Sometimes, early in the experience of reading a book, I will get a sensation that I may be in the presence of a classic.
It’s tough to say what triggers this sensation. I remember experiencing it while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns,” her landmark exploration of the emigration of Black Southerners to other parts of the country in the 20th century and how this remade our culture. You just get the sense that you’re experiencing a rare intersection of subject and unique authorial intelligence.
I had this feeling when I first started on Ruth Franklin’s “The Many Lives of Anne Frank,” and by the time I finished reading, this feeling was confirmed. This is a book that should be read and discussed for generations.
It’s worth wondering whether or not we needed another study of Anne Frank. There are multiple biographies of Anne Frank. The Anne Frank house in Amsterdam is one of the most visited tourist destinations in all of Europe. We also have Anne’s own words from “The Diary of a Young Girl,” compiled by her father Otto Frank after the war, which has been read by millions across dozens of languages.
Franklin dives into all of this by considering Anne Frank through a series of different lenses — child, refugee, prisoner, writer, icon — in order to simultaneously bring the reader closer to Anne Frank, the real person who lived a real life, and the image of Anne Frank that has suffused society in the years since her death.
At her heart, Franklin is a literary biographer — having previously published a marvelous biography of the writer Shirley Jackson (“Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life”) — and her skill as an interpreter of text shines throughout the book. In the first section of the book, Franklin repeatedly brings historical analysis, primary sources and Anne Frank’s writing into juxtaposition with each other in a way that both illuminates Anne Frank as an individual and the larger tragedy of the Holocaust.
A recent controversy over an AI-powered Anne Frank chatbot that could not be made to condemn the Nazis who murdered her is a reminder of the danger of reducing real people into slogans. The opening chapters of Franklin’s book serve as a clear corrective to the reduction of Anne Frank into a billboard icon, a smiling girl with “Believe in people” stamped above her image. Franklin deeply admires Frank’s precocity and talent and spirit, and shows us how and why we should consider her a genuine literary figure, but she also reminds us she was a girl who died of disease alongside her sister, Margot, at the Bergen-Belsen death camp.
The book would be a welcome addition to the Anne Frank canon if it ended after these opening chapters, but Franklin goes on to consider the posthumous legacy of Anne Frank as a “celebrity,” “ambassador” and “survivor,” the last category through the inspiration she’s given other writers such as Philip Roth (“The Ghost Writer”) and Shalom Auslander (“Hope: A Tragedy”), who have used Anne Frank as a jumping off point for their own creative work.
A final chapter of Anne Frank as a “pawn” in present-day geopolitical events will challenge and unsettle many readers, but this is Franklin’s mission, to consider Frank in all dimensions.
Produced as part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank” is very readable without sacrificing complexity or depth. It’s a book that would satisfy anyone who has read “The Diary of a Young Girl” or toured the annex where Anne’s family and others were hidden.
Read this book. You won’t regret it.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance” by Kellie Carter Jackson
2. “All of Us Strangers” by Taichi Yamada
3. “Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe” by John Guy and Julia Fox
4. “The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders” by Sarah Aziza
5. “Maskerade: Discworld #18” by Terry Pratchett
— Lesley W., Evanston
I think this book is out of print, which is a shame, but libraries will have it and it can be bought used, “You Came Back,” by Christopher Coake.
1. “Roctogenarians” by Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg
2. “Pay Dirt” by Sara Paretsky
3. “Horse” by Geraldine Brooks
4. “Like a Garden” by Sara Covin Juengst
5. “Every Day is a Good Day” by Wilma Mankiller
— Beverly B., Valparaiso, Indiana
“The Round House” by Louise Erdrich is the pick for Beverly.
1. “Hope Dies Last” by Studs Terkel
2. “The Barn” by Wright Thompson
3. “James” by Percival Everett
4. “Begin Again” by Eddie Glaude Jr.
5. “No Name in the Street” by James Baldwin
— John H., Ft. Wayne, Indiana
What a great list. I’m going with one of my favorite back-in-print cult classics of African American literature, “Oreo” by Fran Ross.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.
