For Cynthia Ozick (New York, 1928), Anne Frank was a born writer. Had she not been born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1929, her trajectory would have been more similar “to that of Nadine Gordimer, let’s say, than that of Françoise Sagan.” Not only did she intuit from an early age the power of literature to create “an explosive document straight into the future”, but her work is “prodigious” in its own right, because she lucidly narrated lives marked by threat daily extermination.
Translation by Eugenia Vazquez Nacarino. Alpha Decay. 64 pages. 12,50 €You can buy it here.
According to Ozick, Anne Frank’s diary, far from being an edifying reading, as it has generally been described since its first successful American stage adaptation in 1955, in which one of its phrases (“still I believe, despite everything, in the goodness of the human being”), is a “scary story”, with its “flashes of intelligence, emotion and talent”.
In 1997, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the publication of the newspaper in Dutch, and three months before the Broadway premiere of the theatrical adaptation starring Natalie Portman, Ozick published in The New Yorker the essay Who owns Anne Frank?, a text with the best qualities of the genre: argumentative clarity, subtlety not without forcefulness, critical gaze and audacity in the face of cultural inertia.
Israeli writer Yishai Sarid claims that Anne Frank is the only name most would cite as a Holocaust victim. And what follows from the fact that one name outshines millions of others? Ozick offers us clues about the perversion of certain legacies for the sake of their popularization and our tendency to “cheap sentimentality at the cost of a huge catastrophe”, which Hannah Arendt hated so much. Thus, together with his text The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination, it is one of the indispensable titles on the (ab) uses and perversions inflicted on historical memory.
The fact that this diary is possibly the most widely read (and often the only) document related to the Holocaust, and that its author’s name has been elevated to a symbol carrying a universal message with all that that entails (“the voice who spoke for six million victims”, as the reviewer of the NYT Book Review and Iliá Ehrenburg agreed in the introduction to the Soviet edition), has diverted attention from the process of publication and exploitation of the work, as well as from the two foundations that dispute each other’s legacy.
As Ozick explains, behind the newspaper that has become a bestseller there is a chain of editorial manipulations and battles of political, economic, legal, ideological and personal interests that have devalued the original until turning it into a “consumer good” ready for its adaptation to comics. to the theater, to the cinema, to Instagram stories, to exhibitions, or to translations that soften certain messages, as happened with the first German version: the one created by the father in Geneva and the one by the house-museum in Amsterdam, which every year visits more than a million people.
Reminding that the work is not really about the Holocaust nor is it the story of Anne Frank itself (since “a story cannot be called that if it lacks the ending”), the author points out the danger of basing knowledge of the norm from exceptional cases, as was the case of the Franks, who managed to hide until someone betrayed them.
After the publication of this essay, the fights did not abate -as David Barnouw reviews in The Phenomenon of Anna Frank- and, in the end, instead of talking about Anne, people speak for her. The nuance is important. What about the voice of the young writer who, hidden in her shelter, began to review her diary, with the intuition that it could be published in a future that did not arrive? Have we lived up to it?
This relentless essay questions whether the most liberating outcome of the manuscript would not have been the one that its rescuer, Miep Gies, came up with: burning it for compromising. Turned into ashes, the diary would have been safe from a world reluctant to look into the eyes of the “imponderable truth of evil embodied in a name and a place.”
“That Israel’s legitimacy is being questioned more than 70 years after its historic renewal is a symptom of moral rottenness, well visible in that radically evil expression of ‘the right to exist’. Who would question the right to exist of a cat or a dog?” defends Ozick. “And now the Jews, surrounded by enemies clamoring for their destruction, are they to be deprived of their right to exist again? There are days when I don’t know if I live in the 21st century or the shaky 1930s.”
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