It raises lots of interesting questions about the image now attached to Anne and grapples with the topic in a very nuanced way, recognizing that the story of Anne Frank has long since ceased to be simply the tragic story of a girl whose life was cut short by barbarism. Author Lola Lafon writes, “How beloved she is, this young Jewish girl who is no longer."
Lafon wrote the book after sleeping in the annex at the Anne Frank House, not something just any visitor can do. (The annex is the hidden compartment where Anne and her family and another family lived, while trying to escape deportation).
As she prepares for the visit, she writes, “I will spend the night in this space where for 25 months eight people submitted themselves to silence, learning all the forms it could take, from whispers to muffled steps to total immobility.”
According to Franklin, the diary has sold 30 million copies and “is the most famous work of literature to arise from the Holocaust.”
It’s an interesting comparison because Bruck, like all survivors including Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, has written about what Anne could not: what happened in the Nazi concentration camps and life after liberation. Moreover, many women survivors have told their stories but they failed to make a deep impression and hence don’t enter into the widely-known public conception of the Holocaust. That wasn’t the fate of Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947.
Born in 1974, Lafon is widely known in France as a feminist writer. She is the author of the novel, The Little Communist Who Never Smiled. This book was translated from the French by Lauren Elkin. It's a very smooth translation.
Why read this book? The author addresses the age-old scourges of anti-Semitism, exploitation and historical amnesia but has found a new approach in what some have called “a sleepover with the dead.”
