Theater of Cruelty (16 page)

It was all desperately sad and unedifying. The difference between the two accounts of Levin’s tribulations is that Graver writes as a historian and Melnick as a passionate advocate of his hero’s conspiracy theories. Graver is not unsympathetic to Levin. He thinks Levin’s version was indeed closer to the spirit—and words—of Anne’s diary. But he demolishes the Broadway-Stalinist-self-hating-Jewish conspiracy theory. Instead, he blames the “Zeitgeist” of the 1950s, which combined the popular demand for universal uplift, the Broadway producers’ interest in providing it, the “assimilationist mood” among many American Jews, the postwar pressure to be friendly to Germany, and the anti-anticommunism of the left. The Zeitgeist, as well as Levin’s “self-defeating behavior,” was responsible, in Graver’s view, for obscuring Levin’s play and “his efforts to deepen public understanding of the significance of what was done to the Jews of Europe.” This is being very fair to Levin.

Melnick is less fair toward Levin’s critics. Hellman is Melnick’s and Levin’s most heinous bête noire. In their view, she led the conspiratorial
pack. Melnick’s tactic is guilt by association. Stalin’s Soviet Union was anti-Semitic, Hellman defended Stalin’s Soviet Union and was “a thoroughly self-hating Jew,” so it stands to reason that Hellman was Stalin’s agent on Broadway. After reminding us of Stalin’s persecution of Jewish writers, Melnick states: “This silencing of the Jewish artistic voice found its parallel in Hellman’s treatment of Meyer and the
Diary
at the very time when Stalin’s most notorious and potentially dangerous anti-Semitic attack was beginning to unfold, in the guise of what came to be know as the Doctors’ Plot of 1953.”

Now, Hellman had indeed been a Communist; she had no time for Zionism, could be mean and vindictive, and had a cavalier attitude toward the truth. But according to most accounts, including Graver’s, her involvement with the Anne Frank play was not very significant. She was asked to write the play herself but declined, saying, “I think [the diary] is a great historical work which will probably live forever, but I couldn’t be more wrong as the adaptor. If
I
did this it would run one night because it would be deeply depressing. You need someone who has a much lighter touch.”
⁸
This suggests showbiz wisdom, rather than self-hatred or Stalinism. She was friendly with Goodrich and Hackett and gave them advice when they asked for it. According to them, her most useful tips were structural.

The Soviets denied the uniqueness of the Holocaust, to be sure. Goodrich and Hackett’s play skates lightly around it. It is made clear that the victims were Jewish, and the death camps their final destination. But Anne is given the line: “We’re not the only people that have had to suffer.” Levin saw this as Hellman’s smoking gun, for didn’t she voice the same opinion, using the same phrase, in her memoir
Pentimento
? Melnick picks up on this too, in high dudgeon. The
same words are indeed spoken in
Pentimento
, not by Hellman, however, but by Julia, the fictionalized resistance heroine Hellman claimed to have performed brave deeds with. “Julia” tells “Lillian” (in the late 1930s, so before the Holocaust) that she will use her money to save victims of the Nazis. “Jews?” asks Hellman. And Julia says, “About half. And political people. Socialists, Communists, plain old Catholic dissenters. Jews aren’t the only people who have suffered here.” In that context, Julia was of course right.

In fact, if anyone was chiefly to blame for the “revisionism” of the 1950s play, it was the director Garson Kanin, another Jew swabbed by Levin with the self-hating, Stalinist brush. He insisted on taking out Peter van Daan’s line about having to suffer “Because we’re Jews! Because we’re Jews!” He told the Goodrich and Hackett to substitute the jaunty “Oh, Hanukah!” song for the more sober and dignified “Ma’oz Tzur.” And Kanin argued that Anne’s statement about Jews having had to suffer through the ages was an “embarrassing piece of special pleading. Right down the ages, people have suffered because of being English, French, German, Italian, Ethiopian, Mohammedan, Negro, and so on.” This is missing the mark so widely, you wonder whether he ever had it in his sight.

Levin’s play has hardly ever been performed, since Otto owned the rights to the diary. This is a shame, for now we shall never know whether his version would indeed have been more effective in deepening public understanding of the Holocaust. I think the Broadway producers and Otto were right to assume that Goodrich and Hackett’s version would reach a wider audience, which is not to say it was the better play. But popular entertainment can sometimes deepen people’s understanding. Depth is a relative concept. Showbiz can be remarkably effective, for better or worse. The Goodrich and Hackett play stunned audiences in Germany, just as the American TV soap opera
Holocaust
would a generation later. People are moved precisely
because they identify with the victims as characters—though not of course with their fate. Hollywood’s international appeal always has been its stress on character instead of milieu. Cultural and historical accuracy suffers. But making German audiences identify with Jewish victims is better, it seems to me, than teaching them lessons on how to be a good Jew. Such identification can result in sentimental self-pity, but it is more likely to give people at least some idea of the evil that was done.

I am in any case not sure that Levin’s play was less of a distortion of the diary than Goodrich and Hackett’s version. I have only read a late, much revised version of Levin’s script. It is clumsy and hopelessly didactic. It isn’t easy to recreate the atmosphere of the secret annex in Amsterdam, where eight terrified people argued about all manner of things, including the Jewish Question, in a mixture of German, Dutch, and broken Dutch (mimicked by Anne in the diary). But I find the following dialogue between Otto and his wife, Edith, somewhat implausible:

This is what Levin wanted his characters to say. And Mrs. Frank, in a liberal way, was more religious than her husband. But it sounds
more like an interior dialogue in Levin’s own head. He “got” religion late in life. When Otto visited New York, Levin took him to his synagogue, hoping that Otto would share in his discovery of Judaism. Then there is Mr. van Daan, a solid German businessman, who alternates in Levin’s version between sounding like a friendly rabbi and a character in a Yiddish soap opera. When his son, Peter, asks him why only religion should help us to tell right from wrong, he preaches: “That is the way it came to us. The Jewish way. Everybody in the world, Peter, has the right to be what they are, and we have the right to be Jews.” Again, this sounds like Levin being pious more than the van Daan we know from the diary.

If Goodrich and Hackett’s sin was to take the Jewishness out of the Franks and van Daans, Levin’s sin is to put too much of it in. These were people, after all, who celebrated Saint Nicholas (which has no religious significance in Holland) with greater gusto than Hanukah. Otto actually wanted to give Anne a copy of the New Testament on Hanukah, for her education. Mr. van Daan’s pork sausages were the highlight on the annex menu. Levin was right to insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but making the characters appear more Jewish than they did in real life was the wrong way to make the point. For one of the horrors of Nazi anti-Semitism was that it didn’t matter how Jewish or un-Jewish you were, appeared, or wanted to be, they would get you anyway. And here, I think, we have arrived at the center of Levin’s antagonism. Levin resented Otto, and his kind, for not being willing, in Levin’s eyes, to be good enough Jews. He condemned Otto for his assimilationism. The ferocity of Levin’s battles with Otto, which are still being fought by his defenders, has less to do with the diary itself than with class and “identity” politics.

Melnick sets the tone of his book by stating in the preface that Stalinist propaganda was only one reason for cutting out Anne’s “Jewish avowal” in the play. There were other “equally egregious
reasons for this decision, both commercial and assimilationist.” Having established that Stalinism and assimilationism are equally egregious, Melnick quotes Levin’s view that assimilationists suffer from “psychic cancers, ugly secret growths that our people have so long buried in their souls.”

The Jews most associated with assimilationism, not just in the US, are of course, the prosperous German Jews. Ill feeling against them is deep and goes back a long way. German Jews tended to disassociate themselves from the poor, religious immigrants and refugees from the east. The
Ostjuden
were regarded as riffraff who gave respectable Jews a bad name. Later on, too many assimilated Jews, lucky enough to be in Britain or the US, looked the other way when Hitler went about annihilating their less fortunate brethren. Walter Lippmann’s refusal to write even one column forthrightly denouncing the persecution of Jews is a well-known and indeed shameful example. So a degree of resentment is understandable. But when resentment about German-Jewish snootiness slips into paranoia, as it does in some of the recent comments on the case, including Melnick’s, reasonable argument is cut short.

It has become fashionable to assert one’s minority status, especially in the US. And this can be a positive thing. Diversity is good. Jews who wish to live according to the customs and religious beliefs of their ancestors contribute to it. But this is no reason to feel such contempt for those who choose not to do so. Wanting to be assimilated does not necessarily imply self-hatred. The person who had felt ashamed of his parents’ Jewishness was Levin, not Otto Frank. The fact that people such as the Franks were not able to live out their lives as ordinary Germans was not their fault, but Hitler’s. To think that they were punished by God for not being good Jews is to say that God is a Nazi. If Mrs. Frank really said such a thing, she was deluded. If Levin invented it, he was being grotesque.

Of the three theatrical versions of Anne Frank’s diary, Kesselman’s rewrite of Goodrich and Hackett’s play strikes the fewest false notes. It provides a sharper historical perspective. And Anne’s famous lines of redemption—“In spite of everything …”—are given a dark twist of irony, for they are spoken moments before the Nazis arrive to claim their victims. Critics have praised the current production for its tough-mindedness: “A Darker Anne Frank,” as one headline put it. This is right. But before condemning the “Fifties Zeitgeist” too smugly for its sentimentalism, we should reflect on our own variety. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Linda Lavin, who plays Mrs. van Daan, describes how people come back “into our dressing rooms, sobbing at the end of the evening—sobbing. And I’m holding friends—strangers, people who’ve come to say—what—to show us what they have just been through. We know what they’ve been through because we’ve presented it and they’re afraid for us.”

What they went through was a theatrical performance. Reviewing the play in
Time
magazine, Richard Zoglin called Anne Frank’s diary a “communal rite of grief.” That was indeed the mood of the audience with whom I “shared” the experience of watching the play in December. The more I see people expressing their “identities” in communal rites of grief, the more I am inclined to admire Otto Frank’s dignity, and his perhaps naive, but nonetheless admirable, wish to put his own grief to a more universal purpose.

HÉLÈNE BERR, TWENTY-ONE
, student of English literature at the Sorbonne:

Philippe Jullian, twenty-three, artist and aspiring man of letters: