Abstracts

Adrienne Kertzer
University of Calgary

Growing up with Anne Frank

When Nina Auerbach begins her recent review of Melissa Müller's Anne Frank, the Biography by claiming, "When I was Anne Frank's age, I hated Anne Frank, and so did other disaffected American Jewish girls in the 1950s," how can we be surprised? The need to distance oneself from the 1950s and 1960s' reverent attitude toward Frank is familiar to any reader of the Holocaust literary criticism of a Lawrence L. Langer, or the fiction of a Philip Roth, or Cynthia Ozick. Ozick concludes her New Yorker article "Who Owns Anne Frank?" so angry at the misuse of Frank's diary that she wishes that it had never been published. Jason Sherman, a Canadian dramatist, satirizes such misuse in Reading Hebron, when a non-Jewish character, thrilled to be at her first Passover seder, confesses that she once longed to be Anne Frank. For such cultural critics, Anne Frank functions as a pitiful example of the determinism of American popular culture to rework everything, even genocide, into a narrative of naïve optimism: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." In their disdain for the misguided sanctity surrounding this particular and often quoted out of context statement by Frank, these writers signal their adult distance from the children's literature they have grown beyond.

What such critics do not address is what, if anything, they would give children to read instead of Frank's diary. For if one postmodern sign of growing up is growing past the commodification and sanctification of Anne Frank (a commodification alluded to in both Ozick's title and the title of Ralph Melnick's study, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank), a contradictory sign appears in our continuing need to believe that children sound like Anne Frank, and benefit from reading her diary. My paper examines the consequences of this puzzling contradiction, one in which belief in The Diary of a Young Girl persists as the marker of the border between childhood and adulthood, the site where we act out the tension and difference between children's Holocaust literature and Holocaust representation intended for adults. Not only does the Diary persist as assigned classroom reading, it remains profoundly influential in terms of how we imagine children respond to war, and how we recognize a child's voice. Such influence is seen for example in Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo, not only in the diarist's self-conscious references to Anne Frank, e.g., her longing not to share the fate of Anne Frank even as she names her diary just as Frank did, but even more in the adult determination to market the book as a successor to Frank's diary. Drawing attention to the problematic innocence of a child's voice that is demonstrated through its faithfulness/closeness to a literary predecessor, Zlata's Diary reinforces how The Diary of a Young Girl continues to function as a marker of our uncertainty regarding what we are willing to tell children about the children who die in war, and what we imagine such children can tell us.