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Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants.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.

From the Inside Flap
"Lawrence Graver's book is a precise and generous account of dreadful obsession, in which deep issues are reduced by paranoia into misery all around--and work for many lawyers. It's sad, true to my knowledge of Meyer Levin and others enmeshed in the history--infinitely sad."--Herbert Gold, author of Fathers

"Beautifully and poignantly told, this story holds a mirror up to American Jewry's own coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is by turns captivating and heartbreaking, the story of both Levin's obsession and his search for Jewish and American identity after the Holocaust. In this literary history, Lawrence Graver also reanimates the diary itself, returning it to the time and place from which it was torn fifty years ago."--James Young, author of Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust and TheTexture of Memory

"A gripping account, easy to read in one or two sittings, hard to put down. The balance between sympathy for Levin and criticism of his mounting obsession is exquisitely established and beautifully maintained, culminating in remarkable insight."--Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden

"Beyond Anne Frank is so beautiful and thoughtfully written that I really couldn't put it down. Diane Wolf's voice is human and humanistic, without glossing over any painful realities. She probes the subject from an impressive array of angles, considering a wide variety of types of experiences. This book is extraordinarily fine and I enthusiastically recommend it."--Lynn Davidman, author of Motherloss

Read An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary Online

Paperback: 238 pages
Author: Lawrence Graver
Publisher: University of California Press (September 18, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520212207
ISBN-13: 978-0520212206

1  "Some day A Teller Would Arise"
2  The Old Jewish Question
3  Levin's Anne Frank
4  The Fanatic, Anne Frank in Israel, and the Obsession
5  Don Quixote and the Star of David

About the Author
Lawrence Graver is Professor of English at Williams College. He is the author of Conrad's Short Fiction (1969), Carson McCullers (1969), Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1979), and Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1989).

About Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June, 1929 – early March 1945) was a Jewish girl born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany. She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933 after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the occupation of the Netherlands, which began in 1940. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building.

After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Seven months after her arrest, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, within days of the death of her sister, Margot Frank. Her father Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. It has been translated into many languages, has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films. Anne Frank has been acknowledged for the quality of her writing, and has become one of the most renowned and most discussed victims of the Holocaust. (Wikipedia.org)

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