THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK

The short life and long legacy of the world’s most famous Holocaust victim.

Anne Frank got her first diary as a present for her 13th birthday, just weeks before her family went into hiding in 1942. By the time she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, not yet 16, she had filled multiple notebooks and was revising them for postwar publication before her arrest. Franklin, who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, in Part 1 follows Anne from childhood in Germany to Holland and Bergen-Belsen. She spotlights Anne’s increasing maturity over the course of two years in hiding and takes a close look at her revisions as indications of “the coherent testimonial narrative she now wanted to write.” Part 2, described by Franklin as “a cultural history of the idea of Anne as it has developed since 1947,” contains some familiar material: her father Otto’s recovery and editing of the diary (he removed some of Anne’s more acerbic comments and included material she had cut as too personal); its publication and international success; the stage and movie versions criticized today for downplaying Anne’s Jewishness to make her an all-purpose icon of human endurance—these topics have been covered widely. More unusual, and quite moving, are the “interludes” testifying to the diary’s impact on individual readers across the globe. A final chapter, “Anne in the Political World,” is problematic, especially when Franklin tackles with evident discomfort the fierce debates over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its military response to the 2023 Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians. Speculating on how Anne might have viewed these issues if she had survived doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the general thrust of Franklin’s thoughtful book, which succeeds best in its aims of “recognizing and respecting Anne’s intentions as an author” and “reclaiming her as a human being rather than a symbol.”

An intriguing effort that tries to do too much.