Like many of us, novelist Francine Prose first came across Anne Frank as a youngster. She pictures herself on the floor of her bedroom at an age younger than Anne was when she started writing her diary, reading away the daylight "enthralled" by the teenager's description of the life of those eight Jews hidden from the Nazi extermination in an attic in Amsterdam. She tells of how she was so fascinated that having completed the book, she went back to the beginning and immediately started all over again.
It was a fascination that stuck with her, and her new book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, is her attempt to document and explain that fascination both in herself as well as in the countless others who have come to see the teenaged diarist as the face of the Holocaust.
The Anne Frank Prose presents to the reader is not a callow mindless teenager. The Anne Frank Prose posits is a close observer of human nature with an eye beyond her years. She is an introspective self-annalist. Moreover, she is well able to put those observations and that introspection on paper for the reader. She is not merely a precocious teen gushing confidences in secret, she is a talented writer interested in producing something that will have a life when she is gone.
Prose examines the different versions of the diary to show how Anne went back and revised what she had already written, how she dreamed about using it as material for a fictional work, how she began to think about the diary as a public document, rather than a private record.
It is the theatrical adaptation of the diary and later the motion picture, Prose feels, that is responsible for the image of Anne as a silly teen. Goodrich and Hackett in their adaptation aimed to create a character and a storyline that would be palatable to a Broadway audience. The plight of Anne and the others in the attic was deemed both too dark and too parochial for popular success.
What Goodrich and Hackett did was to turn Anne into something more like an American teenager. They de-emphasized the Jewish elements and added some comic elements to lighten things. They tried to infuse some optimism by emphasizing Anne's faith in the essential goodness of human beings. In doing so, they distorted both the diary and the diarist, yet at the same time, the popular success of their play may well have been responsible for turning new audiences onto the original.
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