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I received this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program. The book was published in February and I, of course, shelved the book until long after the publication data. I am apparently not that great at reading advanced review copies.
There’s something almost magical about this book. With Hitler’s army barring down on them, the residents of a remote Jewish village in Romania decide to reset the world and start over from the beginning. Relationships are reset; our narrator, an eleven-year-old girl, is reassign to another family to be their daughter, to be their baby. Genesis begins anew. For a while the dream manages to sustain them. The young girl grows up and becomes a wife and mother. Yet like all good dreams, the residents are forced to wake up and face the new world, and the younger mother must flee to save herself, her children, and her husband.
The same magic surrounding this book is what keeps the reader so distant. This new world is built for the eleven-year-old girl, for her aunt and uncle, for her parents and neighbors. It is not for the reader and while I always felt that sense of magic surrounding me, I never could catch hold of these characters.
This is especially true after Lena and the others go one the run. I lost track of them, lost my footing along the way. The psychological damage inflicted on Lena, our narrator, even before the war warps her perception of reality. An eleven-year-old forced to be a baby? A twelve-year-old who marries and becomes a mother? She’s wrapped up in her own naivety because she’s still a child.
Yet all the characters have a warped perception, all of them are naive, and it’s hard to keep track of people who are referred to by their occupation rather than names or personalities. The book is foggy. The end is bittersweet.
Book Mentioned:
- Ausubel, Ramona. No One is Here Except All of Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012. Print. 336 pgs. ISBN: 9781594487941. Source: Advanced review copy.
Don’t make the same mistake I did; this is not the graphic version of Frank’s diary. Rather the book is a graphic biography starting with her father, Otto, serving in World War II and ending with Otto’s death in Switzerland in 1980. When the book does follow along with the diary, it steps back to provide the broader historical context of what was occurring outside the annex.
The illustrations themselves are interesting as they change throughout the novel. Some are translated from pictures of the Frank family and their friends while others are drawn from text when available or the authors own imaginations. Those copied from pictures are grainier and fuzzier than those Jacobson and Colón thought up for themselves. The graphics illustrating the horrors of the Holocaust accurately reflected the differences in the camps and showed the progression of Anne and Margot’s deteriorating health.
Some of the paneling for this graphic biography did not flow properly. There were parts where the dialog straddled two panels but was interrupted by more dialog within the panels. And in other sections were the dialog was written over multiple boxes, I wasn’t sure what the correct order to read the book in was. Some of the dialog seemed misplaced and I would occasionally end up reading it out of order.
However, the book does not replace Frank’s diary and is simply a new way to experience the story of Anne Frank. Many of her poignant observations are not included in this graphic biography. But the historical context does add new depth to the Frank family’s story that people may not know when they start the original diary. The reader is able to understand how and why the Nazi party rose to power and why Frank and her family moved into the annex, which is something I find is lacking for those who use Frank’s diary as the basis of their knowledge on the Holocaust.
Book Mentioned:
- Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón. Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print. 160 pgs. ISBN: 9780809026845. Source: Library.
Although I’ve taken two classes and read more than three dozen books on the subject, I have never read the diary of the most famous victim of the Holocaust. I’ve seen the movie version of her diary several times, and Frank is a constant source of discussion in my two classes. But her diary was never assigned reading for me (unlike most people, it seems), and my professors seem to seek out the journals, diaries, and memoirs of lesser known victims (probably because they assume I have read it).
The diary covers Frank receiving the diary on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942 through their time in hiding in the “Secret Annexe” to August 1, 1944, right before her family and the people hiding with them were betrayed to the Gestapo.
“It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I — nor for that matter anyone else — will be interested in the unbosoming of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.” (pg. 2)
The most surprising aspect of Frank’s diary was the muted role Miep Gies seems to play out in the diary. This is not meant to disparage her role, and we have her to thank for preserving Frank’s diary until her father, Otto, returned. But one particular young woman, Elli Vossen, was a constant source of entertainment and support for Frank while in hiding. Yet, I’ve never even heard of Vossen and she has never taken center stage (in terms of the hiders) in any adaptation of the diary I’ve seen.
There are moments when the reader is reminded that this just a young girl concerned about boys and school work and movie stars, and then there are other moments when she sounds so incredibly mature and insightful. There are also moments that made my stomach clinch. For example, on page 117 in my edition, Frank is discussing the cremation of her pen and remarks that is “just what I want later”. I just felt sick after reading that small sentence. And I wonder, if she had lived, would she cringe at the things she wrote about her family, particularly her mother?
The diary was edited by Otto Frank; pages were removed including ones in which “Anne picks apart her parents’ strained marriage, analyzes her own difficult relations with her mother, Edith, and vows to keep the diary out of her family’s hands as ”none of their business”. The pages have since been added back into the diary, but my edition was published in 1993 and I missed these 2007 additions.
The diary also paints a very atypical existance in hiding, which I think most readers of this diary do not realize. Even those lucky enough to be in hiding were not as luck as Frank’s family when it came to space, food, education, and entertainment. Most families were also unable to hide together unlike the Franks and Van Daans.
Ultimately, though, I did not love Frank’s diary. I really have no great reason why. But I can understand why it is such a widely read account of the Holocaust, and I am glad I read it.
Others’ Thoughts:
Book Mentioned:
- Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated from Dutch by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. Originally published 1947. Print. 283 pgs. ISBN: 0553296981. Source: Purchased.
Subtitled “From Kristallnacht to Liberation”, this book is surprisingly colorful and photographic exploration of life in Berlin, Germany during the reign of the Nazis. The book is divided into ten parts — 1938, emigration, Aryanization, the yellow star, Zionists, forced labor, deportation, betrayal, survival, and Jewish organizations. Stories of individuals and families are used in some instances while other subjects are presented on a large scale.
This collection of essays was one of the more interesting books I read for my class on the Holocaust this semester. While not specifically addressing the issues of rescue and resistance, Jews in Nazi Berlin provides a thorough introduction to the plight of the 153,000 Jews living in Berlin in August 1935.
Why did only 80,000 Jews manage to emigrate from Berlin between 1933 and 1939? Why did countries refuse to allow more Jews into their country? How is the line between collaboration and responsible action on the part of Nazi-established Jewish Councils in the city defined?Why did these councils not forewarn their fellow Jews about what really happened when one was “sent to the East”? How can a Jewish woman willingly and maliciously hand over other Jews?
Although some of the information was a repeat of what I already know about Berlin Jews, I particularly enjoyed reading about how some of the more difficult questions (see last three above) about the Holocaust are answered. The personal experiences highlighted in the book also made for interesting reads. The part about Stella Kübler Isaaksohn was fascinating!
Book Mentioned:
- Meyer, Beate, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz. Translated from German by Caroline Gay and Miranda Robbins. Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print. 392 pgs. ISBN: 9780226521572. Source: Purchased.
Subtitled “History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome”, Portelli follows the March 24, 1944 massacre of 335 unarmed civilians by the Nazi occupation forces in Rome in retaliation for a partisan attack the day before. The resistance fighters killed 35 Nazis so the Nazis decided to kill ten Italians for each German killed.
With a heavy reliance upon the oral testimonies of the victims’ family, friends, and fellow resistance fighters, Portelli attempts to craft a multi-voiced oral history of the massacre, of its background and its aftermath.
I will confess to knowing little about the Fascist regime in or Nazi occupation of Italy. I was excited to learn more about Italy during this time period, but Portelli’s book just did not do it for me.
There is a wealth of information in this book and it isn’t always the easiest book to read. The interviewee’s testimonies were meant to blend together to paint a complete picture of Italy before, during, and after the war. A picture not clouded by socioeconomic status or gender bias as another book about Italy during the late 1930s and early 1940s I read recently.
But the stories blend too well. It’s really difficult to delineate between the interviewees and I failed to develop a connection with an interviewee. For me, when reading about the Holocaust, an emotional connection is important. At the very least, I want to follow a handful of people so I feel like I really get to know them.
The construction of memory and how it’s shaped by myth is a really interesting subject to me. It’s something I would love to research more and I think this book contributes well to the development of my understanding of how memory is shaped. But I found getting through the book to be really difficult.
Book Mentioned:
- Portelli, Alessandro. The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Originally published 2003. Print. 330 pgs. ISBN: 9781403980083. Source: Purchased.
