Spiritual Quote of the Day (Anne Frank, on God and Nature, ‘Solace in All Troubles’)

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”—German-Dutch Holocaust victim Anne Frank (1929-1945), journal entry for Feb. 23, 1944, The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

I took the image accompanying this post—Tappan Memorial Park in Tappan, NY—last October.

Quote of the Day (Anne Frank, on the ‘Upholding of One’s Own Honor and Conscience’)

“People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don’t necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can’t accept, but still a religion, it doesn’t matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn’t the fear of God but the upholding of one’s own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn’t know it must learn and find by experience that: ‘A quiet conscience makes one strong!’” —Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

On an unrecorded date 70 years ago this month, 15-year-old Anne Frank and her older sister Margot died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Before she perished, Anne told childhood friend Nanette Konig, also at the Nazi death camp, that after the war she planned to use her diary entries as the basis for a book.

Anne did not survive, but her diary, of course, did. It is the extraordinary record of a girl moving into adulthood under the most harrowing conditions—and, along the way, developing a powerful conscience. The diary also stands as a rebuke to the forces of intolerance. In her time, they were Nazis; in ours, even in the Europe that once paid dearly for its acquiescence to evil, anti-Semitism continues to spread across national borders.

Anne “would be very happy with all the attention she is getting,” Ms. Konig told an interviewer from London’s The Independent this week. “She always wanted to be seen. She wanted to be heard. She was full of life and this would be right in her, what she would have liked to happen."

This Day in Theater History (“Anne Frank,” With Own Backstage Drama, Wins Pulitzer)

May 7, 1956—When The Diary of Anne Frank was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the play’s stars, director, producer, and, not least of all, its playwrights, were happy. But it could only have further angered a writer who felt that he had been robbed of the chance—no, the right—to the dramatization.

The disappointed man was novelist Meyer Levin, who had proselytized everyone he could think of about the virtues of the diary of teenage Holocaust victim Anne Frank, then about the necessity of spreading her message even beyond book form. Levin was indisputably right that the musings of Frank were universally applicable even to those beyond the Jewish faith.

Unfortunately, material that might have seemed simple at heart—the need for tolerance in a resentful world—also sparked a decade of ego, theatrical power plays, and enough legal wrangling to fill Dickens’ Bleak House.

Levin might be best known today as the author of Compulsion, a roman a clef about the Leopold and Loeb case (later made into a movie with Orson Welles). But that title might also describe Levin’s own overwhelming need to make the world more aware of how Frank and her family hid in an attic in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation before their betrayal.

As a WWII correspondent in Germany, Levin was among the first to witness what had happened at Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Understandably, the experience seared him, leading him to call it “the greatest systematic mass murder in the history of mankind.”

Five years later, Levin discovered a French translation of Anne Frank’s diary—but none in English had been made. In fact, it had been rejected by 15 English and American publishers. Levin wrote to Frank’s father Otto, offering to do the translation himself, if necessary, to promote it, and even to bring it to other media such as stage and screen. (The latter ideas had not even occurred to Frank.) Frank agreed that Levin should be retained as a consultant for the American edition.

Levin’s plugging eventually succeeded in winning a publisher for the book in the U.S.: Doubleday. The success of the book was practically assured because of Levin’s own rave in The New York Times Book Review. Levin’s failure to disclose his own connection to the book constituted a huge conflict of interest, however.

The enormous success of the diary in the U.S. elicited the interest of several well-known theater professionals, including Carson McCullers, Elia Kazan, and Maxwell Anderson. As Levin objected to each one in turn, it became increasingly apparent that the person he thought would do the project the most justice was himself. In fact, he had already written an adaptation.

The producer hired to oversee the play, Cheryl Crawford, rejected his script, then withdrew from the project entirely. Frank’s attorney was likewise annoyed by Levin’s special pleading, and eventually told Frank that Levin had no legal right to the play.

The new producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, pulled together a creative team of director Garson Kanin, playwrights Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and unofficial script doctor Lillian Hellman. As Levin saw himself increasingly sidelined from the project, he became obsessed to the point of almost comical madness. A lawsuit he ended up filing against Frank, for instance, led even Levin’s friend Harry Golden to advise him that this was a public relations disaster akin to suing Joan of Arc’s father. When the suit was set aside on a technicality, Levin still couldn't leave well enough alone, likening his struggle to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a letter sent to Frank.

As vitriolic, overwrought and self-interested as Levin had become, one of his complaints did have a point: the play hatched by Bloomgarden’s creative talent had leeched much of the strongest content from the book. To be sure, the gentile Goodrich and Hackett—more famous for their Hollywood work (It’s a Wonderful Life, Father of the Bride) than their Broadway plays to that point—had consulted with rabbis and Jewish community leaders, even visited the Secret Annex where the Frank family hid from the Nazis, in an effort to be faithful to the source.

But increasingly they were told by their creative partners: make this universal. In essence this meant injecting more comic relief and de-emphasizing Jewish religious observances. By the eighth draft—the one that eventually netted them the Pulitzer—Goodrich and Hackett had reached something suitably life-affirming (“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart”), but they had taken a decisive step away from their decidedly dark source material.

In a provocative New Yorker retrospective on the controversy, critic-novelist Cynthia Ozick objected that the result on the stage now represented such "cheap sentimentality at the expense of a great catastrophe" that it might have been better for the diary to have been burned rather than become distorted to such a degree. Ozick ignores the fact that in the 1950s, before deep understanding of the Holocaust and tolerance had taken root, such “cheap sentimentality” might, unfortunately, have been the only way even to begin to spread general consciousness about the best-known personal account of the Holocaust.

In recent years, theatergoers were more likely to see a production of The Diary of Anne Frank that stayed closer to Levin’s intentions than Hackett and Goodrich’s. The U.S. production of the new version by Wendy Kesselman brought early attention to a young Natalie Portman (just as the initial production shone the spotlight on the luminous Susan Strasberg, in the image accompanying this post). I saw this version (with a different cast) in 2000 at the Stratford Festival in Canada.

Kesselman, like Levin, gave more attention to the Franks’ religious practices in the Secret Annex. Moreover, in working with a definitive edition of the diary published in the 1990s, she brought to light material deleted by Frank either at the request of publishers or because of the instrinsically painful nature of the entries themselves: the teenaged Anne’s budding sexuality and her increasing conflicts with her mother.

What might, in effect, have been seen as partial vindication of Levin came too late for the novelist. He grew increasingly embittered as the play not only won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award but ran for more than 700 performances; as the 1959 film version by George Stevens (that director’s last superior movie) brought additional acclaim; and as the play became an increasing staple of regional and community theaters.

Though he gave up his rights to the play when the suit came to a conclusion in 1959, Levin continued to be agitated by the affair, encouraging bootleg performances of his version and cataloguing his grievances in a memoir entitled, appropriately enough, The Obsession. The whole experience profoundly strained his marriage and relations with his children.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl may pose continuing questions about tolerance, but the backstage drama associated with The Diary of Anne Frank highlights additional questions about assimilation, identity and the right of members of a particular ethnic or racial group to interpret their own experience.

In the early 1990s, Spike Lee succeeded where Levin had failed, wresting rights to Malcolm X after Norman Jewison had originally been associated with the project. How, he asked, could the white Jewison be expected to bring the right perspective to the life of an African-American?

Levin’s case was a bit more complicated in that Frank himself, a Jew well assimilated into German society before the rise of the Nazis, himself wanted his daughter’s story to be seen as “universal.” But Hellman, a key member of the creative team, was a secularized, even anti-Zionist, Jew with little interest in emphasizing the family’s faith.

Kesselman's version, unlike the one Goodrich and Hackett created under the powerful influence of Hellman, at least allows theatergoers to understand what mattered to the Frank family--and why they sacrificed their comfort and (in the case of all but the sole survivor of the death camps, Otto) even their lives to maintain it.

Quote of the Day (Anne Frank, on the Plight of Jews)

"Is discord going to show itself while we are still fighting, is the Jew once again worth less than another? Oh, it is sad, very sad, that once more, for the umpteenth time, the old truth is confirmed: 'What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews.'"—Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

A great crime of the last century was that teenage diarist Anne Frank never had the chance to live to 70 (which she would be today), and achieve the great promise shown by her journals, for reasons that had nothing to do with what she did and everything to do with her religion.

For years, the Anne Frank we learned about in English class, on stage or at the movies was the one who wrote, "I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” But much of that image is sentimentalized, derived less from the diary itself than from its Pulitzer Prize-winning stage adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich.

There was another Anne Frank—sometimes despairing, more often just angry—the kind on display in today’s quote above. Though I’m glad that her daily record of finding her inner voice even amid the cramped quarters of her family’s Holland annex continues to move readers worldwide, I share her anger over the fate of Jews in the modern world.

In the year 2000, I was fortunate enough to attend, at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, a production of The Diary of Anne Frank that was truer to the spirit of the book than the version by Hackett and Goodrich. This revision by Wendy Kesselman included scenes showing the Frank family practicing their faith in private. This acknowledgment of their Judaism would have pleased novelist Meyer Levin, who had fought a losing battle to present them in this fashion over 40 years before that.

A dozen years ago, New Yorker critic Cynthia Ozick offered a thoroughly researched, psychologically acute, and morally probing examination of how the diary was “infantilized, Americanized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly denied.” Aiding Hackett and Goodrich in this process was playwright Lillian Hellman, who persuaded the show’s original producer that Levin’s initial script was subpar.

By the time this trio was finished not only with the play but with the resulting movie, strong references to the Frank family’s faith had been deleted, and Anne Frank—a teenager whose typical teen issues with her mother were multiplied by the stress of daily confinement—had morphed into a mostly “funny, hopeful, happy” girl despite the family difficulties.

Despite his good intentions (he was part of the film crew that visually documented the Allies’ discovery of German death camp atrocities), film director George Stevens, as expert a scene stylist and as decent a human being as ever walked in Hollywood, ultimately did a disservice to the diary, I believe, by accepting the Hackett-Goodrich-Hellman version of the Franks. Without any scene of the family at prayer, America—a country in which freedom to worship as you please is written into the Bill of Rights—might have been forgiving for wondering what the fuss over the German treatment of the Jews was all about.

I’m not going to deny that the diary—and yes, much of the film—resonates at points with its openness to hope. But, if we really believe in the saying “Never again,” we have to recover the forgotten side of Anne Frank, the young woman who flashed with what George Orwell loved about Charles Dickens: a “generous anger” on behalf of the world’s victims.

All day, pondering Anne Frank’s life and death and their meaning for today, I have been angered by the precarious state in which the world’s Jews find themselves now:

* Because many lunatics at home and abroad, ignoring the super-abundant evidence to the contrary, continue to exist that the Holocaust never happened;

* Because these same people, as part of the thriving Holocaust-denial industry, dispute the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and its searing eyewitness testimony about man’s inhumanity to man;

* Because an 88-year-old man with a rifle and a diseased mind burst onto the U.S. Holocaust Museum this week and caused mayhem and murder;

* Because the annual Anti-Defamation League report observed that New Jersey topped the nation last year in anti-semitic hate crimes—and Bergen County, where I live, placed a shamefully high third on the list of counties in the state;

* Because millions in the Moslem world cheered wildly over President Obama’s call for a Palestinian state, but sat on their hands in utter silence during his equally strong insistence that the Holocaust was undeniable and that nothing could weaken America’s ties with Israel;

* Because right now, elections in Iran are far closer than they should be, given the unimpressive economic performance—and outright anti-semitic remarks and saber-rattling—of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad;

* Because for the last 40 years, the Arab world has conveniently cited Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territory as the chief obstacle to peace—while ignoring their own previous, unsuccessful attempt to strangle the young Israeli democracy in its crib, and their continuing refusal even to acknowledge its right to exist;

* Because, while running countless stories about the plight of the homeless Palestinians, the media has seldom, if ever, covered an equally widespread and long-term group of refugees—Jews increasingly forced, over the last 50 years, to move out of Egypt and other majority-Moslem lands because of harassment. (See Lucette Lagnado’s account of her family’s move out of Cairo in 1963);

* Because, for six years after establishing the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip, Yasir Arafat did nothing—nothing—to improve economic viability and political stability in that region, and everything to exploit continuing tensions with Israel—including the 2000 intifada that derailed the peace process.

* Because Arab princes, educated in and financially supported by the West, know that Jews are nothing like the caricatures created by the fundamentalist elements of Islam, but have done nothing to counteract the rise of anti-semitism in their countries’ textbooks, mass media and mosques.

* Because to this day, there has been no equivalent of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, John Paul II or John Hume to lead a mass nonviolent protest against prejudice and injustice in Arab lands.

Anne Frank, her mother and sister died because a gang of criminals and fanatics conspired to engineer the mass murder of Jews, while the West did nowhere near enough to quarantine those who spread the virus of hatred (and all too often abetted it). I can understand perfectly well why this teenager felt frustration and anger over the different yardsticks used to measure the morality of individual Christians and Jews.

For that reason, every one of us in the West bears some responsibility for the fate of Jews in the modern world—from the statesmen who must devise arrangements to ensure freedom from fear for Israelis, down to those like myself who write, who owe it to Anne Frank to express our outrage over the continuing practice and spread of anti-Semitism.