Anne Frank's Reading
1988; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.0265
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoAnne Frank's Reading Sylvia Patterson Iskander (bio) Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl unfolds the story of a sensitive teenager in the throes of transition to womanhood, reveals an intimate portrait of eight people hiding in Amsterdam during World War II, fearful for their very lives, and offers a glimpse of some sincere, faithful Dutch men and women willing to risk their lives to aid their Jewish friends living in what Anne called het achterhuis or the "secret annex." Miep Gies (pseudonym Miep Van Santen), perhaps the greatest source of comfort, supplies, and business assistance to the group in hiding had the foresight to save the orange plaid-covered diary and Anne's later papers, a revision of her work with an eye to publication, all of which were tossed in [End Page 137] disarray from Mr. Frank's briefcase on that fateful day of 4 August 1944 when the Green Police stormed into the annex, removed the occupants, and confiscated everything they believed to be of value. Miep's own account, published in 1986, of those war-torn years when death and starvation were the norm, complements Anne's diary and in a sense completes the unfinished journal. Miep tells of gathering the diary, storing it unread in her desk, hoping to return it to Anne one day,1 and of her husband Henk retrieving the library books, among others, from the annex the day their friends were arrested (198-99). Miep later presented the diary to Mr. Frank, the only survivor from the secret annex. Concerned for his daughter's memory and the privacy of others still living, Frank at first refused to publish the manuscript, but later reversed his decision when friends prevailed upon him because of the uniqueness of its account of the war from the perspective of a young girl. The Diary soon became a great success (Gies 247). Upon his death in 1980, Otto Frank willed all his daughter's papers to the Dutch National Institute for War Documentation. The complete, unexpurgated Diary, now available in Dutch, will be published in English for the first time by Doubleday in the fall of 1988. Undoubtedly, it will reveal more of Anneliese Marie Frank's autobiographical talent, a product of her education and learning experiences which resulted in large measure from her reading, both for recreational and for study purposes. I have used both versions currently available to trace Anne's reading, as well as Brinkman's Catalogue to verify which books or editions were in print in Holland prior to 1945. On 11 July 1943, almost a year to the day after the family entered their hiding place in the unused laboratory and storehouse of Mr. Frank's office, Anne writes to Kitty, her fictional diary correspondent: "Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements" (97). Reading relieved the long hours of silence imposed on the Franks, the Van Daans, and Mr. Dussel for fear of being overheard by employees carrying on their daily business in the front of the house on the Prinsengracht Canal. Since the group frequently read the same books, they could discuss them in the evenings and late afternoons when, according to Anne, they "pass the time in all sorts of crazy ways: asking riddles, physical training in the dark, talking English and French, criticizing books" (66). Anne often discusses books with sixteen year old Peter Van Daan in their solitary talks in the attic room, and Otto Frank frequently reads aloud to the children from Dickens and from plays by Goethe and Schiller, such as Don Carlos. Mr. Frank's emphasis on books is attested to by his request that Anne and her sister, Margot, keep a card file of titles and authors of books which they read. Anne compares the residents of the secret annex to little children receiving a present when new books arrive on Saturdays, brought by friends and employees of Mr. Frank's firm, for whom Anne invented the pseudonyms of Mr. Koophuis, Mr. Kraler, and Miep and Henk Van Santen. Some books are gifts for birthdays and other...
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