More to say about Anne Frank

The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most revisited and analyzed books of our time. It turns out that there is much left to learn and say about it.

Author Francine Prose was working on a novel with a teenage character, and turned to the famous diary as background for the writing habits of a 13-year-old girl. What she found was a much more nuanced memoir that was the work of a surprisingly mature writer. The result is her book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, the Afterlife (Harper), which examines Frank’s work with a literary eye. This is about Anne Frank, author, not Anne Frank, icon.

In the years since Frank’s diary first appeared, new versions have appeared, welcomed by critics as more authentic than the version first published by Otto Frank, the young author’s father. In fact, as Prose explains, Anne Frank herself undertook a deliberate and careful editing of the diary while still in hiding. Otto Frank had actually reinstated portions his daughter had cut, including personal sections in which the young woman meditated on her parents’ marriage and her own sexuality.

A very good interview with the author can be heard on the site of Tablet, billed accurately as “a new read on Jewish life,” and created by Nextbook, a leading publisher of Jewish books.

The publication of Prose’s book is bringing forth other new information about Frank–new to me, at least. A review on SFGate by Sara Houghteling answered my question about how Frank came to keep such a diary in the first place:

“On March 29, 1944, on the BBC program “Radio Oranje,” Gerrit Bolkestein, a Dutch minister in the exiled government of Prime Minister Gerbrandy, called for all Dutch citizens living under the Nazi occupation to save everyday documents – in particular, letters and diaries – for eventual collection in a national wartime archive…Among those listening to the broadcast, on a contraband radio, was 14-year-old Anne Frank.

In 1942, when Anne’s sister Margot received her summons for deportation to Westerbork, the family feigned flight to Switzerland and sequestered themselves, along with [four others] in the maze of rooms above Otto Frank’s former Opekta fruit canning company. Anne brought along the checkered journal given to her a month earlier by her father, in which she would famously recount her life in hiding… …The BBC broadcast awoke Anne to the possibility that her diary could be read by an audience outside of herself …”

The passages I’ve read that are quoted from Prose’s book are irresistible; the minute Powell’s World of Books has a used copy, I’ll embark on it. Stay tuned.