Anne Frank and the “What If?”: School of Fiction

Lucy Dawidowicz’s estimable study The War Against the Jews (1975) focuses on the Final Solution, Hitler’s effort to rid the world of Jews. Six million people perished in the genocide that Dawidowicz chronicles in painstaking detail. We are indebted to her scholarship, but at the same time we must realize that the enormity of the Holocaust makes it impossible to see the number of dead both steadily and whole. That is one reason why The Diary of Anne Frank continues to grip the public imagination. As a rite of passage for hundreds of thousands of teenagers who learn about her tragically short life from the printed page, the silver screen, or the Broadway stage, Anne Frank has become, for better or worse, the poster child of the Holocaust.

Not everyone has been happy about this development, and the “diary” has been surrounded by controversy—not only of the sort that once attached itself to slave narratives (Holocaust deniers have insisted that the fifteenyear- old Anne could not have written such a book), but also by those who squabbled that the Anne Frank portrayed on Broadway was too universalized, too sanitized, and that her essential Jewishness had been airbrushed away. After chronicling the various fights about who owns Anne, Cynthia Ozick made this astonishing admission: she would have much preferred that the pages of Anne’s diary, strewn on the floor of her attic hiding place, had been burned rather than discovered. Given the propensity for book-burning in Nazi Germany, Ozick’s declaration is as stark as it is shocking. But, as she weighs the arguments of those who claim to “own” Anne, anonymity seems to her a better choice.

Enter practitioners of the “What if?”—or alternative—school of fiction. They explore parallel universes in which the South wins the Civil War or Lee Harvey Oswald misses his shots from the Dallas Book Depository window. In The Plot Against America (2004) Philip Roth ruminates about what might have happened if the aviator Charles Lindbergh, rather than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had won the presidential election of 1940. The thick novel, filled with fears of what the anti-Semitic Lindbergh might impose on the Jews of Newark, is What if? fiction in its purest form.

With regard to Anne Frank, the What if? school imagines a scenario in which Anne Frank survives the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and appears in America years later. The first notable effort in Anne Frank’s reclamation is Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979). In it the young, extremely talented Nathan Zuckerman (modeled on Roth himself) visits the older, more established writer, E. I. Lonoff (modeled on Bernard Malamud). What Nathan seeks is nothing less than fatherly approval—somebody to tell him that he is a good writer and a good person. Much happens during the tension-filled weekend. The Lonoffs are undergoing a marital crisis, and Zuckerman, being Zuckerman, takes it all in; and later he will presumably write it all down. What I want to concentrate on, however, are the scenes involving Nathan and Lonoff’s fetching research assistant, Amy Bellette. She is a student at the small college where Lonoff teaches. It does not take the imaginative Zuckerman long before he imagines that Amy is Anne Frank, a survivor rather than the martyred Jewish saint.

Roth intends to make two points here: first that his fantasy of marrying Anne Frank would put an end to his mother’s nagging that he date a nice Jewish girl; and second that Anne Frank only has cultural significance by being dead. The power, the very grip, of her diary depends on this.

Anne Frank and What if? fiction are joined again in two recent works: Nathan Englander’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” and Shalom Auslander’s novel, Hope: A Tragedy. Let me begin with...