Portrait of the artist

Exploring the life of Anne Frank, the crafting of her iconic diary, and the book’s historic legacy

November 15, 2009|Roberta Silman, Globe Correspondent

When I got this book, I wondered how Francine Prose would untangle the provenance and legacy of this famous book - “The Diary of a Young Girl’’ by Anne Frank. Its hold on us has inspired John Berryman, Philip Roth, Judith Thurman, Cynthia Ozick among others, and engendered adaptations for stage and screen. Everyone seems to want to have the last word on this beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed Jewish girl whose mischievous, intelligent face adorns the cover and whose photograph has become an icon of the Holocaust.

I need not have worried. Francine Prose, a highly intelligent novelist and critic, has outdone herself, drawing us into the life of the Frank family and their incredible ordeal, placing their story in an historical context where the Dutch are revealed as all too compliant with their Nazi conquerors, and telling us in straightforward, elegant prose how the various versions of Anne’s diary came to be, and how Anne’s story has spread into the public domain, often by well-meaning but misguided people. She reminds us “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.’’

Most important for posterity, Prose adds: “In a few more years, no one alive will have witnessed the scene of a Nazi arresting a Jew. There have been, and will be, other arrests and executions for the crime of having been born into a particular race or religion or tribe. But the scene of Nazis hunting down Jews is unlikely to happen again, though history teaches us never to say never.’’

Conceived as a series of letters written to an imaginary “Kitty,’’ from May 1942 until August 1944, this poignant diary relates the daily lives of the eight people hidden in Het Acherhuis (Anne’s title, “the house behind’’ and sometimes called “the secret annex’’), in Amsterdam during World War II. It has been called a coming-of-age story because it covers the remarkable development of an unusually self-aware, 13-year-old girl who started writing because “paper is patient’’ to the 15-year-old young woman who revised it in spring of 1944 after hearing a radio announcement that there would someday be a museum to house such records. But a coming-of-age story implies a longer life. Anne and her family were betrayed in August of 1944; she was sent to Westerboerk in Holland, then to Auschwitz, and finally to Bergen Belsen where she died of typhus a few weeks before its liberation by the British.