“When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing” (Lola Lafon)

I've reviewed a short nonfiction book for World Literature Review called When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing, but the review won't appear until July and since I remain haunted by it, I'm jotting down a few thoughts here (I've reviewed books for WLT before, and the magazine also published a speech by Edith Bruck that I translated called, "My Alma Mater is Auschwitz").

It's a fascinating if somewhat slim exploration of the annex at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and behind-the-scenes details about Anne Frank’s life, diary, father, etc.

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.”

In preparation for reviewing this book (published by Yale University Press), I also read Ruth Franklin's The Many Lives of Anne Frank. Franklin writes, “Since it first appeared in the Netherlands more than 75 years ago, Anne – who, if she had survived the camps, would be nearly 100 years old – has become an icon.”

According to Franklin, the diary has sold 30 million copies and “is the most famous work of literature to arise from the Holocaust.” 

Like everyone else who's read the diary, I've had occasion to think about this poor little German girl whose life was cut short. But I've also had the opportunity to reflect on one particular aspect of her story: my author, Edith Bruck, was compared to Anne when her first book came out because it was published a few years after the diary was translated into Italian. Italian critics said Bruck was the kind of writer Anne could have become had she survived.

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. 

A reader can feel as though she knows a lot about Anne Frank without knowing many, many details of her story. Indeed, there are stunning little tidbits about the Frank family that will leave you breathless. For example, while in hiding in a hidden compartment in the building that housed Anne’s father’s company, the family had to keep to a strict schedule of silence since not all the workers knew they were there. Starting at 8 a.m. each day, they could make no noise whatsoever. Then at 12:30, when the workers broke for lunch, those in hiding could use the bathroom, have a bite to eat or talk. At 1:30, they were back to a routine of no noise, no movement, no conversations. 

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.” 

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