Everyone knows Anne Frank the martyr, Anne Frank the international icon. Francine Prose wants the world to remember Anne Frank the brilliant writer.
A novelist and teacher of writing, Prose has just published “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife.” It’s certainly not the first book about the Jewish teen who hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, died in a concentration camp and later rocked the world with her recovered diary. But it may be the first to unpack Frank’s literary genius.
Prose will be in the Bay Area to discuss Anne Frank and her new book at a Monday, Oct. 5 lecture at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
“She was a conscious literary artist,” Prose says of Anne. “The revelation was realizing she had re-written the [diary] in the attic. She intended it to be published.”
The book most students read in high school, “The Diary of a Young Girl,” isn’t exactly the work Anne wrote in those 25 months in hiding, from June 1942 until the family was arrested in August 1944. That version was heavily edited by her father, Otto Frank, the family’s only survivor and, ultimately, the one who brought the diary to the world.
Anne actually wrote two versions, the second being an extensive rewrite done in her last months in the attic. A critical edition published in 1995 placed Anne’s two versions side by side, revealing the canny craftsmanship of the doomed 15-year old.
“No one actually sat down with the book and asked what are the literary techniques she uses and why are they so effective,” Prose says. “That was my original intention: a straight-up appreciation of how sophisticated it was. Then when I realized the work she had done, and the consciousness of her literary craft, it became a very different book.”
Prose also gives an account of Anne and the Frank family history, their arrest and Anne’s death at Bergen-Belsen only weeks before liberation. She also writes about the Broadway play, the films and the Amsterdam museum housed in the Franks’ hideout — as well as the efforts of Holocaust deniers to discredit the diary as a fake.
But the heart of Prose’s volume is that examination of Anne’s craft: From her use of dialogue and detail, her honesty and humor, her precocious wisdom, Anne Frank was a unique talent, forged in the darkest of circumstances.
“The meticulousness of her craftsmanship never occurred to me,” says Prose, who had read the diary several times as a girl. “Her skill as an editor and reviser, the decisions she made — like making the diary letters to Kitty, a decision made in 1944 … were all literary decisions made by a natural writer.”
Prose, who is Jewish, says she identified with Anne as a girl.
“Like many little Jewish girls I looked shockingly like Anne Frank,” notes the Brooklyn-born author. “I could see myself in her so clearly, though needless to say my circumstances were so different.”
Many young people reading the diary identify with Anne, whose adolescent struggles mirror those of most teens. Prose writes about the long-standing debate over whether the full horror of the Frank family story gets lost in the focus on Anne the universal teenager.
Anne Frank dreamed of going to Hollywood, of publishing books and making a difference in the world. She got everything she wanted, but never lived to see any of it. That remains the open wound of the Anne Frank story: Readers of her diary get to know her as a friend, and when a friend dies so tragically, it’s impossible to reconcile.
“Which would you rather have,” Prose asks rhetorically, “the book or the living Anne Frank? The answer is obvious.”
But since the diary is all we have, Prose hopes her book will motivate readers to pick up their dog-eared copy of the diary, and re-read it with new eyes.
“It’s important for people to understand that a girl her age could have done this,” she says. “There’s resistance to thinking a teenage girl was capable of this. Not every girl is, but one of them was.” “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife” by Francine Prose (336 pages, Harper, $24.95)
Francine Prose will speak 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5 at the JCC of San Francisco, 3200 California St., S.F. $10-$18. Information: (415) 292-1200 or www.jccsf.org.