If she were alive today, Anne Frank would be 95 years old. But some would argue that the celebrated Holocaust diarist never really died and has acquired a unique sense of immortality.
Ruth Franklin, an award-winning, Baltimore-born author, editor and literary critic, revisits the life and legacy of the Dutch-Jewish teenager — who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945 at the age of 15 — with her new biography, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank” (Yale University Publishing).
A 1991 graduate of the Park School of Baltimore, Franklin, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, recently spoke about the book at Bird in Hand Café & Bookstore, 11 East 33rd Street in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood.
Franklin also spoke at Shabbat services recently as the scholar-in-residence at Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation in Pikesville.
Franklin is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction” (Oxford University Press) and “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life” (Liveright).
She is a former editor at The New Republic whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications.
With “The Many Lives of Anne Frank,” Franklin takes a fresh and innovative look at the discussions and debates surrounding the diarist’s life and work, including the controversial adaptations of her journal.
“I just felt that the myths about the diary are so persistent,” Franklin said in a recent phone interview with Jmore. “It’s been public knowledge for more than 30 years that Anne edited and revised her own diary and yet there is still this enduring sense of it of a kind of found object. I feel really strongly that the persistence of seeing it that way doesn’t give her the credit she deserves for taking the rough draft of her diary and making it into this intentional testimonial to the persecution of the Jews in The Netherlands.”
Extensively researched, “The Many Lives” also chronicles Frank’s evolution as a fictional character in American Jewish literature, and the ways in which her story and image have been politically and culturally appropriated and exploited over the years.
“She is interpreted in so many different ways and I started to feel strongly that the more we see her as this generic symbol, the less we understand who she really was,” Franklin said. “So it was important to me to get as close as possible to get back to her identify as a real person and try to see the world through her eyes.”
Franklin examines the youngster’s transformation from hidden child and Holocaust victim to international icon whose diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and is the most widely read work of the Holocaust.
Franklin’s biography is divided into two sections, the first examining Frank’s childhood in the German city of Frankfurt from 1929 through 1934 and her life in her adopted hometown of Amsterdam until her death.
The second part covers the decades following her passing and the many versions of Anne Frank that the world has come to know and love.
“The second part of the book … is a cultural history of the idea of Anne as it has developed since 1947, when the ‘Diary’ first appeared in Dutch,” Franklin writes in the introduction.
Novelist and essayist Dara Horn, author of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award-winning “People Love Dead Jews,” called “The Many Lives” a “tour de force [that] sets the standard for anyone thinking about Anne Frank for years to come.”
In a column for the media source Literary Hub, Franklin wrote that she hopes her book will inspire more scholars, authors and readers to investigate Anne Frank’s life and legacy in a comprehensive and objective manner.
“A scholar to whom I reached out for advice when beginning my research pointedly warned me that Anne Frank studies was a ‘crowded field,’ Franklin wrote. “I hope my experience will encourage other writers to be persistent and ‘turn every page,’ as [acclaimed biographer and journalist] Robert Caro famously puts it. Even when the ground has been trampled by many feet, a person with a fresh perspective and a careful eye may yet find something unexpected.”
Franklin told Jmore she hopes her book will help readers view Anne Frank as more than simply an optimistic teenager who naively believed that “most people are good at heart.” She views Frank as a young, astute writer who fully recognized what was happening around her in wartime Amsterdam. As the diarist observed, “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.”
For information, visit yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248128/the-many-lives-of-anne-frank/ or ruthfranklin.net/author/bio/.
Haydee M. Rodriguez is a Baltimore-based freelance writer.
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