by Susan Jacoby
I also heard excerpts from Murrow’s famous 1945 broadcast upon the liberation of Buchenwald, in which he described what he found there in graphic—especially for that more reticent era—fashion. With the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, millions of Americans had been informed, for the first time, of the tortures the Nazis had inflicted on concentration camp victims (though the fuller horror of the mass extermination camps on Polish soil, then being liberated by the Red Army, was not yet known).
Although the word Jew was never used in Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald, I was well aware, as a ten-year-old listening to the recording in 1955, that Jews, unlike most other people victimized by the Nazis, had been targeted for total destruction. This I learned at home, not in school, for recent history received short shrift in the American elementary and secondary school curriculum of the 1950s. In world history, teachers usually made it up to the French Revolution by the beginning of May, leaving the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the last four weeks of school. In American history, everything after the Civil War was compressed into the same end-of-term rush. Even when the teachers did get around to World War II, the destruction of European Jewry was treated as a secondary topic, worthy of only the briefest note. In the public high school I attended, the curriculum was even more cursory in its discussion of the camps than my parochial elementary schools had been. While the nuns were primarily interested in Hitler’s treatment of Catholics—a lesson that naturally never touched on what the Vatican did, and did not do, to aid Jews during the Holocaust—my teachers did say the Nazis also aimed their persecutions at the “children of Israel.” Like my father, the sisters never used the word Jew.
My mother was the one who told me that the Jews had been put to death in gas chambers, and she was the parent who handled most of my questions about why people had hated Jews enough to kill them. My ideas about Jews were still hazy; I had heard about them only in connection with concentration camps, the crucifixion, and Old Testament prophecies foretelling the coming of the Messiah. My mother explained Jew hating to me not in religious terms but in terms of ignorance and fear, comparable to the hatred of some whites for Negroes, of small-minded people for anyone who looked or thought differently. Why were the Jews different? Well, my mother attempted to explain, the Jews didn’t believe in Jesus—but that couldn’t be the real reason for the Nazis’ hatred, because there were some Jews who did believe in Jesus and who had converted to the Christian religion, just the way my father had converted from the Episcopal to the Catholic Church….And those “Christian Jews,” as Mom called them, were killed anyway, just because they had Jewish parents. Small wonder that my father usually turned over these questions—how agonizing they must have been for him!—to my mother. Ignorance, fear, and prejudice were like contagious diseases, Mom told me. Most of the time, she added, it was pointless to look for a reason. On one occasion, my father did point out that the very structure of the word prejudice—pre-judge—meant there was no rational explanation for the phenomenon. Before fifth or sixth grade, my interest in the camps, and the people who had been killed in them, was mainly an outgrowth of my fixation on the war. That would change, however, when I turned eleven and read Anne Frank’s diary for the first time.
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MY PAPERBACK copy of the diary, a twenty-five-cent Pocket Book, is yellowed and crumbling, falling apart page by page. I bought it in 1956 from the newly installed paperback book rack in Grettenberger’s drugstore in Okemos. This was the first book I ever bought with my own money, and it is the only book I have kept from my childhood. Anne’s diary went along with me to my college dormitory at Michigan State University, to Washington, and then to Moscow, where I loaned it to a Russian friend but took care to retrieve it before I returned to the United States in 1971. I was unaware, until I was in my late thirties, that there were Jewish cultural commentators who thought the widespread public interest in the diary may actually have done more harm than good as far as American knowledge of the Holocaust was concerned. (In fact, negative critiques of the diary hardly existed before the early 1980s, when the movement toward Holocaust memorialization recast an old question—who has the right to speak for and represent victims?—in an increasingly politicized light.)
The debate over the sentimentalizing, de-Judaizing presentation of Anne’s diary, reinvigorated by a 1997 Broadway revival of the play, has been conducted primarily by literary critics and Holocaust scholars, many of whom genuinely believe that the average American reading the diary forty-five years ago (and perhaps even today) would have somehow overlooked the family’s Jewishness and failed to understand that the lives of the Franks’ were imperiled only because they were Jews. This is a patronizing assumption that not only refuses to credit the intelligence of ordinary readers but also fails to acknowledge that Anne’s diary would not have been published (certainly not in its original adolescent form) if the author had survived. Philip Roth had the latter reality in mind when, in his novel The Ghost Writer, he created an Anne who does survive, without her father’s knowledge, and who learns that Otto Frank himself is alive only when she reads about the Dutch publication of her diary in a newspaper. Instead of contacting her father and telling him that she too has come through the ordeal, the fictional Anne decides to remain dead to the world so that the power of her testimony will be enhanced by her martyrdom.
It is now well known that Otto Frank withheld certain portions of his daughter’s diary that he considered “too Jewish,” too pessimistic, too critical of his wife, or too candid about Anne’s emerging sexuality. Fortunately, Otto was too conscientious a man and a father to destroy the offending passages, which he turned over to the appropriate authorities for publication in a definitive edition after his death. The Broadway revival incorporated a good deal of the material that had been excised from the original edition of the diary; consequently, the 1997 theatrical production had a darker tone than the original. This version of Anne Frank’s story could no longer be summed up in the famous line, “I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Still, the changes and restorations did not change many minds; the public enthusiasm for the diary remains a sore point with a number of high-profile Jewish intellectuals. Their animus cannot be attributed to the contents of the diary itself, in either its formerly bowdlerized or currently available uncensored version, for there is no dispute about Anne’s precocious writing talent and powers of observation.
For some Jews, the real problem with the diary is the kind of Jews the Franks were. Otto Frank, in addition to being a grieving survivor wanting to put the best face on every member of his murdered family, was an acculturated, nonobservant Jew who, before the Nazi era, had considered himself a German like any other and who retained his attachment to German culture after the Holocaust. He was the kind of Jew my grandfather would surely have become if he had been raised, as Otto Frank was, in imperial Germany. Otto’s connection to Judaism as a religion was so tenuous that it is easy to imagine, had Hitler not come along, a late-twentieth-century Frank family with as many Christian converts in Germany as the Jacoby family produced in America. The subliminal (and in many cases overt) critique of the diary boils down to the conviction that if one person is going to stand for the murdered millions in the eyes of the goyim, it should not be the child of a man whose idea of a Hanukkah present for his daughter was a Christian Bible.
Otto, like many of my own ancestors, represents a Jewish possibility that arouses deep emotions, ranging from pity to disdain—with various nuances of anxiety and ambivalence in between—on the part of many contemporary American Jews (secular and observant). Among those most repelled by this Jewish possibility, the public response to Anne’s diary is seen as the product of a concerted and highly manipulative attempt to deemphasize the Jewish particularity of the Holocaust in favor of a universalized view of the extermination camps as just another example of the terrible things human beings are capable of doing to other human beings.
While
the critics of the “Anne Frank industry” are right about the intentions of the publisher, the original Broadway producers, and (to some extent) Otto Frank himself, they are dead wrong in their contention that the bland, universalized approach succeeded in wiping out Anne’s Jewish identity for average readers—many of whom, like me, were children. The Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer has written that “an audience coming to [the] play in 1955…would find little to threaten its psychological or emotional security. No one dies, and the inhabitants of the annex endure minimal suffering.” These are the words of an historian who already knows most of what can be known about the Holocaust (except by those who lived through it). What is left out of this analysis is the impact of a first encounter with the diary (and later, the movie based on the play) on someone like me in the mid-fifties. From reading critiques by pompous Holocaust gatekeepers, one might conclude that the lesson drawn from Anne’s diary by young American readers amounts to nothing more than “There’s so much good in the worst of us / And so much bad in the best of us / That it ill behooves any of us / To talk about the rest of us.”
It is true that when I bought the paperback edition, with a foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt, of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, I could not have known less about what a Jew was. I am sure that the main attraction for me was Anne’s picture on the cover and a blurb calling the book “a deeply moving story of adolescence.” At eleven, I knew that Anne and her family had joined the masses of skeletal victims, in striped uniforms, whom I had seen in newsreel photographs. What I did not know was anything about their lives before the abyss.
In the opening pages, I learned that people called Jews, on another continent, to be sure, but only a few years before I was born, were kept out of public schools, banned from parks and movie theaters, and required to turn in their bicycles. Anne, at twelve, had been forbidden to do all of the things I liked to do. These measures, I understood, were the prelude to the extermination camps. Roth was right: the diary, though it is also the work of a gifted young writer, derives its moral power from our knowledge of what happened to the inhabitants of the secret annex and to millions of others. What Anne’s diary did for me as a child (and I daresay for many of my elders) was to make the connection between a faceless group of victims and individual lives. I was seized by the realization—and it definitely did threaten my sense of security—that people could be killed for nothing, nothing at all, other than having been born into a despised racial or religious group. A year after reading Anne’s diary, I immediately linked her story with the photographs of hate-filled whites jeering at the “Little Rock Nine,” the embattled black students who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. And if this was universalization, it did not impel me to disregard the singularity of what had happened to the Jews but instead enabled me to understand that laws and practices depriving people of the right to go to school, to movies, to public parks, could lead—had led, only fifteen years earlier—to the denial of the very right to live. No, this teenage writer’s diary wasn’t the film Shoah or Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. As a child, I was infused by Anne Frank’s diary with an awareness of evil that would one day lead me to other chapters in the book of genocide. The diary inspired me to learn more: this is not the worst thing to be said on behalf of a small work of art that has entered popular consciousness around the world. And if there were and are many readers who took in the story simply as the tragic tale of one life cut short—well, the Holocaust was that too, six million times over, experienced separately by each person as well as collectively by a people. For me, Anne’s diary became one of those books a reader looks back on for the rest of her life and says, “Yes, that changed me forever.”
It would be foolishly reductive of me to conclude that I became unusually interested in Jews primarily because some sensor mechanism had been triggered by my father’s silences and evasions about his family’s past. Still, something set me off, for the concentration camps and the Jews were subjects that simply did not come up in my everyday life. I was still attending Catholic school when I read the diary, and I remember making a conscious decision to avoid using the chronicle of life in the secret annex for a book report—not only because my sixth-grade nun would have disapproved of the subject but also because I didn’t want to reveal, to a roomful of eleven-year-olds, how deeply I had been affected by Anne’s story. Around that time I began having the recurring concentration camp nightmare in which Hitler himself turned up to inform me that “you’re no better than anyone else here.” The diary had set off a depth charge that forced previously submerged contradictions to the surface of my mind. Like Anne herself, I could no longer reconcile the idea of an all-knowing, all-caring God with the evil that human beings, said to be divine creations, were capable of inflicting on one another. I could no longer accept what I was being taught in Catholic classrooms.
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IN ALL memoirs, there is an ever-present temptation to project current preoccupations onto a past self, to rewrite private history in a fashion that minimizes anything inconsistent with the person one has become and exaggerates the importance of anything that is clearly a precursor of the adult self. My father, whenever I would bring up some aspect of “this Jewish business” in my twenties, would remind me of my onetime infatuation with the political philosophy expounded by Senator Barry Goldwater in The Conscience of a Conservative (fifty cents at Grettenberger’s in 1960). I was convinced that the graduated income tax was one of the worst things ever to happen to Americans, and Dad’s arguments on behalf of social justice (not to mention that his accounting firm would have gone out of business without progressive taxation as administered by the Internal Revenue Service) fell on deaf ears for a time. I had forgotten about my brief passion for Goldwater—and my opinion, in 1960, that both Nixon and Kennedy were too liberal—until Dad reminded me years later. When I moved on politically, I obviously eradicated the conservative hero from my intellectual résumé. My father was right to remind me of the selectivity of memory, but he was wrong to imply (as he surely intended) that I was retrospectively exaggerating the degree of my youthful alienation from Catholic certitudes and the intensity of my interest in everything to do with Jews. Resistance to religious authority and a desire to learn more about Jews were two themes, though they were not connected in my mind at the time, that emerged in childhood and grew even more important during my adolescence; while the former could be explained by the force-feeding of religion in parochial school, the latter seemed to come, as my father insisted, “out of nowhere.”
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MY CATHOLIC education ended at fourteen, when my parents transferred me from St. Thomas to Okemos High School. There is no question that I was influenced profoundly by those years of parochial school, which left a deeper impression than any subsequent part of my formal education. Thorough indoctrination in pre—Vatican II Catholicism gave me a firm idea of what I did not believe—a point of intellectual and spiritual departure. For this I have always been grateful. Even the most retrograde aspects of parochial school religiosity served the useful purpose of stimulating doubt. In class, we were all embarrassed, and would snicker uneasily behind our hands, when we were forced to listen to a bloodcurdling record dramatizing the death of twelve-year-old Maria Goretti, who had only recently been canonized by Pope Pius XII for resisting her rapist unto death. “No, no, it is a sin—God forbids it!” screamed the Maria stand-in as her attacker stabbed her over and over. Why, I asked myself, should a girl have to prove her virtue by resisting a man until he murders her? I knew I would have given in so I could go on living—and this certainty didn’t make me feel guilty at all. This is not (as my dad might suggest if he were alive) a piece of feminist revisionism, exaggerating the depth of my preteen repulsion at the idea that it was better to die a virgin than to survive a rape. If dying was what it took for a girl to become a saint, I didn’t want any part of sainthood. “Unjust! Unjust!” (I had just read Jane Eyre) was my visceral reaction.