Anne Frank Read Free Page A

a diary—a journal in which events are recorded as they occur, day by day—but rather a memoir in the form of diary entries. The translator of the Definitive Edition, Mirjam Pressler, has written one of the few books that acknowledges the importance of Anne’s revisions. Published in English as Anne Frank: A Hidden Life, and, oddly, targeted at a young-adult readership, Pressler’s bookmixes biographical information, a meditation about Anne and the others in the annex, and illuminating comparisons between the original diary and the version Anne rewrote. “The Diary of a Young Girl is not a diary kept in chronological order from beginning to end as one might expect. The main part of the book consists of the second version of Anne’s original diary, revised with additions by Anne herself, with some stories from the account book in which she also wrote.”
    Judith Thurman got it right, as few have, when she questioned even calling the book, as Anne’s American publishers did, The Diary of a Young Girl. “That ingenuous title corresponds to what is in fact an epistolary autobiography of exceptional caliber. It takes the full measure of a complex, evolving character. It has the shape and drama of literature. It was scrupulously revised by its author, who intended it to be read. It is certainly not a piece of ‘found art,’ as one Dutch critic has suggested.”
    One can understand Doubleday’s belief that The Diary of a Young Girl was a catchier title than The House Behind. Though Anne Frank imagined Het Achterhuis as a novel in the form of a journal, it has come down to us as a diary. In The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth—who, as a fellow novelist, would be naturally sensitive to a writer’s prerogative to call her book what she wants—refers to Anne’s book only as Het Achterhuis, and to the Broadway play by its name, The Diary of Anne Frank.
     
    D ESPITE Anne’s initial misgivings, the revision of Het Achterhuis went very quickly. Correlating the penmanship of the loose sheets against that of the notebooks, the forensic handwriting analysts later employed by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation concluded that “if we take May 20, 1944, as the starting date (on the basis of the comment in part 3) and August 1, 1944, as the date of the last entry, then the average dailyentry would run to from 4 to 5 pages a day. These must have been written in addition to the entries in the diary, part 3…. It appears that the writer worked more intensely on the loose sheets, particularly in the period between July 15 and August 1, 1944. During that period, 162 pages were completed, or about 11 pages a day.”
    Working at this astonishing rate, Anne rewrote her early draft in the weeks before her arrest, making major and minor changes. Like any memoirist fearing hurt feelings, or accusations of misrepresentation, she made a list of pseudonyms for the Jews and their helpers. The Frank family would become the Robins, the Van Pelses would be called the Van Daans, while the dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, would appear in the book as Albert Dussel. Perhaps for fluency, she continued to use the real names when she wrote her second draft.
    “I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know how wonderful it is.” By the time she made her final entry, on August 1, 1944, she had revised the passages that preceded the March radio broadcast and kept the diary up to date in an unrevised first draft.
    After the war, when Otto Frank read over his daughter’s work and became convinced that she’d meant it to be published, he prepared a version of the book that combined passages from Anne’s first draft and from her revisions, in some cases using earlier versions of passages that she had subsequently revised. All in all, Otto Frank did an admirable job of editing—omitting needless details, choosing between alternate versions of events, preserving