Collection 5: "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife" by Francine Prose

I understood, as I could not have as a child, how much art is required to give the impression of artlessness, how much control is necessary in order to seem natural, how almost nothing is more difficult for a writer than to find a narrative voice as fresh and unaffected as Anne Frank’s.

I appreciated, as I did not when I was a girl, her technical proficiency, the novelistic qualities of her diary, her ability to turn living people into characters, her observational powers, her eye for detail, her ear for dialogue and monologue, and the sense of pacing that guides her as she intersperses sections of reflection with dramatized scenes.

I appreciated, as I did not when I was a girl, her technical proficiency, the novelistic qualities of her diary, her ability to turn living people into characters, her observational powers, her eye for detail, her ear for dialogue and monologue, and the sense of pacing that guides her as she intersperses sections of reflection with dramatized scenes.

I kept pausing to marvel at the fact that one of the greatest books about the Nazi genocide should have been written by a girl between the ages of thirteen and fifteen—not a demographic we commonly associate with literary genius.

What makes it even more impressive is that this deceptively unassuming book focuses on a particular moment and on specific people, and at the same time speaks, in ways that seem timeless and universal, about adolescence and family life.

It tells the truth about certain human beings’ ineradicable desire to exterminate the largest possible number of other human beings, even as it celebrates the will to survive and the determination to maintain one’s decency and dignity under the most dehumanizing circumstances.

It tells the truth about certain human beings’ ineradicable desire to exterminate the largest possible number of other human beings, even as it celebrates the will to survive and the determination to maintain one’s decency and dignity under the most dehumanizing circumstances.

In April 1944, four months before the attic in which the Franks found refuge was raided by the Nazis, Anne Frank recorded her wish to become a writer.

In fact, though the Definitive Edition is almost a third longer than the first published version of The Diary of a Young Girl, the sections that were reinstated—barbed comments about Edith Frank and the Van Pelses, and other entries revealing the extent of Anne’s curiosity about sexuality and about her body—don’t substantially change our perception of her.

In an incisive 1989 New Yorker essay, “Not Even a Nice Girl,” Judith Thurman remarked on the skill with which Anne Frank constructed her narrative.

A small number of critics and historians have called attention to Anne’s precocious literary talent.

Her book has been discussed as eyewitness testimony, as a war document, as a Holocaust narrative or not, as a book written during the time of war that is only tangentially about the war, and as a springboard for conversations about racism and intolerance.

“A child’s diary, even when she was so natural a writer, rarely could sustain literary criticism. Since this diary is emblematic of hundreds of thousands of murdered children, criticism is irrelevant. I myself have no qualifications except as a literary critic. One cannot write about Anne Frank’s Diary as if Shakespeare, or Philip Roth, is the subject.”

I do not mean to sound impervious to the poignancy of the Diary.

I do not mean to sound impervious to the poignancy of the Diary.

Anne may have been a bright and admirably introspective girl, but there is not much in her diary that is emotionally demanding, and her reflections on the world have the quality of banality that one would expect from a 14-year-old.

Anne may have been a bright and admirably introspective girl, but there is not much in her diary that is emotionally demanding, and her reflections on the world have the quality of banality that one would expect from a 14-year-old.

Regardless of her age and her gender, she managed to create something that transcended what she herself called “the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old” and that should be awarded its place among the great memoirs and spiritual confessions, as well as among the most significant records of the era in which she lived.