If not for Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, I might never have gotten around to reading Diary of a Young Girl, aka The Diary of Anne Frank.
Roth’s novel is set in 1955, and Anne Frank figures in as a character – miraculously, but not implausibly, having survived the horror of Nazi concentration camps, and deliberately living in anonymity in the United States.
Or is it Anne Frank?
The Ghost Writer is the first of Roth’s Zuckerman novels, and it totally knocks me out – as much now as the first time I read it six or seven years ago. It centers on the young Nathan Zuckerman and a quarrel within the Zuckerman household: Nathan has used an old family dispute as the source for one of his short stories. The dispute involved a fight over money, and Nathan’s mortified parents conclude, or at least strongly suspect, that their son is a self-hating Jew.
Actually, that’s mostly backstory. The novel proper begins with Nathan as the invited guest at the home of his literary idol, one E.I. Lonoff. Nathan, in the wake of his family feud, sent Lonoff his story and “had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E.I. Lonoff’s spiritual son.”
At the Lonoff home he meets a young woman named Amy Bellette, and in a flight of fancy begins to think she is, in fact, Anne Frank. The reader, too, is permitted to think this. The circumstances of Anne’s miraculous survival, and her discovery years later that her diary (Het Achterhuis in the original Dutch) has not only been published but become an international sensation, are described in excruciating detail, as are her reasons for choosing anonymity.
Nathan observes:
How could even the most obtuse of the ordinary ignore what had been done to the Jews just for being Jews, how could even the most benighted of the Gentiles fail to get the idea when they read in Het Achterhuis that once a year the Franks sang a harmless Chanukah song, said some Hebrew words, lighted some candles, exchanged some presents – a ceremony lasting about ten minutes – and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing – that was the horror. And that was the truth. And that was the power of her book.
Soon enough, Nathan falls in love with Amy/Anne and imagines marrying her. What better way to prove you’re not a self-hating Jew? Here’s my new bride, Anne Frank!
The Ghost Writer is, by turns, hilarious and harrowing. (About the only thing I don’t like is a casual, almost throwaway line, “when Oswald shot Kennedy” – regrettable, and beneath a writer as smart as Philip Roth.)
So after first reading The Ghost Writer, I at long last turned to the famous diary. Hard to believe I went so long without reading it.
Maybe I’d never read it, but I knew the story: who doesn’t? I knew the grim outcome. That outcome is in sharp contrast to certain other elements of the diary, in particular the elfin-like names of its principals: Pim and Miep and Bep, and of course Kitty.
And yet I did not get hooked right away. For one thing, I discovered a “definitive edition” of the diary and began comparing passages between it and the version I had started with, which was a well-worn mass market paperback – the version everyone probably starts with. Eventually I set them both down. Soon they were due at the library. Then overdue. I returned them and paid the fines.
Eventually I got back to it, but got sidetracked again – this time by The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, a thick volume containing three versions of the famous diary and a lot of related material. Began plowing through them simultaneously.
A section of The Critical Edition called “The Betrayal” really intrigued me. A lingering question is how the Franks were discovered by the Nazis. There is nothing definitive, but suspicion centers on a man named W.G. van Maaren, who apparently worked for the Frank business starting in 1943, when the family was already in hiding.
According to the critical edition, van Maaren grew suspicious about what might be going on at night, in the building where the Franks hid. He set little traps he thought might reveal people were hiding, like dusting the floor with flour, which he hoped would reveal footprints should those hiding emerge after hours.
Did he betray his employer and his family in exchange for a bounty? Van Maaren was grilled about this more than once after the war but never admitted to anything. Nothing was ever proven. He died in Amsterdam in 1971.
I think it is fairly well known that Nathan Zuckerman was Philip Roth’s alter-ego. Roth was himself attacked as a self-hating Jew, after publication of Goodbye Columbus in 1959. I won’t weigh in on that, but I will say that Roth wrote with great power – not just fictionalized accounts of Nazi outrages, but anti-Semitism in particular.
Philip Roth died in May 2018. The Ghost Writer was published in 1979. Did Nathan become Lonoff’s spiritual son? I will not say. But I’ll add that Roth revisited parts of The Ghost Writer a few years ago, in his novel Exit Ghost; I consider it a companion piece.
