Of the 1950 German translation that omitted anti-German references, Prose writes coolly: “This reluctance to offend readers in a country whose leaders had murdered the book’s author was one gauge of the speed at which the diary had already become a commodity that the public might, or might not, choose to buy.” In dealing with stage and screen versions of Anne’s story, Prose tracks the attempts to make the story happier, fluffier, more dramatic and more “universal.” As she puts it, “The adorable was emphasized at the expense of the human, the particular was replaced by the so-called universal, and universal was interpreted to mean American — or in any case, not Jewish” for all kinds of reasons, not least of them commercial ones.
As she provides her blow-by-blow account of the denaturing of the Anne Frank story, Prose remains impressively fair. She believes the book to be a masterpiece written by a complicated artist who died too young. But she by no means clings to the idea that every word of its text should be inviolable, and she recognizes the occasional improvements that were made. The deletion of a 13-year-old girl’s “bubbly longueurs,” she says, must be seen as an improvement even by Anne’s most devoted fans.
This seemingly narrow work is an impressively far-reaching critical monograph, an elegant study both edifying and entertaining. In a book full of keen observations and fascinating disputes (the craziest of which involves Meyer Levin, who had no qualms about both reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review and trying to act as its agent), Prose looks in all directions to find noteworthy material. And when she writes of how Anne’s diary, which according to a 1996 survey was at one point required reading for 50 percent of schoolchildren in the US, keeps on finding its way “onto the desks of teachers who discover that the book most certainly does not, as they say, teach itself,” she underscores the importance of keen analysis. This is a Grade A example of what a smart, precise and impassioned teacher can do.
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