Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  “Just because…” DAF, November 7, 1942.

  “I have seldom…” Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, 95.

  “like a little island…” DAF, November 9, 1942.

  “Mrs. Van Daan sat bolt upright…” DAF, May 18, 1943.

  “The room was in a glorious…” DAF, December 10, 1942.

  “I wasn’t quite my usual…” DAF, January 24, 1944.

  “…Rauter…” DAF, March 27, 1943.

  “Oh, Kitty…” DAF, June 6, 1944.

  CHAPTER 5 The Book, Part III

  “From Mummy and Daddy…” DAF, June 14, 1942.

  “Miss J. always has…” DAF, June 15, 1942.

  “We went to oasis…” DAF, June 30, 1942.

  “ But, Daddy…” DAF, July 5, 1942.

  “Anne, putting herself…” Nussbaum, “Anne Frank,” in Enzer, Anne Frank: Reflections, 26.

  “I couldn’t refrain….” DAF, January 6, 1944.

  “From early in the morning…” DAF, February 27, 1944.

  “Peter has touched…” DAF, April 28, 1944.

  “When revising…” Nussbaum, “Anne Frank,” in Enzer, Anne Frank: Reflections, 28.

  “how the houses…” DAF, March 29, 1944.

  “One Sunday morning…” DAF, September 28, 1942.

  “In this first book…” Sylvia P. Iskander, “Anne Frank’s Reading: A Retrospective,” in Enzer, Anne Frank: Reflections, 103.

  “After he’d been working…” DAF, October 20, 1942.

  “Mr. van Pels repeated…” DAF, August 14, 1942.

  “Prospectus and Guide…” DAF, November 17, 1942.

  “on November 27, 1943, Anne writes…” Pressler, Anne Frank: A Hidden Life, 140.

  “The little hole underneath is so terribly small…” DAF, March 24, 1944.

  “Otto Frank had picked…” Nussbaum, “Anne Frank,” in Enzer, Anne Frank: Reflections, 24.

  “A reader…” Nussbaum, 30–31.

  “When I look over…” DAF, January 22, 1944.

  CHAPTER 6 The House

  “The moment…” Interview with author Mariela Chyrikins, Amsterdam, February 14, 2008.

  “If you’re surprised…” Interview with Norbert Hinterleitner, Amsterdam, February 14, 2008.

  “True, the ending happens…” Bruno Bettleheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” in Enzer, Anne Frank: Reflections, 189.

  “kitsch…” Ian Buruma, “The Afterlife of Anne Frank,” the New York Review of Books, February 19, 1998, 4.

  “The line…” Lawrence Langer, “The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen,” in Enzer, Anne Frank: Reflections, 201–2.

  “Anyone who claims…” DAF, July 15, 1944.

  “been torn…” Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” The New Yorker, October 6, 1997, 78.

  “not gruesome enough” Sem Dresden, Persecution, Extermination, Literature, trans. Henry G. Shogt (Toronto: University of Texas Press, 1995), 198.

  “The diary is taken to be…” Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” 78.

  “A girl’s journal…” Alter, “The View from the Attic: An Obsession with Anne Frank,” the New Republic, December 4, 1995, 58.

  “Statistics don’t bleed…” Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar and other essays (London: Hutchinson & co., 1985), 97.

  “One single Anne Frank…” Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Random House, 1988), 145.

  “If Anne Frank’s diary…” Ludwig Lewisohn, review of The Diary of A Young Girl, by Anne Frank, the Saturday Review, July 1952, p. 20.

  “Such identification…” Buruma, “The Afterlife of Anne Frank,” NYRB, 4.

  “Despite…” Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?”, 79.

  “The unabashed…” Ozick, 80.

  “deeply truth-telling…” Ozick, 78.

  CHAPTER 7 The Play

  “from amongst…” Meyer Levin, The Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 28.

  “he made just one…” Judith Jones, The Tenth Muse, 46.

  “In the middle of life…” Levin, The Obsession, 7.

  “Levin has the hallucination…” Levin, 37.

  “Agreed, it was an obsession…” Levin, 13.

  “ringed by eternal fire…” Levin, 39.

  “You have been my Hitler” Levin, 40.

  “Again and again…” Levin, 31.

  “Anne Frank’s diary…” Meyer Levin, The New York Times Book Review, “Life in the Secret Annex,” June 15, 1952.

  “agenting the tome…” Variety, June 18, 1952.

  “screwing up…” Letter from Barbara Zimmerman to Frank Price, quoted in Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 22.

  “impossible…play,” Barbara Zimmerman letter, quoted in Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 72.

  “If he writes the play…” Letter from Meyer Levin to Otto Frank, quoted in Melnick, The Stolen Legacy, 24–5.

  “I always said…” Letter from OF to ML, quoted in Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank, 54.

  “castrating homosexual” Letter from ML to OF, quoted in Graver, 50.

  “The only way…” David L. Goodrich, The Real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 207.

  “big-name dramatist…” Levin, The Obsession, 61.

  “The very origin…” Levin, 36.

  “Quite a triumph…” Meyer Levin, “Anne Frank: A Play,” unpublished ms. in the Dorot Jewish Division, the New York Public Library, 2.

  “We must go into hiding…” Levin, “Anne Frank: A Play,” 7.

  “Never let a man choose a house” Levin, 17.

  (“It’s part of being something…” Levin, 68–69.

  197

  “I suppose it could be…” Levin, 41.

  “When you were at home…that’s God” Anne Frank, Tales from the Secret Annex, 172–3.

  “End of the diary” Levin, “Anne Frank: A Play,” 60.

  “I think I have never…” Letter from Carson McCullers to Otto Frank, quoted in Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank, 51–2.

  “We have no…” Letter from CM to OF in Anne Frank archive.

  “In spite of our…” Letter from CM to OF in Anne Frank archive.

  “by the Nazis…” Letter from ML to OF, quoted in Melnick, The Stolen Legacy, 88.

  “moments of lovely comedy…” Goodrich and Hackett papers, quoted in Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank, 78.

  “tremendous responsibility” Hackett, “Diary of the Diary of Anne Frank,” New York Times, September 30, 1956, xi.

  “A Challenge…” New York Post, January 13, 1954, quoted in Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank, 80.

  “cavalier” Letter from ML to OF, quoted in Melnick, The Stolen Legacy, 104.

  “brilliant” Hackett, “Diary of the Diary,” xi.

  “embarrassing…” Garson Kanin to Frances and Albert Hackett, quoted in Melnick, The Stolen Legacy, 115.

  “I thought I could not cry…” Hackett, “Diary of the Diary,” Arts and Leisure, page xi.

  “In all my meetings…crashed down.” Bernard Kalb, “Diary Footnotes,” New York Times, October 2, 1955, 3.

  Warsaw ghetto…Letter from ML to OF, quoted in Melnick, The Stolen Legacy, 123.

  “flamboyant and dashing” Joseph Schildkraut, My Father and I (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 230.

  “uncanny” Hackett, “Diary of the Diary,” xi.

  “had first-hand…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens, 20th Century Fox, 1959, DVD, supplemental material.

  “This is not a play…” Hackett, “Diary of the Diary,” xi.

  “I told him…” Bernard Kalb, “Diary Footnotes,” New York Times, October 2, 1955, xi.

  “Both Kermit…”
Hackett, “Diary of the Diary,” xi.

  “Mostly, though…” Kalb, “Diary Footnotes,” xi.

  “You are the most intolerable…” Goodrich and Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank and Related Readings (Evanston: McDougall Littell, 1997), 30.

  “Some day…” Goodrich and Hackett, 118.

  “going through a phase…” Goodrich and Hackett, 118.

  “She puts me to shame.” Goodrich and Hackett, 122.

  “they have made…” Brooks Atkinson, review of The Diary of Anne Frank, New York Times, October 6, 1955, 24.

  “There is only one way…” Brooks Atkinson, “Inspired Theater,” New York Times, October 16, 1955.

  “the punch of plain…” Newsweek, October 17, 1955, 103.

  “I can think…” The New Yorker, October 15, 1955, 75–6.

  “The house lights…” Kenneth Tynan, “At the Theater: Berlin Postcript,” London Observer, November 7, 1956.

  “Yes, but that girl…” Adorno, Theodor W., “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 127.

  “I wanted to restore…” Interview with Wendy Kesselman, telephone, summer, 2007.

  “To see Natalie…” Ben Brantley, “This Time, Another Anne Confronts Life in the Attic,” New York Times, December 5, 1997, 16.

  “Despite the changes,…” Molly Magid Hoagland, “Anne Frank Onstage and Off,” Commentary, March 1998.

  “earnestly artificial…” Vincent Canby, “A New Anne Frank Still Stuck in the 50’s,” New York Times, December 21,1997, 5.

  “At 16…” Natalie Portman, “Thoughts from a Young Actor,” Time magazine, June 14, 1999, 80.

  CHAPTER 8 The Film

  “I was seventeen…” Anne Frank, Tales from the Secret Annex, 82.

  “How many little girls…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens, 20th Century Fox, 1959, DVD, supplemental material.

  “He approved of me…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens.

  “no greater…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens.

  “You have given…” Judith Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 72.

  “If it’s that bad…” DAF, October 9, 1942.

  “I didn’t understand…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens.

  “accessible…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens.

  “I watched…” Shelley Winters, Shelley II, The Middle of My Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 227.

  “And so it seems…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens.

  “But Anne…” The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens.

  CHAPTER 9 Denial

  “When a…” Robert Boatman, letter to the Idaho Statesman, July 1998.

  “So you are…” Teressa Hendry, the American Mercury, summer 1967.

  “the first pedophile…” Ditlieb Felderer, Anne Frank’s Diary, A Hoax (Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1979), 64.

  “Apparently…” Felderer, 6.

  “We never had illusions…” Francis X. Clines, “Anne Frank Again Focus of Challenge,” New York Times, April 21, 1987, section A, page 10.

  “symbolically free himself…” German Press Agency, February 26, 2007.

  CHAPTER 10 Teaching the Diary

  “The Diary is many things…” Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, The Diary of Anne Frank, Cliffs Notes (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, 1984), 6.

  “Perhaps teachers hesitate…” Rebecca Kelch Johnson, “Teaching the Holocaust,” in the English Journal, vol. 69, no. 7, October 1980, 69.

  “There’s in people…” DAF, May 5, 1944.

  “champions goodness…” Lesley Shore, “Anne Frank in Life and Death: Teaching the Lesson of the Holocaust,” from Proceedings of the 38th Annual Convention of Jewish Libraries, Toronto, June 15–28.

  True or false…Michelle Keller, “Remembering the Holocaust,” Education Resources Information Center, teacher classroom guide, 2002.

  “Hitler’s ‘final…” Sue Jones Erlenbusch, Projects for Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, 1993, www.teachervision.com.

  1. I want my memory…Mari Lu Robbins, A Guide for Using Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl in the Classroom (Westminster, CA: Teacher Created Resources, 2007), 12.

  “Even when students…” Karen Spector and Stephanie Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank: Critical Literacy and the Holocaust in Eighth-Grade English,” in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, September 2007, 40.

  “ask them to reflect…” Karyn M. Peterson, Cyberhunt Teacher’s Page, May-June 2004, www.scholastic.com.

  “what literature is…” Robert Probst, “Literature as Invitation,” in Voices from the Middle, vol. 8, no. 2, December 2000, 8–15.

  (“Let us take…” Judith Tydor Baumel, “Teaching the Holocaust through the Diary of Anne Frank,” in Anne Frank in Historical Perspective: A Teaching Guide for Secondary Schools, eds. Alex Grobman and Joel Fishman (Los Angeles: Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, 1995), 49.

  At Fowler High School…” National Coalition Against Censorship, www.ncac.org.

  “It is this underlying…” Bob Mozert et al. v. Hawkins County Public Schools et al. U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Northeastern Division, 1984.

  Selected Bibliography

  Books

  WORKS BY ANNE FRANK

  The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. Introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. Garden City: Doubleday, 1952.

  The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. Prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

  The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition. Prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

  The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Translated by Susan Masotty. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

  Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex: Fables, Short Stories, Essays, and an Unfinished Novel by the Author of “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Translated by Michel Mok and Ralph Manheim. New York: Washington Square Press, 1983

  Aercke, Kristiaan, ed. Women Writing in Dutch. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.

  Anne Frank House. Anne Frank House: A Museum with a Story. Amsterdam: Anne Frank House, 2001.

  Berryman, John. The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.

  Bettleheim, Bruno. Surviving and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952.

  Bloom, Harold, ed. A Scholarly Look at The Diary of Anne Frank. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999.

  Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. Writing as Resistance, Four Women Confronting the Holocaust. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

  Doneson, Judith E. The Holocaust in American Film. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987.

  Dresden, Sam. Persecution, Extermination, Literature. Translated by Hewy S. Schlogt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 1995.

  Dwork, Deborah. Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

  Enzer, Hyman A., and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer, eds. Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

  Freedom Writers, with Erin Gruwell. The Freedom Writers Diary. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.

  Gies, Miep, with Alison Leslie Gold. Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

  Goodrich, David L. The
Real Nick and Nora. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.

  Goodrich, Frances, and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank and Related Readings. Based upon The Diary of a Young Girl. Evanston: McDougal Littell, 1997.

  Goodrich, Frances, and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank. Based upon The Diary of a Young Girl. Newly adapted by Wendy Kesselman. New York: Dramatists Play Series, Inc., 2000.

  Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession with Anne Frank. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

  Grobman, Alex, and Joel Fishman, eds. Anne Frank in Historical Perspective: A Teaching Guide for Secondary Schools. Los Angeles: Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust of the Jewish Federation Council, 1995.

  Hartman, Geoffrey, ed. Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

  Hillesum, Etty. An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.

  Jones, Judith. Judith Jones: The Tenth Muse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

  Kopf, Hedda Rosner. Understanding Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997.

  Last, Dick van Galen, and Rolf Wolfswinkel. Anne Frank and After: Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996.

  Lee, Carol Ann. The Hidden Life of Otto Frank. New York: Collins Publishers Inc., 2002.

  Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Random House, 1988.

  Levin, Meyer. The Obsession. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.

  Lindwer, Willy. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. Translated by Alison Meersshaert. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

  Litvin, Martin. Audacious Pilgrim: The Story of Meyer Levin. Woodson, Kansas: Western Books, 1999.

  Mak, Geert. Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City. Translated by Philip Blom. London: Harvill Press, 2001.

  Melnick, Ralph. The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

  Müller, Melissa. Anne Frank: The Biography. Translated by Rita and Robert Kimber. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.

  Pick, Hella. Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.