Synopses & Reviews
Anne Frank's
Diary has been acclaimed throughout the world as an indelible portrait of a gifted girl and as a remarkable document of the Holocaust. For Meyer Levin, the respected writer who helped bring the
Diary to an American audience, the Jewish girl's moving story became a thirty-year obsession that altered his life and brought him heartbreaking sorrow.
Lawrence Graver's fascinating account of Meyer Levin's ordeal is a story within a story. What began as a warm collaboration between Levin and Anne's father, Otto Frank, turned into a notorious dispute that lasted several decades and included litigation and public scandal. Behind this story is another: one man's struggle with himselfas a Jew and as a writerin postwar America. Looming over both stories is the shadow of the Holocaust and its persistent, complex presence in our lives.
Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants. It illuminates important areas of American culture: publishing, law, religion, politics, and the popular media. The "Red Scare," anti-McCarthyism, and the commercial imperatives of Broadway are all players in this book, along with the assimilationist mood among many Jews and the simplistic pieties of American society in the 1950s.
Graver also examines the different and often conflicting ways that people the world over, Jewish and Gentile, wanted Anne Frank and her much-loved book to be represented. That her afterlife has in extraordinary ways taken on the shape and implications of myth makes Graver's storyand Meyer Levin'seven more compelling.
Synopsis
Anne Frank's Diary has been acclaimed throughout the world as a remarkable portrait of a gifted girl and as an indelible document of the Holocaust. For Meyer Levin, the respected writer who helped bring the Diary to an American audience, it became a thirty-year obsession that completely altered his life and brought him heart-breaking sorrow.
Synopsis
"Lawrence Graver's book is a precise and generous account of dreadful obsession, in which deep issues are reduced by paranoia into misery all aroundand work for many lawyers. It's sad, true to my knowledge of Meyer Levin and others enmeshed in the historyinfinitely sad."Herbert Gold, author of
Fathers"Beautifully and poignantly told, this story holds a mirror up to American Jewry's own coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is by turns captivating and heartbreaking, the story of both Levin's obsession and his search for Jewish and American identity after the Holocaust. In this literary history, Lawrence Graver also reanimates the diary itself, returning it to the time and place from which it was torn fifty years ago."James Young, author of Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust and TheTexture of Memory
"A gripping account, easy to read in one or two sittings, hard to put down. The balance between sympathy for Levin and criticism of his mounting obsession is exquisitely established and beautifully maintained, culminating in remarkable insight."Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden
"Beyond Anne Frank is so beautiful and thoughtfully written that I really couldn't put it down. Diane Wolf's voice is human and humanistic, without glossing over any painful realities. She probes the subject from an impressive array of angles, considering a wide variety of types of experiences. This book is extraordinarily fine and I enthusiastically recommend it."Lynn Davidman, author of Motherloss
About the Author
Lawrence Graver is Professor of English at Williams College. He is the author of Conrad's Short Fiction (1969), Carson McCullers (1969), Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1979), and Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1989).