The path might not be easy to find.
In Nathan Englander’s short story, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank,” a riff on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” Englander depicts a reunion between two women who grew up going to day school and high school together. Sitting around a table drinking and smoking pot, they introduce their husbands and their current selves to each other. One woman has become more observant, now a Chasid living in Jerusalem, and plotlines, but then there is usually some philosophical subtext or literary technique on which we focus instead. and the other has become less observant, now secular living in a Florida suburb. Similar to Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” in which love is not the subject of the story, but awful behavior that could be called anything but love, Anne Frank is not the subject of Englander’s story at all. When the conversation does get around to Anne Frank, she does not feature for even a moment, instead the discussion is of which non-Jewish friend they could trust to hide them, if we were again in a situation like the Holocaust.
Englander’s story, like many of his, is not in the least bit kind to Orthodox Jews, or really, Jews in general, but putting this aside, Englander is right about one thing: when we talk about Anne Frank, the discussion is not usually about Frank or the diary, but about what happened after the diary. Or, more to the point-, what did not happen after the diary: Frank did not grow up to be the writer which her talent promised she would become. She died in a concentration camp at the end of the Holocaust, not from being gassed, but from catching typhus in the abominable conditions of the camp. She died just weeks before she would have been liberated. When we discuss her, we discuss her as a girl who puts a face on the six million victims, who gives a voice to all of those who were murdered. The problem is that we do not usually listen to her voice.
In teaching Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a literary text in a high school English class, finding a point of entry was not easy. Translated into English by B.M. Mooyaart, in a manner which I trust to be faithful, the diary does not have a basic narrative arc, because it is a diary and not a novel. The diary is also constrained by the circumstances in which it was written: not much happens to the characters because they are trapped in an annex. Certainly, we teach novels that lack narrative arcs, but usually they are philosophically significant or have great literary merit. The diary, though translated in a style that is far from artless, it is also far from revolutionary.
Before approaching the book with my class, who are all male and Christian, I did not know the history of the diary, and found myself intrigued by the controversies. I originally stumbled into the debates when I came away from the book puzzled by the lack of Judaism. No mention of Passover, which almost all American Jews today celebrate, as well as no Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, also almost universally celebrated. There is mention of Hanukkah, but because their protectors are Christian, there is much more of a to-do about Christmas, St. Nicholas Day, and Whitsunday, a celebration related to Pentecost. I asked Google about the editing of the diary, as I was curious whether the Franks simply did not celebrate Jewish holidays or if they had been edited out. While I did not, at that time, find my answer, I did find controversies over what had been edited out, what had been hidden by Otto Frank (Frank’s father, who made the decision to publish her diary), and who owned the content of the previously hidden pages.
I did find one essay online about the depiction of Anne in the diary, “Can Anne Be Like Margot and Still Be Like Anne?” Tthe authors, Linda Irwin-DeVitis and Beth Benjamin, have conducted a book club as a case study of adolescent girls, using Diary of a Young Girl as a way to discuss some of the pressures of adolescence. As the title suggests, one of their questions pertains to the expectation of young women to be obedient, cheerful, and uncomplaining, all personality traits attributed to Margot, Frank’s older sister. The discussion of Frank as a character in her own book was refreshing, if not enlightening.
I also found a session of the Dead Authors Podcast, featuring Anne Frank. The Dead Authors Podcast is unscripted comedy, in which a fictitious H. G. Wells brings authors in his time machine to interview. Anne Frank, portrayed by Jamie Denbo spars with interviewer Paul F. Tompkins as H. G. Wells. Denbo’s Frank is biting, sarcastic, and hilarious. Her irreverent portrayal emphasizes the aspects of Frank which are truly adolescent and often downplayed: her sense of superiority, interest in sex, grandiose sense of self, and bickering with family and other residents of the annex. As a parody, the podcast takes the jokes a bit far and is not for those with delicate sensitivities. However, it does hit home the cultural expectations of Frank being innocent to the point of unrealistic.
Ultimately, in discussing the book with my class, we talked about being in captivity, family frustrations, the break-ins (universally scene as “the exciting parts, because something actually happened”), the feelings and experiences of teenagers, developing of identity (an overarching theme of the course) and ownership, editing, and publication of the book. Interestingly enough, though all students agreed that if a teacher posted an essay of theirs on social media without permission, they would demand that it be taken down, they found no problem with the publication of the diary, even though Frank had no way of giving consent or approving edits.
My hope is that for my students, the conversation and their understanding went beyond Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a book about the Holocaust, and also helped them begin to think about the experiences of others. Whether or not this is true I may not discover, as tends to be the case for most teachers. While we have a long-term view for our students, we do not often get to see what the long-term view actually ends up being.
Sometimes we do not wish to see what is waiting for us.
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