An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary Book

An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary, by Lawrence Graver, is a work of disciplined, erudite storytelling about Meyer Levin's messy, passionate obsession with The Diary of Anne Frank. Levin, an American novelist and journalist, was among the figures instrumental in publishing and publicizing The Diary of Anne Frank in the United States. His 1952 review of the Diary in The New York Times raved, "Anne Frank's voice becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls." Thanks in no small part to Levin's work, his proclamation came true: Anne Frank became one of the most famous figures in the world, an icon of the devastation of the Holocaust. Levin, by contrast, descended into a paralyzing and terminal despair when his attempts to become a central guardian of Anne Frank's legacy were rebuffed by Anne's father, Otto Frank. Most dramatically, Levin fought a bitter court battle when he felt he was cheated out of the opportunity to adapt Anne Frank's book for the stage, and was replaced by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, a more famous, more optimistic, and non-Jewish team of playwrights. Graver describes Levin's obsession with detailed attention to the role of popular culture in defining Jewish identity, and the ways that Anne Frank was and is still being politicized by Jews and gentiles around the world. In his characteristically spare, lucid style, Graver writes in the final chapter that "[Levin's] history testifies to the enormous difficulty, if not the impossibility, of finding an authentic way to bear witness to the Holocaust in a society governed by money, popular taste, media hype, democratic optimism, and a susceptibility to easy consolation." --Michael Joseph GrossRead More

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  • Product Description

    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 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 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 story--and Meyer Levin's--even more compelling.

  • 0520212207
  • 9780520212206
  • Lawrence Graver
  • 18 September 1997
  • University of California Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 238
  • New edition
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