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 Gross
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