Remembering Anne Frank, artist
She would have been 75 today, this talented writer who died in a concentration camp at 16.
By Carlin Romano
INQUIRER BOOK CRITIC
 

I mentioned recently to a colleague that today, June 12, would be a particularly brutal literary anniversary.

The 75th birthday of Anne Frank. The talented young Jewish writer - hidden in a "Secret Annex" near her father's Amsterdam office during World War II and then betrayed to the SS - whose diary from her 25 months in hiding remains the single most widely read document of the Nazi war against the Jews.

Still, after all these years, the most internationally recognized face of the Holocaust.

Only 75. The age of many a spry mah-jongg player down at the local pool. The age, give or take a few months, of America's oldest teenager, Dick Clark. Eighteen years younger than Ronald Reagan at his death.

"Funny," my colleague replied in the crackling black humor of office repartee, "she doesn't look a day over 16."

Tasteless, of course. Incorrect. Just a line, not a sentiment, since both of us tip over to the "kill all Nazis first" side of things. But trenchant.

Because isn't that the harsh truth?

Changes in appearance, the confusions of a long life, simply don't apply to Anne Frank. She didn't get the chance to live many lives, to try new careers, to experience different loves.

Frank particularly resonates and disturbs because when you compute the "tragedy index" - the age (16) at which she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the magnitude of her achievement as author of one of the world's most read "great books" (translated into almost 70 languages), the enduring optimism of her temperament - her case eclipses others.

In every field, the gifted sometimes die young, and draw special fervor.  Pilgrims to the Paris grave of the Doors' Jim Morrison would not still leave flowers by his headstone if he'd ended up doing an Atlantic City lounge act.

John Kennedy Jr., Sylvia Plath, Princess Diana - all shook up their admirers by dying too soon, yet all received far more than the allotment of years permitted to Frank.

Attention, of course, is being paid. In Amsterdam, "Photographs of Otto Frank," her father, goes on display today until Sept. 12. Another photo exhibit at Kraushaar Galleries in New York City continues through July 30. The Anne Frank House, as always, will draw thousands of visitors.

For those who would revisit Frank and her story more privately, perhaps in a not-too-comfortable chair, there is Anchor's "Definitive Edition" of The Diary of a Young Girl ($12.95), which adds 30 percent more material to the original 1947 edition. As many now know, Otto Frank excised passages that included her unflattering comments about her mother, and her thoughts on sex.

But if you're inclined to take a little more time to think about her, find a copy of a more expensive book: The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (Doubleday, $75), edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom.

The only full collection of her writings, it includes three versions of her diary; the new pages that came to light in 1998; her unfinished novel, Cady's Life; Tales From the Secret Annex, short stories, fables and reminiscences; and the latest research about her life.

"I hear the approaching thunder," Frank famously wrote at the end of her diary, "that one day, will destroy us too."

It did come and take her, but now she is 75, and she is still with us.