The novel, Auslander’s first, is both entertaining and disconcerting and Auslander, a Tablet columnist, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss German tourguides, Palestinian cabdrivers, and the pros and cons of living with hope. (To buy tickets to see Auslander discuss the novel in person on January 25 in San Francisco, click here.) Warning: The interview includes explicit language. [Running time: 20:51.]

At Commentary, Matthew Ackerman has the story exactly right: “The story’s conclusion reveals the gravitational pull the emotional drama of the Holocaust continues to exert on so many Jews, and how hard it remains for so many to find Jewish meaning in anything else.” He adds, “the challenges Jews the world over face are daunting, and it does not appear they can be successfully met without finding a core of Jewish identity that is not based in the European tragedy. We have no choice then but to make it a never forgotten piece of our collective past, but a piece only. Only then will we find the courage to meet the future with confidence and success and stop hiding in closets from imagined terrors.”

Englander’s story is a bit neat (as short stories probably should be) in that the two respective Jewish worldviews represented are Haredim from Israel and seculars from the States. For them, the Holocaust is, as Ackerman puts it, “the only point of strong Jewish connection they all share.” Which means the story does elide the other “strong Jewish connection” that most Jews share: Israel. (The Holocaust is stronger: a Jew can say he feels no affiliation with Israel; he cannot deny that he would have been on Himmler’s figurative list or on one of his many actual ones.) As with the Holocaust, too often, I think, Israel serves as an insubstantial point of connection among Jews rather than as an actually existing place; as a signifier rather than a signified. What we talk about when we talk about Israel is frequently our own pride in being Jewish (which can shade into chauvinism or forced victimhood, twin impostors that are really just the same). The good news is that untangling this need not require a cathartically horrific “game,” but rather the recognition that there many ways to be Jewish, and that being Israeli is only one of them and feeling a certain way about Israel only another.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank [The New Yorker]
This Week in Fiction: Nathan Englander [New Yorker Book Bench]
The Difficulty of Letting Go of the Holocaust [Commentary Contentions]

Today, on the birthday of the inimitable poet Emma Lazarus, we celebrate another young, female writer whose breakout success was quite unexpected—as was her subject matter. Mary Berg, a fifteen-year-old living in Lodz, Poland, when the Germans invaded in fall 1939, began chronicling life as her family fled to Warsaw and the ghetto sprung up around them.

Her diary, first published in 1945 shortly after Berg arrived in New York with her parents and younger sister, might now seem like a fairly common account of Jewish life in Poland during the Holocaust (itself a relatively uncommon experience, but still). However, to American readers in the 1940s, Berg’s reports were otherworldly and completely unfamiliar. Frustrated by her sudden hero status and later deeply conflicted about her success (“We, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other,” she wrote from an internment camp in France, adding, “Had we the right to save ourselves?”), she shunned the spotlight and, in an oddly antithetical ending to her witness-bearing journey, simply disappeared.

In 2008, upon the publication of a new edition of The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, Amy Rosenberg offered further explanation of the diary’s absence from high school curricula. You can probably guess: “Berg’s book fell out of print in the early 1950s,” Rosenberg noted, “right around the time the English-language edition of [Anne] Frank’s diary was issued. (Frank’s has been in print continuously ever since.)”

Read What Happened to Mary Berg?, by Amy Rosenberg

•Four Jewish summer camps in the Poconos have signed contracts with gas companies licensing the environmentally destructive practice known as “fracking.” [Forward]

• Maybe Israel and Turkey can make up over their shared love of circumcision. [JPost]

• The World Conference of Science Journalists was held in Doha, Qatar. So clearly there had to be controversy about a U.S.-Israeli citizen appearing on a panel. [Science Insider]

• Andrew Silow-Carroll takes up one of my biggest pet peeves: Namely, writers who turn the nouns bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah into verbs. We don’t do that, thank you (and yes I’m sure I have at some point). [Just ASC]

• Ten Bastille Day articles from the Forverts. My favorite is Abraham Cahan’s. [Forward]

A Tennessee-based sculptor wants part of the fallen Anne Frank tree. He hopes to use it to create the second-most beautiful artistic monument to Anne Frank ever.

But Rosenzweig’s job, and that of his halal counterpart, are now on the line: Last week, the lower house of the parliament overwhelmingly voted to ban ritual slaughter, by a margin of 116 to 30. (The upper house still must approve the legislation before it becomes law.) A majority of Dutch voters say they support the ban, which will be more noticeable in the much larger Muslim community, which numbers more than a million.

On the eve of the vote, members of the Dutch parliament were invited to observe the ritual, an attempt by Rosenzweig’s bosses to show their opponents that their animals don’t suffer. Only one legislator turned up, from the tiny Christian Union party.

Marianne Thieme, leader of the country’s animal-rights party, had no interest in attending. “I don’t want subjective observations,” Thieme says. “I want scientific proof.” Her Party for Animals is small, with only two parliament members, but it managed to galvanize the anti-ritual slaughter on the grounds that it causes unnecessary suffering to animals. If the law goes into effect, it will require that all animals must be stunned, or anesthetized, before they’re slaughtered. Both the kosher laws governing slaughter, or Sh’hitah, and halal laws dictate that animals be fully conscious when killed. “Maybe theirs was the best way to slaughter 3,000 years ago, but not now,” says Thieme.

“It’s depressing,” says Binyomin Jacobs, chief rabbi of the Netherlands, pointing out that one of the first laws enacted by the Nazis in 1940 closed ritual slaughterhouses. (Seventy percent of Holland’s Jews were killed during World War II, including Rosenzweig’s grandfather, who was also a shochet.)

“Religion in a secular country is easy to attack,” says Ronnie Eisenmann, head of the board of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam. “If you say Jews and Muslims do medieval things, then of course people are against it.” And Muslim leaders agree. “Besides the direct and irreversible restriction of freedom of belief, the fate of two world religions is totally left to officials, scientists, veterinarians, and owners of slaughterhouses,” the Contact Committee for Muslims and Government, a liaison group, said in a statement.

The law, as passed, does include one potential loophole: If it can be proven that animals who are slaughtered by kosher or halal ritual feel no more pain than animals who are stunned, then ritual slaughter could continue. “But how can you prove that?” asks Jacobs. He said that kosher slaughter respects animals, not only during the kill, but before: Animals can’t be wounded while transported (or else the meat is unusable), and they go one by one to the slaughter (they’re not allowed to see the animal in front of them get killed).

Ritual slaughterers receive an extensive education, training for several years under a master and requiring certification. “Motty had 10 years of training before becoming a slaughterer,” says David Serphos, the former director of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam. “He studied for two years how to sharpen his knife before getting near a chicken.”

“The knife used is sharp and smooth so the cut itself does not cause any pain,” Rosenzweig says. “The blood pressure immediately drops, and in a few seconds the animal is unconscious.” He is proud of his family’s shochet roots in the Netherlands, but he already works several days a week in Belgium and France; he thinks his professional days in his hometown are numbered. “The feeling I get here is, ‘Do it our way or leave,’ ” he says.

In recent years, the Netherlands, like many European countries, has seen a major influx of Muslim immigrants, and this influx has at times led to tensions. But Thieme says that her party’s concern is for the well-being of animals, not against religion. “The freedom of religion is not unrestricted,” she says. Roos Vonk, a professor of psychology at Radboud University, recalls being a member of an animal rights group in the early 1980s; its members considered taking on ritual slaughter but didn’t dare. “It was impossible then to say anything against Muslims and minorities,” Vonk says. “The whole of Holland would roll over you. We didn’t want to appear racist. But that was before Pim Fortuyn”—the right-wing populist who rose to prominence a decade ago on his anti-Muslim positions. (He was murdered during the 2002 election campaign.)

In the week leading up to the ritual-slaughter vote, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared multiculturalism dead, his Cabinet announced plans to cut funding for programs aiding immigrants (a move that three-quarters of the Dutch say they support), and the popular anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders was acquitted on charges of inciting racial hatred for comparing the Quran to Mein Kampf, among other things. The country once thought of as among the most liberal and tolerant in the world is now known for its increasingly conservative and populist mindset.

“I sympathize with anyone trying to make sense of the emotional state of this country’s population,” says Tom Eijsbouts, professor of law at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. “People seek certainty in the extremes.” He views the ritual-slaughter ban as a misguided attempt by the Dutch public to deal with its discomfort over the mass production of animals. “It seems to me that the bad feelings have been diverted to a non-essential aesthetic issue of slaughter without stunning,” he says. And the Netherlands is not alone; Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Switzerland have banned ritual slaughter, too.

Marcus Butchers, the only kosher butcher shop in Amsterdam, is located in the south of the city. It’s a stone’s throw from the house on Merwedeplein where Anne Frank and her family lived before they went into hiding. The store’s manager, Luuk Koole, hopes that the ban won’t pass the senate and become law. If it does, he says he’ll have no choice but to start importing meat. “I’m not so afraid for business,” he says, “but our prices will go up if we have to import.”

A customer, Rabbi Chaim Rodrigues Pereira, was buying kosher sausage and veal for Shabbat. “I don’t think it’s anti-Semitism,” he says of the ban. (He chalks it up to a modern emphasis on animal welfare, which he supports.) “But if they tell us we may not slaughter kosher, they know we’ll go to Belgium, where they’ll have to slaughter more. They want civility in Holland but they don’t care if they do it in Belgium or France.”

If there is an upside to the slaughter saga, it’s that opposition to the ban has brought the Jewish and Muslim communities closer together. “Working together may be a big word, but we are on the same side,” says Ronnie Eisenmann. “In a secular society, the Jewish community has more in common with Muslims than the Dutch—family, special education, circumcision, ritual slaughter. We’re both more conservative.”

Lauren Comiteau has been reporting from the Netherlands for Time, CBS Radio, the CBC, and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications, others since 1996.

CORRECTION, July 11: Anne Frank and her family lived on Merwedeplein before they went into hiding. This error has been corrected.

Barber and Johnson went into hiding in the attic of [agent Mark] Lepselter’s house in New Jersey. “Lep’s Jewish,” says Barber, “and it was like a reverse Anne Frank thing.” (Here is Barber writ small: He has the wit and smarts to make an Anne Frank allusion and the artlessness to liken himself—an adulterer trying to elude gossip columnists—to a Holocaust victim.)

I, for one, am shocked. I mean, a Jewish sports agent???

Tiki Barber Gets Real [SI]

• Somehow made it through the whole week without posting this profile of David Mamet, focusing on his conversion (to conservatism, that is; he remains Jewish—actually, that has a lot to do with it). [The Weekly Standard]

• A guilty verdict was handed down in Israel’s sensational Rose murder case. [NYT]

• IHH, the Turkish group behind the flotillas, condemned the killing of Bin Laden. [Meir Amit]

• Most of those Korean-Jewish babies are being raised Jewish. [Forward]

• If l’affaire DSK has revealed one thing, it is that France no longer has an anti-Semitism problem. [The Daily Beast]

• Anne Frank wedding cards! [Regretsy]

• Sheldon Adelson backs (though not necessarily endorses) Newt Gingrich. [Jewish Week]

Les Lieber is the coolest 99-year-old you or anyone else knows (and to answer your immediate objection, Jacques Barzun is not 99, he is 103).

• The six best Jewish cookbooks. [Saveur]

• Ruth Franklin weighs what it means to consider Anne Frank’s story a universal one, as opposed to a particularly Jewish one. [TNR]

• At a memorial for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—the first Likud PM—Benjamin Netanyahu chastised West Bank settlers that harass Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• The latest This American Life, whose theme is gifts, has much of interest to Tablet Magazine readers, from the reading of an Etgar Keret short story to a tale of an Israeli marijuana sting. [TAL]

• Thirty Jewish Studies faculty members in the University of California system urged the Orange County prosecutor to drop charges against 11 Muslim students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Irvine last year. [JTA]

It occurred to me that two of the three Jewish intellectuals contributing editor Ruth R. Wisse wrote about this week are also two of the three Jewish intellectuals in Zelig’s opening.

On a cool October morning, actress Natalie Portman is wearing a jean jacket and dangling beaded earrings, sipping tea in Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She talks about the difference between Jews in Israel and Jews in Long Island. “I definitely know what being Jewish in Israel means and what being Jewish in America means,” says this 24-year-old, who was born in Israel to an Israeli father, fertility specialist Dr. Avner Hershlag, and an American mother, artist Shelley Hershlag.

They moved to the United States when she was 3, and they return to Israel every year to visit family. Portman, who uses her grandmother’s maiden name professionally, attended Jewish day schools until eighth grade—mostly, she says, because her parents wanted her to keep up her Hebrew. But the Hershlags were not a religious family, nor involved in the local synagogue. “I grew up in the classic American Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.”

I ask her to elaborate. “The people I grew up with on Long Island are wonderful people. But I have friends who grew up in $5 million homes, they all drive BMWs, and the only places they’ve been to outside the United States are the islands in the Caribbean. Which is fine, it’s a choice, and I don’t want to be critical of that. But I am. I think it can definitely be a problem, especially since American Jews are the ones who are in a position—politically and financially—to help other Jews around the world who are facing problems that we can’t conceive of.”

Portman explains why she never felt a pull to be a part of Jewish life in her Syosset neighborhood. “I never liked going to temple on Long Island because it just had that aura of someone’s fake party to me, which always made me uncomfortable. So I never went to temple at home, I never got bat mitzvahed, I just sort of rejected that whole thing; it seemed so tied up with values that I hated. But on the other hand, when I go to Israel, I always want to go to temple on the High Holy Days even if no one in my family is going with me. I’ll fast. One year in Israel, my family went to Jaffa to get pizza on Pesach and I would not do that. You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I like the way that religion is done there.”

As she describes some of her Long Island girlfriends, the slur “JAP” pops into my head and I ask how she feels when someone uses the word. “I mean, I grew up in a Long Island public school that was 60 to 70 percent Jewish and I know what a JAP is,” she says, sipping her tea. “But obviously the word shouldn’t be misused. I wouldn’t want to have stereotypes used in derogatory ways by people outside the Jewish community, but I think it is something from within the community that we need to examine and be self-critical about, because it’s how we’re raising our young people.”

“I had a fashion designer tell me that when I wear a dress of his, it sells out across the country because Jewish girls ‘look to me,’ and Jewish girls are the ones that buy expensive dresses. It made me sort of sad, because I want to be an influence in ways other than by a pretty dress.”

I ask if she’s felt pressure to use her celebrity on behalf of Israeli causes. “I’m very comfortable with that,” she says, “and I’m currently exploring ways to help because I love the country.” She’s recently become more protective of Israel, in part because people around her have become more impatient with it. “I have a very close friend who lately has this European, anti-Israel way of thinking, and it’s very hard for me to have conversations with him. He says, ‘Can’t you be self-critical?’ But it’s hard to be publicly critical. It has to be done in a very delicate, well-thought-out manner. These issues come up at parties and dinners with people who don’t know a lot, and as someone who was born in Israel, you’re put in a position of defending Israel because you know how much is at stake. It’s become a much bigger part of my identity in recent years because it’s become an issue of survival.”

I turn the conversation to her career, asking if she feels some Jewish pride in being considered a Hollywood beauty. “Yeah,” she replies. “The hard thing is that people often don’t associate me with being Jewish. I’m not someone who you look at and say, ‘You’re Jewish.’ People ask me if I’m Spanish, Italian, or even WASPy. So I don’t think I can be representative. But in another way, I think I look very Jewish because all the Jewish girls I grew up with, we all look the same: small, short, skinny, dark hair, dark eyes. Little noses.” She laughs. “So maybe it is time for a new type. I’d like it if people thought I was Jewish-looking.”

She did play an iconic Jew, Anne Frank, on Broadway at the age of 16, and I wonder how personally Portman connected to the character. “Very personally,” she says. “Because my grandparents didn’t talk about those years much, especially my grandfather. His younger brother, who was 14 at the time, was in hiding from the Nazis and couldn’t take it one more day and ran out and was shot in the streets. And his parents were killed at Auschwitz. He was the one I’d always related to in the family. He was sort of the quiet, brilliant man who led Pesach and I would always imagine him or his father in these horrifying humiliating conditions. The humiliation is almost harder for me to imagine than the physical pain.”

When it comes to Portman’s own romantic life, it has obviously been a staple of gossip columns, but she says she’s not necessarily looking for a Jewish husband. “A priority for me is definitely that I’d like to raise my kids Jewish, but the ultimate thing is just to have someone who is a good person and who is a partner.” She says her parents don’t push her one way or another. “My dad always makes this stupid joke with my new boyfriend, who is not Jewish. He says, ‘It’s just a simple operation.’” She laughs. “They’ve always said to me that they mainly want me to be happy and that’s the most important thing, but they’ve also said that if you marry someone with the same religion, it’s one less thing to fight about. But according to that argument, I might as well only date vegetarian guys.”

She doesn’t think it necessarily takes two Jews to maintain Jewish continuity in a family. “I feel the strength to carry that on myself. It’s obviously easier when both parents are in it together, but I don’t necessarily think it has to be.”

Portman says she resists any kind of blind tribalism. “I don’t believe in going along with anything without questioning. I think that’s the basis of Judaism: questioning and skepticism.” She says that for her, basic humanity comes before faith. “To me, the most important concept in Judaism is that you can break any law of Judaism to save a human life. I think that’s the most important thing. Which means to me that humans are more important than Jews are to me. Or than being Jewish is to me.”

Excerpted from Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish by Abigail Pogrebin. Copyright 2005 by Abigail Pogrebin. Used by permission of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

On March 7th, Marc will be moderating a conversation about writing in the third generation since the Holocaust between Nathan Englander (For the Relief of Unbearable Urges), Ruth Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction), and Rinne Groff (Compulsion) as part of a Public Theater forum on “Imagination and Memory: Anne Frank and the Writers Who Followed Her.”

The forum is hosted by actor Michael Stuhlbarg and will feature author Francine Prose discussing her latest book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.

Marc reviewed Franklin’s first book, A Thousand Darknesses, for Tablet in December.

Buy tickets here!

At first I thought the play, which stars Mandy Patinkin and in which Anne Frank is played by a marionette, was aimed at my demographic—Baby Boomers—or older, readers of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Holocaust-worriers, identity-fretters, anti-Semitism seers. I thought it was pitched to people (like me) who had nightmares about the diary as a child.

In fact, I was probably the youngest person in the audience the day I saw Compulsion at the Public Theater, in Manhattan. (The play has already had successful runs at Yale Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.)

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Compulsion also seeks a younger audience, an audience less stuck in a particular way of thinking about these subjects. Groff, who is a founder of Elevator Repair Service, the theatrical collective best known for Gatz, an engaging seven-hour staged reading of The Great Gatsby, seems on the surface hardly interested in the story of Anne Frank that the diary tells—that of a young writer entering adulthood in the shadow of the Holocaust. Nor is she that interested in the story of The Ghost Writer, in which Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman imagines that a woman he meets at the home of his mentor is Anne Frank.

In Compulsion, Anne Frank is a marionette precisely because she is no longer and can never be a girl, because she is an artifact and a symbol. She is more of a cloud than a character.

Groff’s real interest seems to be how the diary destroyed the very man responsible for its success. In Compulsion, this man is Sid Silver, a lightly fictionalized version of Meyer Levin (Patinkin), the writer and puppeteer from Chicago who introduced the diary to America, became obsessed with making a dramatic version of it—with being the diary’s puppeteer, so to speak—and descended into paranoia and madness.

Stylistically, though, Compulsion is of our time. It owes a lot to reflexive works like Being John Malkovich and to I Am My Own Wife, the one-person show by Doug Wright about his conversations with a German transvestite. It is probing, cagy, and unresolved—as theater people like to say, up to the audience to make sense of it.

In real life, the fascinating saga of Levin and the diary was, as Francine Prose wrote in Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, “so rife with betrayal and bad behavior … that at least four books have attempted to explain what happened and why.” Years ago, Groff read a review of the most even-handed of these books—Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession With Anne Frank—in the New York Times Book Review and began to research the story.

It’s easy to see why. In her book, Prose quotes Cynthia Ozick as comparing Levin’s saga to that of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the lawsuit in Bleak House whose ruinous costs far exceed those of money.

Levin, a writer with a tormented relationship to his own Jewishness, is given a French version of the diary by his young wife after World War II. He becomes determined to get the diary a wider audience. He begins to correspond with Otto Frank, he brings the diary to Doubleday, he tries to help sell it. He is not agenting, exactly—he never accepts money for his efforts—but he does give the book a rave review in the New York Times Book Review. (Prose makes the interesting point that his review made a book that might otherwise have been remaindered a best-seller.)

After it becomes clear that the diary is a commercial property, Doubleday grows increasingly cold to Levin’s suggestion that he write the theatrical adaptation, especially since he does not actually have a formal contract. Levin becomes more belligerent, and lawsuits follow. Levin sees conspiracies, Cold War ones and anti-Semitic ones. He accuses Doubleday of commercializing the diary, of making it less Jewish, of watering it down. He smears writers Doubleday likes.

None of this helped Levin’s cause. After Doubleday was turned down by many writers (including Carson McCullers and Lillian Hellman), two Hollywood hacks did the theatrical adaptation. As some critics pointed out at the time, one of the sins of this adaptation, which ran on Broadway for 717 performances, was to replace the wise, knowing voice of Anne Frank with that of a fluff-brained sock-hopper. The producer wanted the play to make people laugh. For its uplifting ending, the play twists a line from the diary, “I still believe that people are really good at heart” into banality. (Groff uses this line too, to ironic effect.)

Levin did his own dark, serious, possibly unplayable adaptation. He moved to Israel.

This is a good story. And Compulsion, which is also the title of a book by Levin about Leopold and Loeb, asks good questions, some of which have been asked before: Was Levin insane or was he wronged? Who owns an artistic work about the Holocaust? What is the cost of turning such a work into a classic? What is the cost of profiting from it? Who should tell the Jews’ stories? Can others do it?

Yet my first response to this play was frustration. There is an unresolved tension between Groff’s interest in dreams, questions, meta-theater, and realistic acting. Patinkin, for example, plays Silver with an old-fashioned cheery belligerence. From the moment he lurches on stage (greeted by a standing ovation), he is too Jewish. “I’m writing a book about what it means to be a Jew in the world today,” he announces to the horrified Doubleday editors. He might have stepped out of an Arthur Miller play.

A thornier and more unsolvable problem is the limitations of the theater, where it is difficult to layer in complex historical arguments and facts. So you cannot know for example, when Silver rants that a Stalinist conspiracy was responsible for his being denied the adaptation, that this is absurd. In fact, the only thing he was right about was that Doubleday wanted to make money off of Anne Frank.

But Groff gains something from showing scenes inside Silver’s marriage. In one, set on Fire Island, Silver is working on the theatrical adaptation without a contract. His long-suffering wife confronts him. You learn that during their courtship—he was a 40-year-old soldier, and she was 19—he pursued her with all the avidity with which he now pursues Anne Frank. They dance.

There are also satisfying confrontational moments, like when Silver spits in the face of one of the editors. And schticky ones, like when Silver says, “I still love the juice” a Borscht Belt joke on “I love The Jews.” That got laughs.

The moment that redeemed Compulsion for me is one of the least naturalistic in the play. It takes place in Act Three. It is 1966, and the Silvers have fled to Israel to escape Anne Frank. But they can’t. Silver is asleep but he, his wife, and Anne Frank are all in bed together. Silver is speaking Anne Frank’s lines, which heightens the sense of confusion about who is really who here. Silver’s wife is trying to convince Anne to leave the family alone. (She has already tried to kill herself because of her husband’s obsession with Anne.) Anne will only do this if the wife lets her sleep in the bed. Finally, she relents and they snuggle up together.

At that moment, Patinkin gets out of bed and, in a spotlight, sings a haunting song, which I was later told was “Mayn Shtetle Belz.”

Here I thought Compulsion hinted at what it could be about: the search for the invisible lost world. This is not just a historical search—it is about identity. “Mayn Shtetele Belz” represents a tiny fragment of this, of nameless towns and dead Jews, that Silver is driven to recapture through Anne Frank. But his search isn’t just about his own identity; it’s about that enormous world whose energy remains though most of the evidence that it even existed is gone. The diary was one such piece of evidence, and the quest for it—and the examination of his relationship to it—drove Silver into madness.

Benno and the Night of Broken Glass, by Meg Wiviott, is a picture book about Kristallnacht, seen through the eyes of a cat. School Library Journal loved it, naming it one of the best children’s books of 2010. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review. I found it so distasteful I have trouble forming coherent sentences about it.

But I’ll try. The book tells the story of a cat in Berlin in 1938. He watches the city get scarier and scarier. Men in brown shirts begin throwing books into flames; little girls who once walked to school together no longer speak; Benno’s neighborhood fills with fear. “Then came a night like no other,” Wiviott writes. “The air filled with screams and shouts, sounds of shattering and splintering glass, and the bitter smell of smoke. Benno cowered in a doorway.” The synagogue goes up in flames. “They broke into Professor Goldfarb’s apartment and tore his books and papers from their shelves. ‘I must save the books!’ the professor cried, as he was dragged away.” The next morning, non-Jews’ apartments and stores were left untouched, but “smoldering fires stung Benno’s eyes. His paws were cut and sore from the broken glass that littered the streets.” Benno remains in his apartment building with its non-Jewish residents, but “He never saw Professor Goldfarb or Sophie and her family again.”

Who is the audience for this? Yes, the art, by Canadian illustrator Josée Bisaillon, is gorgeous—a mix of collage, drawings, and digital montage, in which pretty folk-arty illustrations give way to jagged shard-like slashes and darkness. But these wonderful and terrible images are in a young child’s picture book, written in simple, declarative sentences. Picture books can be a tough sell to kids over age 8 or so, because no one wants to look like a baby in front of his chapter-book- and graphic-novel-reading peers. And do kids younger than 8 really need to be slammed with this kind of brutality and horror? Surely Benno suffers, because his eyes sting and his paws are cut, but the book’s flat affect betrays no emotion. The characters are undifferentiated—some are dragged away and some aren’t, and we know nothing about them except their names and whether they give Benno snacks. This is, of course, exactly how actual cats see the world—they care only about who feeds them and who provides a warm lap. But it’s an awfully unnerving way to approach the Holocaust. It’s a book without hope. It’s torture porn for little children.

And yet there’s proof that a book for small children about cats during the Holocaust can work. The Cats in Krasinski Square, by Karen Hesse, manages to get the tone and the scariness level just right. In this 2004 book, Hesse—a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant whose 1997 book Out of the Dust was awarded the Newbery Medal—steers clear of the sense of powerlessness and acted-upon-ness that makes Wiviott’s book so soul-crushing.

In The Cats in Krasinski Square, a little girl helps prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto. She and her sister are Jews masquerading as Poles, living outside the ghetto, working for the Resistance. Unlike Benno (or anyone in Benno’s story), this girl has agency. Her story is told in the first person rather than the third; she’s in control of the narrative. She actively fights against injustice while hiding in plain sight.

I wear my Polish look
I walk my Polish walk
Polish words float from my lips
And I am almost safe,
Almost invisible,
Moving through Krasinski Square
Past the dizzy girls riding the merry-go-round.

The horror is still there—you can’t write a Holocaust story without horror, no matter how young your readers are. Hesse makes it clear, albeit subtly, that the rest of the girl’s family is missing or dead. The little girl befriends the book’s titular cats because their owners have disappeared. But the language of the book is poetic and beautiful, the love between the sisters is evident, and Wendy Watson’s clean, golden-hued, Lois-Lenski-like illustrations invite the reader in rather than pushing her away. Most important, Hesse offers us a protagonist who tries to help others. Readers can identify in a way they can’t with the blank, passive Benno. They can consider how they’d react in such a terrifying, inhuman situation. Would they, too, have the guts to be a helper, someone who stands up to injustice? The book invites identification instead of alienation.

The little girl, because she spends so much time watching the cats slip in and out of cracks in the ghetto walls, knows how to help smuggle food inside. She has a friend who is still behind those walls; her friend needs bread, and she takes great personal risks to bring it to her. And our little heroine comes up with a plan to use her kitty friends to distract the Gestapo’s dogs. Hesse’s book (which is based on a true story), offers a historical afternote that explains that the ghetto ultimately was destroyed and most of its inhabitants died. But even in the note (which most kids and parents won’t read), Hesse takes care to explain that the Jews of Warsaw fought bravely for a long time and that there were some survivors who lived to bear witness.

I wanted my daughters’ first Holocaust book to be Number the Stars, Lois Lowry’s brilliant Newbery-winning chapter book. It, too, is about Resistance members, this time in Denmark in the early 1940s. It, too, is based on a true story. And it, too, shows a little girl standing up to tyranny to save a friend. But Josie found the Holocaust without me through The Night Crossing by Karen Ackerman, a book she discovered in the school library. This turned out to be a not-too-terrifying novel for beginning chapter-book readers about a brave little girl who helps smuggle her family’s Shabbat candlesticks out of Nazi-occupied Austria. A child stands up to bullies, digs deep to be brave, and helps others. Sense a theme among the good books here?

Still, both The Night Crossing and Number the Stars are chapter books, not picture books. I simply don’t see the hurry to introduce anyone who still wears pull-ups at night to Baby’s First Holocaust. Yes, The Cats in Krasinski Square is a fine book, but must children encounter such horrors at such a young age? “In offering such books to children, it is important to remember that an encounter with the Holocaust hastens the end of innocence,” said Claire Rudin, the former librarian for the Holocaust Resource Center and Archives in Queens. Don’t we already complain that our kids grow up too quickly? Do we really need to introduce this darkness so soon? The greatest despair a 6-year-old should feel should be the realization that she’s left a My Little Pony on the subway. As Rudin added, “The selector of books for children to read will make sure that the full horror of knowing the Holocaust is postponed until greater maturity makes possible acceptance of that reality, and then, perhaps, understanding.”

In short, too much, too deep, too fast is no way to teach our kids. Our desire to educate can’t trump their need to believe in a safe, joyful future. Cats shouldn’t be silent bloody-pawed witnesses to horror. They should be cuddly little snugglepusses seeking someone “to kiss their/velvet heads,” in Hesse’s words. Children can provide those kitty kisses. They may not have much power, but this, this they can do. And being able to kiss, to help others in small ways—that’s the path into Holocaust education. As the greatest Holocaust writer for children of all, Anne Frank, wrote, “I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death.”

My tour guide, Vera, descends from one of the first Jewish families to come to Amsterdam from Portugal in the early 17th century. In her voluminous fur-trimmed coat and oversized black beret, she bears more than a passing resemblance to those oil paintings of darkly featured merchants and their dramatically attired wives I saw hanging in the Jewish Historical Museum.

“I am a piece of living history,” she tells me solemnly.

Given Vera’s pedigree, she’s the perfect person to lead me on today’s tour of Jewish Amsterdam. But first, she tells me I need a hat.

Obediently, I pull out my crumpled gray knit hat from my pocket.

“And your scarf?” she asks. “Where’s your scarf?”

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

“You can’t go out without a scarf. You’ll freeze to death.” She settles back down onto the sofa in the hotel lobby. “Go back up to your room and get one. I’ll wait.”

The Portuguese Synagogue is startlingly unimpressive from the outside. A long, low, stone building showing every one of its 325 years, it looks like more like some ancient storage facility than a treasured house of worship. Inside, however, it’s a different story—a shockingly preserved portal to another time. The ark and pews are gilded and intricately carved; the dark wood ceiling is vaulted, like the underside of a hull of ship, and hung with elaborate brass chandeliers, each one bearing hundreds of wax tapers. It is also freezing.

“There’s no heating,” Vera explains. “You see now why you need a scarf.”

I look at all the old wood surrounding me. “I guess space heaters would be too dangerous?”

Vera laughs. “Yes, but also, it’s not possible because there is no electricity.”

It seems the candlelit chandeliers are no designer-y affectation.

“They had a chance to wire the building at the beginning of the 20th century,” Vera says. “But they decided against it. The synagogue elders didn’t want to shut down the building for the time they would need to do it, and it was expensive. They felt that this new technology would never last anyway.” Her lined face is shining.

“I grew up in this synagogue,” she says. “My parents were married here, they brought me here for my naming when I was a baby. My ex-husband was the president of the congregation. Anything you want to know about this place, I can tell you.”

I had questions. The fine dusting of sand covering the floor boards? “It’s a tradition. Some people say it is to represent the sands of the deserts, but really it’s to keep people’s muddy shoes from rotting the boards.” The bathrooms? “This is really the problem,” Vera says. Except for the High Holidays and a few other events, the congregation’s regular services are held in a modern building in the city’s southern suburbs (where most of Amsterdam’s Jews currently live). It has heating, electricity, flush toilets, and other amenities that people have come to expect in their houses of worship. She makes a face. “You really should have gone at the hotel.”

I quickly change the subject. “How did the building survive the war?”

Vera shrugs. “Nobody is sure exactly,” she says. “But many people think that the Nazis planned to keep it as a kind of museum. After they have killed all the Jews, you understand.”

Not for the first time, I feel an eerie shudder at the similarity between the Nazis oft-stated plans for postwar museums and the actual Jewish museums of Europe and beyond: the objectification of objects, the display of relics as a way of life, an entire society that no longer exists. Intent, I suppose, is everything.

I try to phrase my next question delicately. In Holland, the memories of the war, for many, are still painful; it’s not unheard of for even the Dutch of my generation to give wrong directions to hapless German tourists in a kind of futile revenge. “And how did your family survive?”

She smiles at me sadly. “I’ll tell you but not here,” she says. “This should be a happy place. We’ll go now to the Hollandse Schouwburg, and there I’ll tell you the story.”

In a former life, Hollandse Schouwburg was a performance hall situated in the heart of Amsterdam’s affluent Jewish neighborhoods around the Nieuwe Herengracht. A major center of vaudeville and theater, it featured acts from all over the world. In 1941, the Nazis renamed it the Joodische Schouwburg, or “Jewish Theater,” forbidding non-Jewish acts and non-Jewish audiences. In 1942, when the first relocation (that is, deportation) notices went out to Amsterdam’s Jews, the theater was transformed into an assembly point.

“You received a notice in the mail, telling you to report to the Schouwburg and what you could bring with you,” Vera explains. “Then you waited.” Whole families might spend weeks, even months, crammed inside until was their turn for transport to Westerbork, the transit camp in northeastern Netherlands, from where they would eventually be deported to the death camps in the East, mainly to Auschwitz and Sobibor.

Today, the Hollandse Schouwburg is a museum dedicated to the memory of Amsterdam’s Jews. On display are deportation notices, like the one famously received by Margot Frank, prompting the Frank family to go into hiding; photographs; special toiletry kits that Jews were advised to buy in preparation for their “relocation.” Most astonishing to me was a TV monitor that played on loop the entire wedding film of Jim de Zwarte to Rosa Wertheim, the flickering bride from the Jewish Historical Museum. In the film, the wedding party files smilingly out of the house and into waiting carriages; enter the synagogue, and come out again. Neighbors cheer and throw flower petals, and the whole thing would be extremely normal were it not for the enormous yellow stars sewn to the tailcoats and cocktail dresses, a terrible talisman of doom.

“My parents once looked at their guest book from their wedding in 1932,” says Vera, peering over my shoulder. “Two hundred people, and all but maybe 10 of them just disappeared. They never said dead, my parents. Just: ‘They never came back.’ ” She sighs, and then she tells me the story of her parents’ survival, which I hope I can relay faithfully here—it seemed a little tacky to take notes.

In early 1940, when the German invasion looked imminent, Vera’s father, a well-off textile merchant (ah, the schmatte business) wanted to go to England or Switzerland, where he had business contacts, but her mother, a nurse, refused to leave Amsterdam and her elderly parents behind. The family was summoned for deportation and went into the Schouwburg. A week or two later, however, Vera’s mother was deemed an essential worker (she was assigned to look after sick children), and she was permitted to return home, along with Vera’s father and older sister, who was a baby at the time. The grandparents were not so lucky.

Given this reprieve, the family went into hiding in a rural village at the home of a colleague of Vera’s father. The baby stayed with the colleague’s single daughter, who claimed the baby was the orphaned child of a friend. “The village didn’t believe it though,” Vera tells me. “They gossiped that she had had a baby with a German soldier.” She looks at her watch. “We have one hour left. Please can we go to the house of Anne Frank? They made me promise I would take you.”

My misadventures involving the Anne Frank House—the only place of Jewish interest in Amsterdam where I have logged quite a bit of time—are exhaustively chronicled in my book, Everything Is Going To Be Great, but if for some reason you have neglected to read it, I will briefly recount them here. I tripped on the stairs and almost sent a group of Belgian children plummeting to their deaths. I got in a screaming fight with my mother in the Frank family’s kitchen, which was only resolved by our sudden and mutual delight in the gorgeousness of the Frank family’s toilet. I worked its exit doors as a street promoter for an American-style comedy club, and I cheerily greeted weeping strangers with the phrase: “Do you like comedy? Do you like to laugh?” and was once berated for this by a particularly offended woman “on behalf of the Jewish people.”

So, I thought I was tapped out when it comes to Anne Frank, but I am pleased to announce that with Vera’s assistance, I was able to add to my legacy of awkwardness in the Secret Annex. We are in the bedroom that Anne had shared with Fritz Pfeffer (or Dr. Dussel the dentist, as he is known in the diary), inspecting the famous collection of pictures of movie stars and babies that she had carefully pasted on the walls. From the next room, the warm voice of Otto Frank reads aloud a section of a diary. Everyone is sniffling, except for Vera, who leans towards me to whisper loudly: “You know, my cousin was in the same class with Anne Frank.”

“Really?” I whisper back.

“They walked together to school every day.” Vera pauses. “She never liked her. She said Anne Frank was a bit—trutig. You know trutig?”

“Bitchy?” I whisper, half-expecting to be shot.

“Ja. Anne Frank was a bit bitchy.”

We laugh like maniacs. You have to when things are sad.

TOMORROW: The Jewish answer to Eurovision.

Fans will recall that Anne could view the tree from the Annex. “Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs,” she wrote, “from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”

Because this was clearly your next question, “tree” or “trees” is mentioned in In the Aeroplane Over the Sea three times:

• “And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees” (“King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1”);

• “There are lights in the clouds/Anna’s ghost all around/Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me/Soft and sweet/How the notes all bend and reach above the trees” (“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”);

• “Two-headed boy/There’s no reason to grieve/The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves/Left beneath Christmas trees in the snow” (“Two-Headed Boy”).

Storm Knocks Down Tree That Cheered Anne Frank [AP/Google]

• Toward a definition of JCall, which is (somewhat misleadingly) fashioned as the European J Street. [Foreign Policy]

• A former Israeli diplomat and consul general makes the case for a U.S.-imposed peace plan instead of proximity talks. [Politico]

• In Britain, Leeds University’s student paper was pulled from racks after publishing an interview in which a Palestinian journalist said of news outlets, “They are certainly pro-Israeli. I think you have to ask yourself who controls the media.” [Leeds Student]

• Model Naomi Campbell is having secret meetings (except apparently not-so-secret) with Madonna’s Kaballah mentor. [Page Six]

• “Unfortunately, we receive so many Holocaust teenage diaries composed in European attics that it is impossible to accept each one.” [McSweeney’s]

Mazel tov to Tablet Magazine columnist Josh Lambert, newly the father of Asher:

• Eshkol Nevo, one of Israel’s hottest young novelists, sits for an interview with journalist Michael Orthofer, this evening.

• A distinguished panel will discuss the work of the classic Austrian-Jewish Modernist novelist Stefan Zweig, Friday evening.

• Three authors who have adapted The Diary of Anne Frank in various ways, including novelist Francine Prose, discuss it, Saturday afternoon. (Bonus! Check out our Vox Tablet with Prose.)

• As part of a “Translation Slam,” one side of the transliterary “duel” will be reading the work of Alex Epstein in Hebrew, Friday evening.

• A panel, including authors Paul Berman and Alina Bronsky, will discuss the intersection of free art in Europe and Islamist censorship, Sunday afternoon.

So check it out. Start at the movable bookcase.

Anne Frank House Offering Virtual Tour [JTA]

But now Hannah Pick-Goslar, a childhood friend of Frank’s who also survived Bergen-Belsen, has come forward to dispute the memoir’s account. “In that condition, you almost died,” she told a reporter. “You had no strength to tell stories.”

I guess I’d like to know whether this is true or not. But please let’s not lose sight of the Diary, which really does justify its considerable hype. I’m constantly amazed by how many people have never actually read it. If you’re one of them, then have I got a book recommendation for you!

Below: Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel plays his song, “Holland, 1945.”

Memoir’s Glimpse of Anne Frank Draws Skepticism [AP/NYT]
Anne Frank Told Fables To Children [AP/HuffPo]

Miep Gies, Protector of Anne Frank, Dies at 100 [NYT]

One stat has us sincerely hoping that the children being surveyed were showing off their senses of humor: “77 percent of the children aged 9-15 recognised Hitler as leader of the Nazi party, but 13.5 percent thought he invented gravity in 1650 and seven percent thought he coached Germany’s football team.” Another seems oddly revealing about how the Holocaust is treated: “Auschwitz was correctly identified by 70 percent—but 15 percent thought it was a WWII-based theme park.” A third is simply baffling: “61 percent knew who Goebbels was but 21 percent thought he was a ‘well-known Jew who wrote a diary in the attic.’” Perhaps we’re biased, but it’s hard to imagine anyone not having a pretty clear idea who Anne Frank was, what with the constant media attention given to the girl and her diary.

Of course before proceeding to mock the sad state of education in the United Kingdom, consider the fact that more than 90 percent of respondents know who Winston Churchill is. We’re not sure the same can be said about school children on this side of the pond.

Kids Think Hitler Was German Football Coach: Poll [AFP]

Christian School Wants to Simulate Anne Frank’s Hiding with Sleepover [SunSentinel.com]

Given the remarkable successes of Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank—the latter of which receives an exemplary close reading by Francine Prose in Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the After Life (HarperCollins, October), as discussed last week on Vox Tablet—publishers know that stories about the Nazis’ youngest, most vulnerable victims have the power to move contemporary readers like nothing else. And, sadly, there was no dearth of children and teens who suffered or died at the hands of the Third Reich, each of them with a story as heartbreaking as it is appalling.

Rita Lurie’s family paid a non-Jewish Pole to hide them in an attic on his farm during the war. Unlike Anne Frank, Rita managed to survive, though she saw her brother and mother die in hiding, and she watched as two other relatives were shot. Lurie and her daughter, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, a former lawyer and television executive, describe her experiences, and the continuing fallout of those traumas decades later, in Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir (Harper, September).

Janusz Korczak dedicated his life to caring for abandoned Jewish children, long before the Nazis set their sights on Poland. He founded a revolutionary orphanage in Warsaw in 1912—a little ways up Krochmalna Street from the house in which Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up—in which children administrated their own government, legal system, and media. When the Nazis deported the orphanage’s children to Treblinka, Korczak insisted on staying with them to the end. Tomek Bogacki, a Polish-born artist and children’s book author, presents Korczak’s bravery for an audience around the same age as his charges, in The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak (FSG, September, ages 9–12).

Hannelore Brenner’s The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Therensienstadt (Schocken, September) meanwhile focuses on a group of Jewish women who met in the Theresienstadt camp between 1942 and 1944, when they were teenagers. Living today in England, Israel, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., these survivors now gather once a year to reaffirm their fellowship, and they have contributed their diaries, drawings, and recollections to Brenner’s tribute volume.

The camp, near Prague, where Brenner’s subjects were imprisoned functioned both as a sort of Potemkin Village to appease the Red Cross and as a way station for Jews en route to their extermination. Further insights into the camp’s operation and atmosphere can be found in the diary kept by Philipp Manes, a Berlin furrier, during the two years he spent there before his murder in Auschwitz. As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto (Palgrave Macmillan, November), Manes’s diary, like Brenner’s book, depicts the cultural vibrancy that Jews heroically kept alive in Theresienstadt—among other things, inmates wrote and staged a “children’s opera,” Brundibar—as well as the bitterness of living at the whim of the Nazis in a showpiece ghetto.

Even after eluding the carnage of Hitler’s Europe, some Jewish adolescents found themselves jailed again, like the four orphaned protagonists of Anita Diamant’s novel Day After Night (Scribner, September). The novel takes place in 1945, and each of Diamant’s heroines has followed a different path through the Holocaust, dramatizing the variety of its horrors: one, like Rita Lurie, hid out in a barn, another survived the camps, a third battled with the partisans, and the fourth waited out the war turning tricks in a Parisian brothel. Drawn, like many of the women featured in Girls of Room 28, to the Land of Israel—whether through ideology or desperation—these girls wind up in Atlit, a camp for illegal immigrants established by the British rulers of Palestine.

Many of the young European Jews who escaped to the U.S. before the onset of the war found themselves in ideal positions to fight in the Allied military: fluent in German, familiar with strategic locations, they were, most importantly, extraordinarily motivated to risk their lives to defeat the Nazis. Two new popular histories—Patrick K. O’Donnell’s They Dared Return: An Epic Story of Jewish Refugees Who Escaped Nazi Germany, but Returned for Vengeance (Da Capo, October) and Steven Karras’s The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II (Zenith, October)—tell the tales of such soldiers. Karras’s book adapts material from his 1999 documentary, About Face, but the film that best explains why two volumes on this subject would be published almost simultaneously this fall is Quentin Tarantino’s Inlglourious Basterds, the world-wide earnings of which recently topped $230 million. At least until a Basterds tie-in book appears (apart from Tarantino’s screenplay, which has floated around the web for years, and has been available for purchase since August), Karras, O’Donnell, and their editors can hope to profit from a burgeoning market for military dramas of Jewish revenge.

On the subject of Hollywood tie-ins: as Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man fills movie theaters with the sound of Yiddish, fans of their remarkable oeuvre may be interested to discover the uses to which their films have been put in a couple of new books. Cultural studies scholars can turn anything into analytical fodder, so no one should be surprised by The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies (Indiana, November), edited by professors Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe. It contains essays titled “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism,” “No Literal Connection: Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism, and the Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski,” and “Abiding (as) Animal: Marmot, Pomeranian, Whale, Dude,” among others—and, yes, both the editors and authors seem well aware that what they’re doing is at least a little ridiculous. Less self-conscious is Cathleen Falsani’s The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers (Zondervan, October), which sets out “to uncover what the overarching spiritual messages of their films—their ‘gospel,’ if you will—might be.” Notwithstanding the “Foreword” Falsani has wrangled from a Montana rabbi who calls her, absurdly, “the Rashi to the Coens’ scripture,” not much insight into the filmmakers’ religion or ethnicity can be expected from The Dudes Abides. Falsani’s evangelical publisher aims primarily to “glorify Jesus Christ” (and includes in its catalog such literary gems as How Jewish Is Christianity, in which one thoughtful contributor worries that the spread of Messianic synagogues might undermine efforts of bona fide Christian churches to “reach out to the Jewish people in evangelism and discipleship”). Might evangelical Christians cull spiritual wisdom from Fargo and Barton Fink? The idea recalls a saying of that great Jewish sage, Walter Sobchak: “Donny, you’re out of your element.”

Anne Frank’s Channel [YouTube]
Anne Frank Channel Launched on YouTube [Telegraph]

What Prose begins as a literary investigation expands to encompass the history of the diary and its author, as well as its many reincarnations as a musical, a film, a brand, and an inspiration for human rights organizations and classroom curricula. Prose spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the diary and its impact.

What we imagine to be the trailer:

INTERIOR, A (SURPRISINGLY SPACIOUS) DUTCH ATTIC. DAY.

ANNE:
The thing is…

OTTO:
Yeah?

ANNE:
It’s that…

OTTO:
What?

ANNE:
It’s that I still believe…

OTTO:
Great.

ANNE:
I still believe, in spite of everything…

OTTO:
There’s a lot of shit out there.

ANNE:
There is. But I still believe.

OTTO:
I know, you believe.

ANNE:
No, what I’m saying is…

OTTO:
What the hell are you saying?

ANNE:
I’m saying that I still believe, in spite of everything…

OTTO:
Yeah?

ANNE:
That people are truly good at heart.

OTTO:
Oh yeah?

ANNE:
Yeah.

OTTO:
Fucking fool.

Mamet Takes on ‘Anne Frank’ [Variety]
Related: Anne Frank’s Diary, As Interpreted by David Mamet [Vulture]

At the height of the 2006 Lebanon war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Argentine humor magazine Barcelona published a one-frame cartoon depicting two bearded, hook-nosed, tzitzit- and yarmulke-wearing men whose Haifa apartment has just been hit by a rocket. “Fuck, do something!” one of them says. “Those sons of bitches have launched a Katyusha and destroyed my toilet and my jacuzzi!” “Well then,” says the other, “we’ll bomb Gaza, Beirut, the airports, the refineries, the highways, and we’ll destroy the Parliament.”

The cartoon quickly aroused the ire of many in Argentina’s Jewish community. “Del arte de cruzar los oceános,” a blog by an Argentine Jew living in Israel, denounced the work as anti-Semitic for its stereotypical caricatures, its stance against Israel’s actions in the war, and its ignorance of the realities of Israeli life (a jacuzzi, the blogger pointed out, would be a rare luxury in that middle-class desert nation). Comunidades, a newspaper circulated in Buenos Aires’ Jewish community, echoed the denunciations almost to the letter. Some members of the community took their outrage a step further, sending emails and letters to the artist comparing his work to 1930s Nazi propaganda.

The target of this outcry was the celebrated Argentine cartoonist Sergio Langer, a man deeply invested in his Jewish heritage and also deeply committed to using humor, in his words, “to make things right, to fix injustice…to mock Nazis.” “If I perceive [authoritarianism] and I draw it and do it humorously, that’s mission accomplished for me,” Langer says. His work forces the viewer into close contact with a host of the hideous: rotting military dictators, dominatrix suicide bombers, lecherous priests, and Klansmen, to name a few. A history of violence shadows these crude, emphatic drawings, which attempt to call out reactionaries at the same time as they offer a time-honored form of Jewish cartharsis: laughing at tragedy, laughing at suffering, and laughing at ourselves. Clearly influenced by the grotesque physicality of Robert Crumb and the irreverent irony of Art Spiegelman, Langer has crafted an original style that can be both vulgar—impossibly ugly priests in the throes of orgasmic ecstasy—and tender—scenes depicting mothers and sons.

Over the course of his 30-year career, Langer’s work has appeared frequently in the major Argentine newspapers Página/12 and Clarín, in the Peruvian magazine Somos, and in U.S. publications such as Newsweek, the Miami Herald, and the now-defunct New York Newsday. Despite this steady work, Langer was known almost exclusively to the cartoon cognoscenti until five years ago, when his comic strip “La Nelly” brought him widespread recognition for the first time. Published daily on the back page of Clarin since September 2003, “La Nelly” chronicles the misadventures of a bigoted middle-aged woman whom Langer sees as an exemplar of the Argentine middle class. Even in the most mainstream venue in the Argentine cartoon world, Langer’s work snaps with an outsider’s bite.

Langer, who is 49, relishes throwing viewers into a world that brazenly mixes senseless violence with dark humor. His work often elicits profound discomfort, challenging artistic boundaries and social acceptability. Langer’s stated goal is to fight authoritarianism, and he sees skewering political correctness as part of the battle. Usually cast as opposites—a Holocaust-denying reactionary like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after all, spews defiantly un-P.C. statements—political correctness and authoritarianism do have in common a desire to suppress or limit speech. “There’s a paranoia, a madness,” Langer says, “because society is very intolerant, and it [pretends] not to support its own intolerance.”

Langer’s own dark personal history colors the violent images and provocative voice of his cartoons. Born in 1959 in Once, Buenos Aires’ traditionally Jewish neighborhood, Langer grew up hearing first-hand stories of Nazi Europe from his maternal uncle, who escaped Romania and fought in the Soviet Army at Stalingrad, and his survivor mother, who was imprisoned for four years at the Mogilev-Podolski concentration camp. Growing up in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of Eichmann’s dramatic capture, Langer eagerly collected newspaper clippings that detailed the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. He dedicated his first cartoon collection, Langer: Blanco y Negro, to his “beloved superhero Simon Wiesenthal” (who responded with a gracious letter saying that he was “touched,” and noting of Langer’s black humor that “sometimes the desire to chuckle gets stuck in the throat”).

As a child, Langer made sense of the horrors of his family history through play. A typical scene in the Langer house involved the young Sergio tracing soldiers and tanks in flour on the kitchen table as his mother cooked at the stove, a habit that he translated to pen and paper as an adult. “It’s like I still haven’t finished exorcising that,” he says. “In fact, I can say that I’m a pacifist, but I love weapons. I love to draw them; I love to watch war movies. When I was a kid, I played Warsaw Ghetto and killed Nazis…you can say that’s a kind of Jewish humor.”

When Langer was 12, reality caught up with the darkness of his fantasies. His father, who fled to Argentina from Poland in the 1930s, was murdered during a robbery of his business in the Patagonian city of Rio Gallegos. Five years later, in 1976, a military junta seized power in Argentina, launching a clandestine war on leftists, intellectuals, young people, Jews, and many others unlucky enough to arouse the government’s paranoid suspicions. While studying architecture at the University of Buenos Aires during this period, Langer began to draw for Humor, a subversive magazine that published covers mocking the dictatorship. Though many critics of the junta faced murderous reprisal, the military granted Humor an unspoken amnesty, permitting the underground magazine to mock the government as a sham demonstration of democracy and free speech. “In 1979, I published one of my first drawings,” Langer remembers. “[It was] of a military officer saying, ‘We’re not going to stay in power,’ while he had a chain tying him to the presidential seat. I would do that kind of thing with the military, but they never gave me any problems. That said, I knew what was going on—not in detail, but I knew.”

While the dictatorship is a recurring theme in his work, Langer comes to terms with the horrors of the past most fully in his comics about the Holocaust. In the 10-page comic story La Vida Es Bella (Life Is Beautiful)—published in its entirety in the July 2008 issue of the Argentine comic magazine Fierro—Langer places the viewer inside the mind of his childhood self, defending the right of each generation to engage with remembrance in its own way. The story begins with the young artist drawing furiously at the kitchen table as his mother cooks on the stove. Against this quotidian backdrop, the young Langer peppers his mother with a series of questions about the Holocaust that quickly exasperate her. “If you could change destiny what would you do: Save the six million who the Nazis killed or the family that you’ve made in Argentina?” he asks. “Enough!” she shouts, sending the young Langer back to the table to resume drawing.

In the upper frame of each of the comic’s remaining nine pages, the young Langer imagines a series of events that he thinks might have stopped or impeded the Holocaust: a group of 250,000 Jews leads a violent resistance on Kristallnacht; German industrialists threaten to rescind their support of Hitler if he continues to use Jewish slave labor; the Pope leads a group of 300 bishops to Dachau to intercede on behalf of “our Jewish brothers”; Hitler succeeds as an artist, becoming one of the most controversial German painters of the 1920s and ’30s. On the bottom of each page, a train carrying Langer’s mother and grandmother chugs through a starless night until, in the final frame, we see a guard tower and a smokestack looming in the distance—reality dashes the young Langer’s hopeful fantasies.

La Vida Es Bella personalizes remembrance in a way that passive reverence could not. “There’s a kind of official culture of what memory is and how we must remember,” Langer says. “But everyone sees things in his or her own way. It’s not The Diary of Anne Frank and nothing else.” Langer argues that irony and humor can help us better come to terms with historical truth than can “official culture,” which makes the work of remembrance into a compulsory ritual—a phrase like “never again” can be uttered very solemnly without any genuine individual reflection on its meaning. Langer’s speculative, ironic work argues that each generation needs to hone its own voice for that memory to stay relevant.

But how does this care for memory, history, and justice fit in with Langer’s pugnacious, highly controversial Lebanon War cartoon? Is it possible to reconcile the harshly criticized polemicist with the zany memorialist of La Vida Es Bella?

Langer admits that his mistake in the Lebanon war cartoon was in using stereotypical Jewish caricatures as stock representations of Israelis, enabling his critics to interpret it as a blanket statement that Jews are petty and barbarous. By employing these simplistic caricatures, he gave his critics an opportunity to interpret his work as sinister. His real target, he says, was the kind of conservative thinking that he saw expressed in Israel’s actions in Lebanon. “There’s a sector of the Jewish community that says, ‘If it’s good for the Jews, then it’s good—that’s it, nothing else matters,’” he says. “It’s like if there’s a war between Iran and Iraq, saying ‘That’s great! Let them kill each other!’ That kind of thinking has always existed for better or worse, but it doesn’t interest me at all.” Had the cartoon more clearly conformed to the sentiment of that statement, it would likely still have been criticized; but without stock Jewish caricatures, it may not have been so easy for some to label it anti-Semitic.

While acknowledging this, Langer says he has no regrets. In a world where so many are quick to take offense, his comics try to shake us out of a nervous silence that not only suppresses speech, but also suppresses laughter. This false tolerance—cohabitation enabled by averted eyes and guarded speech—mutes the possibility of a more vibrant world of acceptance. Langer belongs to a long tradition of proudly subversive cartoonists who believe that creating challenging art means recognizing that some people will be offended by it. “I understand that it’s a delicate subject,” Langer says about the Lebanon War, “but sometimes it’s worth it to go over the line, to take a risk.”

“Mama, what would have happened if the Holocaust in Europe had never existed? Where would I be today?”

“Hmmm…I don’t know, little one. I would have stayed in Romania, I would have married Isaac, I would have had a family, children…The Nazis wouldn’t have killed my family and my friends. Who knows?”

“Or maybe you wouldn’t have come to Argentina, you wouldn’t have met Papa, I would never have been born, and I never would have been your son!?!”

“Yes, my love! You would have been born just like you were because you were destined to be my lovely little boy…it was written.”
“Destiny?”

“If you could change destiny what would you do: Save the six million who the Nazis killed or the family that you’ve made in Argentina?”

“Enough! I’ve had it with your questions about the war! Go draw and don’t torture me any more…”
“I’m going to draw a comic about extermination camps…”

“Freedom for our Jewish brothers!”

Freedom for our Jewish brothers! With that pronouncement, Pope Pious XII, at the front of a delegation of 300 Catholic bishops, presented himself at Dachau on March 12, 1942. This brave act brought about the closing of the camp and the suspension of the extermination plan in the rest of Europe.

“Hello, Hello, another man might be getting on, ay!”

“If this isn’t art, art doesn’t exist!”

November 1923. In the classic Munich brewery “Hofbräuhaus,” an exhibition opens of the well-known artist Adolf Hitler. Going beyond the criticisms for inciting racial hate and violence, Hitler, or as he often signs, “Der Führer,” becomes recognized as one of the most controversial artists of the next decade in Europe.

Go, little train, go through the meadow!
“I’m cold, Mama…”

Eric Benson is an editorial intern at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Down Beat, and The Argentimes.

Judith Katzir’s second novel, Dearest Anne—published in Israel in 2003 and newly available in English—is written in the form of letters from a young girl named Rivi Shenhar to Anne Frank. The letters are rife with intimate details of Rivi’s discoveries and indiscretions, as she navigates the eighth grade, reads voraciously, and explores her sexuality—notably through a passionate, scandalous love affair with her married literature teacher, Michaela. They’re also richly descriptive of the particulars of Israeli life in the 1970s.

Since her first book, a group of four novellas titled Closing the Sea, was published in Israel in 1990, when she was twenty-six, Katzir has been deliberately building on the relatively new tradition of women writing in Hebrew. Now with seven books to her name, she’s working on one based on the handwritten memoirs of her great-grandmother, who moved to Palestine from Russia in 1906, and eventually settled in Tel Aviv—where she lived in an unconventional communal arrangement with her husband, their five children, and her lover (a vegetarian fascinated by world religions who was nearly ten years her junior).

Katzir was born in Haifa and today lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a literary editor and teaches creative writing.

Until about twenty years ago, Hebrew literature was pretty much dominated by men. How did you experience this, and how does it relate to your work?

When I was in school, we studied mostly male writers. Maybe we read two stories by women, and a few poems. We had the male canon, but I had to find my own subversive canon of women’s literature, translated from other languages. It was a strange concoction of high literature like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, and things like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Anne Frank was a very, very important model for me: She was not only a woman writer, she was a girl writer.

It was important for me not just to read about women’s experience, but to create a portrait of a female artist for myself. Even when I wrote my first stories, in my early twenties, there were very few women writers active in the literature scene here. There was the first book of Orly Castel-Bloom [the story collection Not Far From the Center of Town], and we studied Amalia Kahana-Carmon’s stories in school. In the ’80s, she said that if Hebrew literature is a synagogue, the part of the women is behind a curtain. But now I believe that women writers have built a parallel synagogue for themselves.

Since you didn’t really have female writers as role models, did you feel like you were doing something new?

Yes. Critics said Closing the Sea included the first description of female orgasm in Hebrew literature. I had new areas to explore, and I felt I was among the first to explore them: the feminine body, the aging body, sexuality, relationships between women, mothers and daughters, relationships between men and women. For me, it’s very important to be an insider witness for these topics that are quite new to Hebrew literature.

Was it shocking for people when that kind of writing by women first came out in Israel?

Feminism in the U.S. developed in the late ’60s, early ’70s. I think in Israel we’re about twenty years behind. A Room of One’s Own was translated in the beginning of the ’80s, along with Doris Lessing and a few others. But gender studies in universities started maybe less than ten years ago. So we are behind. But people were quite open to reading such literature. My first collection was a great bestseller here, which is very rare for a collection of stories, and for the first book of a very young woman.

That book was not feminist per se, though the four main characters are all women. They aren’t political stories; they deal with other subjects, like the memory of the Holocaust. The first novella is about two cousins, ages thirteen and fourteen, who spend their summer at their grandparents’ house in Haifa. Their grandparents are Holocaust survivors, and the cousins go to the attic and play “Anne Frank and Peter in Hiding.” Another one of my stories is about a mother and daughter; another about two friends from childhood, and what happens to their friendship when they are in their thirties.

Your work also brings to life historical women writers who haven’t gotten a lot of attention, like Dvora Baron. What attracted you to Baron, and made you decide to write a play about her?

I found her life story much more fascinating than her stories, actually. Her father was a rabbi, and he let her get an education like her brother. And at the age of sixteen, she moved with her brother from their tiny village to Minsk, and studied there, and started to write and publish stories in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1911, she arrived in Palestine. She met the editor of one of the workers’ magazine—she edited the literature part of the magazine—and they got married and had one daughter. In 1920, she discovered that her brother Benjamin had died in Russia, and she decided not to leave the house anymore. For thirty-five years, until her last day, she was in the house, most of the time in bed. She wrote her stories in bed. Her daughter was an epileptic and never sent to school, and she became a kind of servant for her mother.

Baron was a very difficult personality, very clever and egocentric. The play is about the relationship between her and her daughter; the main character is actually the daughter. It takes place on the day of Baron’s death, and is based on the daughter’s flashbacks.

You mentioned that Anne Frank was an early influence on you, and she’s a very strong presence in your writing. How did you first come across her?

In the ’60s and ’70s, when I was a child, many of my friends’ parents were Holocaust survivors. My father’s parents arrived from Poland before the war, but many of their relatives were murdered in Auschwitz. I’m not a second-generation Israeli, but in many ways my generation is a second generation, because we knew many elderly people who had a blue number. But the subject was hushed. They were post-traumatic, and they wanted to protect the children by not telling them about what happened.

We experienced the Holocaust as a big secret, with many images that we didn’t understand. Every year there was a ceremony in school for Yom Hashoah, with the same speeches and the same songs. It was stiff, not personal. Now young people, when they are sixteen or seventeen, go to Poland to see the camps. But we didn’t; young people had to play macabre games in order to control their anxiety about the subject.

So my first real acquaintance with it was through Anne Frank’s diary. It’s a very good introduction to the Holocaust for young people, because she wrote about life in hiding, about the fear, the claustrophobia, but she never wrote about the hunger and disease and death in the camps. Most of the time, her point of view is very optimistic. But still, I knew she was murdered, so it gave me my first knowledge about life destroyed. For me personally, she was very important as an icon of a writing girl, and for all the victims she symbolized. But in Dearest Anne, it was important to take her off the pedestal and relate to her humanity.

The character of Rivi Shenhar appears in both Dearest Anne and your earlier novel Matisse Has the Sun in His Belly. How did she develop over the years?

The two novels are like two pillars of the same house. When I started to write Dearest Anne, I didn’t know it was going to be about the same Rivi. It was important to me that the reader experience the story from the perspective of the young character, without moral judgment. So I decided to write it in present tense, as a diary of what happened to this young girl every day. Then I thought about Anne Frank as an icon, an address for this character, who decides that she’s the fictional Kitty. Kitty doesn’t have a biography or a face, so every girl can decide that she’s Kitty. She’s only a silhouette. I started to see that this was the same soul as Rivi from my previous novel, and I decided it was going to be her, in a different part of her life. She’s a sort of alter ego, but there are differences as well.

In her afterword to the English translation of Dearest Anne, Hannah Ovnat-Tamir writes that the book reminded her of “growing up and coming of age in a time of great historical and national importance.” Was this something you had a sense of when you were growing up?

Yes, but in the book most of the important nation-building issues are in the background. What’s much more important to Rivi is her relationship to her family, and her relationship with Michaela. It’s an alternative way to look at Israeli history. What’s important for most people were issues like the peace process. But for a young girl, what’s important is her world.