the diary’s agent. In addition, he was convinced that he was the perfect choice to adapt the play for the stage.

Nevertheless, he asked permission to write the essay, and Francis Brown, the assigning editor, agreed, then later gave him more space for line after line of praise: “For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form, the drama of puberty.” While acknowledging the painful subject matter, Levin anticipated his readers’ reservations, which he preemptively dispelled, assuring them that “this is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors…Anne Frank’s diary simply bubbles with amusement, love, discovery…These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions
are those of human character and growth, anywhere.”

The variant versions of the diary, including Anne’s revisions, would not be available in English for another thirty years, and Levin perpetrated the most common myth—or partial truth—about Anne’s work: “Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.”

Other critics were equally enthusiastic.
Time
magazine called Anne’s book “one of the most moving stories that anyone, anywhere, has managed to tell about World War II.” On the same page as a review of Flannery O’Connor’s first novel,
Wise Blood,
the Catholic journal
Commonweal
praised the diary as “extraordinary for its writer’s candor and sensitivity, both to her environment and her interior development.”

The official publication date was June 12, and on June 23, Barbara Zimmerman wrote Otto Frank that the first edition had sold out; a second and third printing of ten thousand copies each had been ordered. The house had decided to go all out on ads and promotion. She was certain that the book would be a huge best seller, and the warm public response had renewed her faith in the American people. “ANNE FRANK is a tremendous success…,” wrote Zimmerman. “It is one of the biggest books that has been published in America for a long while. Simply working on this book has been a most wonderful experience for me because I am quite frankly in love with it! And it is so nice to find so many hundreds of others who agree!”

Part of what makes Barbara Zimmerman’s letters to Otto Frank so sympathetic and so touching is that they make it possible to imagine what it was like to be in your early twenties and get your first real publishing job in New York, and one of the first books you are assigned to edit happens to be
The Diary of a Young Girl.

UNLIKE THOSE BOOKS THAT WE LOVED AS CHILDREN
and return to as adults with the bewilderment of someone visiting the site of a childhood home that has been torn down to make room for a superhighway, Anne Frank’s diary never makes us wonder: Who was that person who liked this book? Rather, like any classic—it may be one definition of a literary classic—it rewards rereading. Each reading (I am referring here to the “c” version of the diary, which Otto Frank assembled by combining Anne’s first draft and her revisions, the edition that schoolchildren read and that most of us first encountered) reveals aspects of the work that we may have missed before and allows us to view the book in the light of our own experience, of everything we have learned, remembered, and forgotten since the first time we read it.

Though most young readers might not know what to call it, or how to identify the source of the book’s appeal, the first thing that draws us into the diary is Anne Frank’s voice, that
mysterious amalgam of talent, instinct, hard work, and countless small authorial decisions that make words seem to speak to us from the page. The assured, infectious energy of that voice makes us willing, even eager, to hear a little girl tell us what gifts she got for her thirteenth birthday and how her friends watched a Rin Tin Tin film at her party. We are patient, even charmed, as the child prattles on about who her best friend is now as opposed to which girl
used
to be her best friend, which boy she has a crush on, which boy she intends to marry.

One of the misconceptions about
The Diary of a Young Girl
is the notion that, from the beginning, Anne called her diary Kitty. In fact, in the early drafts, she framed some entries as letters to friends—some real, some imaginary—with whom she kept up a lively, if one-sided, correspondence. In one affecting note, Anne tells a friend that this will be the last letter she will be able to send. Other letters were addressed to characters in Cissy van Marxveldt’s
Joop ter Heul
novels, a popular series of books, of which Anne was extremely fond.

The series, writes Mirjam Pressler, “follows the fortunes of a ‘club’ of girls from school to marriage to motherhood. The subjects of the books are not very different from those of the girls’ books published elsewhere in the world at the same time—stories with an almost educational feel to them, preparing girls for their future roles as wives and mothers. In style, however, they are quite different—more colloquial and amusing; it is tempting to say more modern…We may safely assume that Cissy van Marxveldt had some influence on Anne’s own style.” In September 1942, during a period when Anne mentions reading the
Joop ter Heul
books, she addresses her diary letters (later cut or changed in her revisions) to Conny, Marianne, Phien, Emmy, Jettje, and Poppie—members of the “club.”

One of Van Marxveldt’s heroines was Kitty Francken, and it was Kitty on whom Anne decided when, during her last
months in the attic, she began to revise her diary and focused on one imaginary listener. Though Anne had had a real friend by that name, Kathe “Kitty” Egyedi, it is generally agreed that Anne chose the name from among Van Marxveldt’s characters. Anne may have envisioned
Het Achterhuis
as a
Joop ter Heul-style
romance of the secret annex.

What matters is that this device—the diary letters to Kitty—gave Anne a way of addressing her readers intimately and directly, in the second person:
you you you.
Perhaps it helped her write more fluently by providing her with an imaginary audience. Many people have found themselves prevented from keeping a diary or journal by uncertainty and confusion about whom exactly the diarist is supposed to be writing
to
or
for.

Reading Anne’s diary, we become the friend, the most intelligent, comprehending companion that anyone could hope to find. Chatty, humorous, familiar, Anne is writing to us, speaking from the heart to the ideal confidante, and we rise to the challenge and become that confidante. She turns us into the consummate
listener,
picking up the signals she hopes she is transmitting into the fresh air beyond the prison of the attic. If her diary is a message in a bottle, we are the ones who find it, glittering on the beach.

Within a few pages, the transparency of Anne’s prose style has convinced us that she is telling the truth as she describes the world around her and looks inward, as if her private self is a foreign country whose geography and customs she is struggling to understand so that she can live there. Among the motifs that run throughout the book is Anne’s urgent desire to find out who—what sort of person—she is.

The subject of Anne’s true nature absorbs her, and us, from the earliest passages to the diary’s final entry, in which she talks about her “dual personality,” the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her “better, deeper,
and purer” self. Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious, and peevish. “I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world.” On the brink of a horror of which she was painfully aware, Anne Frank agonizes about not being nicer to her mother.

Reading her diary, we are reminded, often shockingly, of similar questions we may have asked ourselves as adolescents, of the enthralling mysteries that time has solved, or whose urgency age has erased. It’s nearly impossible to recall wondering who we were, who we
really were,
as well as our related preoccupations with the differences between our authentic selves and the outer shells that everyone mistook for the real thing. Trying to remember the psychological and spiritual contortions we put ourselves through, when we were young, is as difficult as trying to summon back our astonishment at how quickly our bodies were changing.

Perhaps more than any other book, Anne’s diary reminds us of what that bewilderment and yearning were like. Meanwhile, the diary entries become a sort of mirror in which teenagers, male and female, can see themselves—a capsule description of the alienation, the loneliness, and the torrents of free-floating grief that define adolescence in twentieth-century Western culture. Older readers will recognize familiar but forgotten echoes from their own pasts as Anne describes her inability to breach the wall that separates her from others. Younger readers may experience an almost eerie kinship with a girl who died so long ago but who is saying what no one has expressed quite so succinctly. Of course, she is writing about eight Jews forced by the
Nazis to spend two years in an attic. But she is also describing what it is like to be young.

Among the fascinations of the diary is the chance it offers to watch Anne’s protagonist and narrator—herself—revealed in all her complexity, and to witness what John Berryman called the transformation of the child into the adult. Anne Frank was immensely observant, and unabashedly curious about everything from current events to the quirks of human nature to the problems of being a movie star to the sex life of a cat. She also had a highly developed sense of humor, which served her well during the worst moments in hiding. When Pfeffer arrives in the attic and brings news of the “gruesome and dreadful” fates of their Jewish friends and neighbors, Anne promises herself that “we shall still have our jokes and tease each other when these horrors have faded a bit in our minds; it won’t do us any good, or help those outside to go on being as gloomy as we are at the moment. And what would be the object of making our ‘Secret Annex’ into a ‘Secret Annex of Gloom’?”

The form of the diary—letters with breaks, like chapter breaks, allowing for gaps in time and changes of subject—lets Anne glide from meditation to action, from narration and reflection to dialogue and dramatized scene. Part of what keeps us reading with such rapt attention are the regular yet unpredictable shifts between opposites of tone and content—between domesticity and danger, between the private and the historic, between metaphysics and high comedy. One of the most intriguing of these oppositions is the tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary, the extreme and the normal, the young genius and the typical teen. In one entry, Anne can make the most trenchant or poetic observations; in the next, she complains that she is being picked on, singled out, criticized unfairly; the adults don’t understand her, they
treat her like the child that she sounds like in these passages. Even as the dangers grew more pressing and her reflections more transcendent, she keeps insisting on how ordinary she is, and regardless of the evidence to the contrary, we believe her, and we don’t, because it’s true and it isn’t.

Her voice is so recognizable and so evocative that we might mistake it for any girl’s, until we read more closely and realize that its timbre, its tempo, and its choice of what to focus on is uniquely Anne’s. Anyone who has ever tried to write autobiographically will know how difficult it is to do so without seeming mannered, strained, and false. Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as
thinking
on the page.

“I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider.” Anne’s self-scrutiny occasionally leads her to write about herself in the third person, as if she is describing an out-of-body experience during which she is watching herself interact with the others or simply lie in bed. “Then a certain person lies awake for about a quarter of an hour, listening to the sounds of the night. Firstly, to whether there might be a burglar downstairs, then to the various beds, above, next door, and in my room, from which one is usually able to make out how the various members of the household are sleeping, or how they pass the night in wakefulness.”

What makes these moments of detachment all the more affecting is that they are often associated with the desire to escape the semiconstant state of terror in which she and her family exist. Among the diary’s most lyrical passages is one in which Anne, who has just been startled by a loud ring at the door, envisions the fragile perch on which she and the others are huddled:

Even as she gropes her way through that great dark mass, Anne is remarkably restrained in calibrating the amount of fear she will admit into the diary. The air raids, the break-ins, and the brutality reported by the helpers and glimpsed from the window appear at regular intervals, so that the reader can never fully relax. Anne’s open-hearted compassion is so powerful and contagious that she makes us feel, as she does, for the elderly, crippled Jewish woman whom Miep has seen sitting on a doorstep, where the Gestapo ordered her to wait while they found a car to take her away.

Until late 1943, when Anne’s fear and anxiety spike, she tends to underplay the gravity of her situation and often ends a disturbing section with a consolatory joke. She appears to be reassuring Kitty, and, at the same time, herself. Her optimism, such as it is, seems like the pure product of youth and inspires a tenderness that few readers feel on reading the war diaries kept by, among others, Mikhail Sebastian, Viktor Klemperer, and Etty Hillesum. Written wholly or partly while their authors were in the world—the final section of Hillesum’s book is composed of letters from Westerbork—these brilliant eyewitness accounts involve numerous locations and large casts of char
acters, few of whom are as memorable as the Franks, the Van Daans, and Dussel. More comprehensive than Anne’s, offering views of their times that tend more toward the panorama than the keyhole, these journals were written by complicated adults, and each book, for different reasons, is as easy to admire but harder to love than the one by the no less complicated child.

W
HAT
I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world.
No one would have, or could have, planned it so that Anne Frank ended her book this way—no more than it could have been arranged that she received her diary as a birthday gift and almost instantly began to write in it, so that the book begins not in the dark confines of the attic, where the constrictions and deprivations are already making themselves felt, but rather in the bright light that in those years passed for normality. In the daylight we can see what kind of person Anne was—who she was before, and might have become without, the incarceration in the attic.

The first entry in Anne’s diary (again, in the version her father edited) nearly lifts itself off the page, powered by the joy that a life-loving, theatrical girl feels at the dawn of her thirteenth birthday. She’s practically bursting out of herself, awake at six in the morning to see her presents. But she must stay in bed until seven, when she is allowed to get up and unwrap her gifts: roses, a plant, some peonies, books, a puzzle, a brooch, money, sweets.

She lists her new books—
Tales and Legends of the Netherlands, Daisy’s Mountain Holiday
—and another she intends to buy with her birthday money,
The Myths of Greece and Rome.
We can tell what kind of girl she is: a reader, a fan of legends and adventure stories, of fantasy and the imagination. Of course, the gift she mentions first is the “nicest” of all, the diary that will later be given the name that history remembers:
Kitty.