She had me from the start, this Margot Frank, older sister of Anne Frank, also known as Margie Franklin, this woman of Jillian Cantor's imagination. All that she thought and did, I believed.
Margot is a tender reimagining--what if Anne Frank's sister had escaped, had jumped from the train going from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, and was living in Philadelphia, hiding her identity--a reimagining that reawakens a universally felt heartache even now when we know all. That is, we know the facts, or we think we do, but the terrain beneath the tattooed skin that lies along the heart, the enormous effort of fashioning lies upon lies in order to keep her equilibrium, can be supplied to us only in carefully wrought fiction.
Reading this novel is like peeling away layers of imagination, first of Jillian Cantor's rendering of the history, as much as it is known, then of Margie's imagination of Peter, of what was or was not said, and her unsure yet haunting memory of Anne and what unspeakable thing actually happened on that train, and finally, of her deepening feeling for her employer, Joshua Rosenstein, junior partner in a Jewish law firm. History and story are blurred at times as subtlety moves into intensity, dreams into reality; for moments we may feel awash and ungrounded, in the years in the Secret Annex, the secrecy of the concentration camp, and the life of a secretary with a secret, suffering survivor's guilt, but wouldn't that drift rightly be the way that Margot/Margie would feel at times? Cantor has deftly, purposefully, put us in that realm. The narrative is judiciously paced, making sure that we readers are in Margie's mind every step of the way toward the final, satisfying conclusion.
I am deeply impressed by the sincerity of Jillian Cantor, and the soundness of her motivation to get us to revisit the life of the Frank sisters, icons now, both of them.
Released today, 9/3/2013