The Path to a Book
On the making of THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK.
Dear friends,
She’s coming! The Many Lives of Anne Frank will be published on January 27, 2025.
The cover art is a mural by a street artist who goes by the moniker Bip Apollo. He created it on a wall outside Partners bar in New Haven sometime in the early 2010s, and it’s still there, although much faded. I love the mural’s stark aesthetic, the way it demonstrates Anne’s ubiquity in the world, and the fact that the first part of the artist’s pseudonym is an acronym for “Believe in People”—a message that Anne almost certainly would have endorsed. See more of his fantastic work here.
This book began with a conversation with an editor from Yale Jewish Lives in 2016. It took us till 2019 to settle on Anne as the right subject. Part of what got me there was reviewing the graphic adaptation of her diary for the New York Times. I admired much of what Ari Folman and David Polonsky did with this project, but I was disappointed by the way they erased Anne’s important act of revising her original diary into a publishable manuscript. The back story about the book’s composition has been known to general readers since 1995, when a “definitive edition” of the diary incorporating some of the material she originally deleted was put into mass circulation. Still, as I wrote then, “Myths die slow deaths, and most readers still aren’t aware of the complexities behind the book’s creation”:
I never imagined that this version of the Diary would be targeted by conservatives for its “LGBTQ content”—Anne’s memory of wanting to touch a friend’s breasts and her admiration of the female body. More on that here:
The manuscript deadline was originally in 2021, but I didn’t turn in a complete draft until June 2023. What took so long? For one thing, the pandemic intervened, making it impossible to travel for research and generally disrupting my work in all the ways with which we’re so familiar (three children at home doing Zoom school, etc).
But it also took me a long time to find my way into this subject. “The story of Anne Frank is so well known to so many that the task of making it new seems at once insurmountable and superfluous,” I wrote in that New York Times review. No one knew it at the time, but I was describing my own dilemma. In the last five years, I can’t count how many people have asked me—some politely, some less so—why the world needs another book about Anne Frank.
My answer is that the mountain of discourse devoted to Anne has obscured the reality of her life. The misconception about her diary is just the beginning. There’s also the false depiction of her father as her censor, which I discuss here:
And the confusion over the downplaying of Anne’s Judaism to allow the Diary to appeal to the broadest possible audience—which is usually blamed on Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who wrote the Broadway adaptation, but actually goes back to the way the Diary was marketed in America. I discuss this in much greater detail in the book, but that chapter started with the post below:
Not to mention the use of her image and words in the service of a vast number of political causes, from apartheid in South Africa to anti-Israel propaganda:
As I described in this post about the writing process, I came up with the book’s “many lives” structure after three years of research, while standing in line at the airport:
What if I structured my book around Anne’s identities—all the different things she meant, and still means, to people? Right there in the line, I started making a list. Child, refugee, target of Nazi regulations, lover (her relationship with Peter van Pels), prisoner (Westerbork, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen), corpse (her terrible death). All the identities around her diary: witness (the author of testimony), artist (revising it for publication), author. And the different ways in which she goes on living after her death: celebrity (the success of the US publication), ambassador (the play’s dissemination of her story around the world), survivor (all the literature about her), and figurehead (the use of her name and image for political purposes).
This structure would allow me to tell much of Anne’s story chronologically but would be flexible enough to allow me to deviate from that chronology when necessary. More than that, it fits with the way I’ve come to understand Anne’s life and the multifaceted role she has come to play in the world.
I’ve used this newsletter as a testing ground for ideas, listening to your feedback to see what resonates. Along the way, I’ve heard from many people whose lives were changed by their encounter with Anne Frank. A few of their stories are in the book, too.
The Many Lives of Anne Frank is now available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, or anywhere else you buy books. As you all probably know by now, preorders are important to help publishers gauge interest and create buzz around a book. Bonuses for those who preorder will include entry into a drawing to win a visit by me (via Zoom) to discuss the book with your book club, a one-on-one writing consultation, and more.
I’m so grateful to all of you for joining me on this path. My next project is still under wraps, but I’m looking forward to sharing details about it soon.
What I’m reading
My latest piece for the New York Review of Books examines a newly translated memoir by Rokhl Auerbach, a member of the Oyneg Shabes project: a grassroots group of amateur archivists who documented the destruction of Warsaw’s Jews. Strikingly, her book isn’t an account of her own suffering but a testament to the lives of her friends and colleagues. “By writing about the people she knew—primarily other members of Jewish Warsaw’s intellectual community—Auerbach memorializes an entire lost world,” I wrote.
What I’m reading
Owing to this and other assignments, I’ve had to put Isabella Hammad on the back burner—again! I pledge to be more organized about the Israeli/Palestininian authors book club in the next few months.
As ever,
Ruth
People’s insistence on describing Anne Frank as a schoolgirl scribbling in her notebook rather than a writer creating a piece of art reminds me of depictions of Rosa Parks. She is persistently described as a seamstress who happened to stay seated on the bus because her feet were tired. In fact she was a trained and experienced political activist whose act of defiance was a planned strategy in a long campaign of collective action against Jim Crow. Both Frank and Parks are held up as icons yet deprived of their agency, as if they had accidentally stumbled into history.
An exciting milestone. Looking forward to reading.