An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary

by Lawrence Graver

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 one man's struggle with himself—as a Jew and as a writer—in 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Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants.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 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 story—and Meyer Levin's—even more compelling.

Genres: Holocaust, History, Biography

254 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 1995

About the author

Lawrence Stanley Graver was a distinguished scholar and beloved professor of English at Williams College, noted for his work on 19th- and 20th-century English and American literature, contemporary fiction, drama, and American Jewish literature. A veteran of the Korean Conflict, he earned his B.A. at City College of New York and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met his wife, Suzanne Levy. Graver contributed widely to public literary discourse, including influential reviews in the New York Times Book Review, and authored acclaimed books on Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Frank, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Carson McCullers. Renowned for his wit, insight, and generosity, he shaped generations of students and was cherished as a teacher, scholar, husband, father, and grandfather.

Reviews

[Cynthia Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just saw Compulsion with Mandy Patinkin at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, which prompted me to seek this book.