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.

The evening was sponsored by Penguin Classics and emceed by Nina Baym Beena Kamlani, who was Bellow’s editor for his last few books (he died in 2005). It was the typical crowd: Girls who probably work in publishing stood in a corner sipping red wine and acting like they belonged, which they did; two people sitting next to me discussed grad school admissions. Most were probably Bellow fans, making me the odd man out: I’ve never got Bellow (and yes, since you were about to ask, I have read Herzog, as well as several others). His rhythm hasn’t flowed for me as it has for some; his genius hasn’t appeared before me as it has for others.

And on its face, it was five typical readers, four novelists and Kamlani: Gary Shteyngart (a contributing editor); Francine Prose (a contributor); Joshua Furst; and Joseph O’Neill. But though all read the same author, they read him in five different ways, almost as five different characters: The neophyte, the socialite, the admirer, the lecturer, and the sentimentalist. I’ll explain this, I swear.

First, after Kamlani’s introduction, was Shteyngart, the diminuitive, jester-like, calmly wise Russian Jewish novelist. He played the neophyte. “Since Valentine’s Day is coming up, I’m reading a dating scene from Herzog,” he announced. And he proceeded to read a rather funny, at times risqué exchange between Moses Herzog and a woman, Ramona, whom, let’s just say, Herzog knows to be wearing black lace underwear. As Shteyngart articulated Herzog’s fascination with the fact of his own erection—“good currency anywhere, accepted by the Bank of England”—Shteyngart did the opposite of become the character: He almost sounded like one coming across the character, or the writer, or even the English language, for the first time. Here he was helped by his faint accent, which was compounded by his exaggeratedly Slavic take on the pronounciation of “Ramona,” which was compounded further still by the exoticism of Ramona’s “French-Russian-Argentine-Jewish ways.” Shteyngart is of course no naif, even if he plays one on YouTube. Rather, he was bringing the listeners along with him in a rediscovery, and I heard a music in Bellow I had never perceived before.

Next was Francine Prose, who I am pretty sure was the tallest of the five readers, even if you spotted Joshua Furst his cowboy boots. She sounded savvy and looked statuesque, like a sophisticated Parisian. She played the socialite. In what initially seemed like a daring gesture, she chose to read from Bellow’s essays on other authors: An excerpt from one on the poet John Berryman, and then one he wrote when his friend John Cheever died. The match was perfect: Prose tossed off the proper nouns in top cocktail-party form, and Bellow’s, well, prose assumed the most poetry it would that night.

Francine Prose.

Next was Furst, playing the admirer, who announced he would be reading from Henderson The Rain King, the weird 1959 book with crude African stereotypes and a famous Counting Crows song loosely based on it. Why this one? “Because it’s his problem book,” Furst explained, to which Prose, from her seat, scarcely more than muttered, “They’re all problem books.” In many ways Bellow’s most exotic book, it sounded downright simple in Furst’s earnest reading. He seemed almost in awe of the words, so impressed and so careful not to step on them; it seemed to me that this was the reading Kamlani, sitting in the front row, looking up, enjoyed the most.

Joshua Furst

Then came O’Neill, who played (and who was the lecturer), who I expected to have an Irish accent but really had more of an English one (the narrator was the “nuh-RAY-tur”). He read from one of Bellow’s last novels, More Die of Heartbreak, and he was the only reader who interrupted himself, which he did periodically: “Classic Bellovian … anyway”; a laugh, and then, “sorry.” It was a mistake, but it was a mistake that O’Neill learned with the rest of us, and during the second half of his reading, he didn’t stop himself, and just let Bellow speak for himself, or through his nuh-RAY-tur: “I could adore long-legged girls, but they aren’t my real preference”; “Edgar Allen Poe and the retarded girl he married.” We learned, with O’Neill, that Bellow, like Hemingway, has to just come out, and you have to just take it as it is. The lecturer is the only character unfit to read Bellow, but to this lecturer’s credit, he realized the error of his ways well before it was too late.

Joseph O'Neill

Finally, Kamlani closed things out by reading the conclusion of a story, “Something To Remember Me By.” Her reading of a tale all about nostalgia was itself nostalgic, almost whimsical: A lullaby. The sentimentalist may be my favorite reader of Bellow. It is possible I will have to give him a second chance. Trying Bellow out merely as myself—as only one reader—is really not the way to do him justice.

• Ashton Kutcher traveled to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, drawing the ire of the left-wing blogosphere. He was in the area as a guest of the Kabbalah Center of Tel Aviv, drawing the ire of everyone else. [Promised Land]

• Britain’s chief rabbi said he was “dismayed” by Prime Minister David Cameron’s comparison of Gaza to “a prison camp” in front of a group of Turkish businessmen. [JPost]

• Thomas Friedman encourages “constructive criticism” of Israel that does not shirk from holding it accountable while recognizing the realities of its regional context. [NYT]

• An important rabbi in the Religious Zionist movement banned overdrawing from bank accounts, something to do with not collecting interest. Plus you know they always get you with those fine-print fees. [Ynet]

• Vox Tablet interlocutor Francine Prose calls Hans Keilson a “genius” and his two reissued novels “masterpieces.” (Adam Kirsch reviewed them last week.) [NYT Book Review]

Today is the 15th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death.

• Über-Jew Harold Bloom tackled Anthony Julius’s new tome on British anti-Semitism.

• As presaged Friday, Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch struggled with whether we must throw out the baby that is Martin Heidegger’s mainstream philosophical contribution with the bathwater that is his undeniable Nazism.

• Also as presaged Friday, Francine Prose reviewed a new biography of Irène Némirovsky as well a collection of the French-Jewish writer’s newly translated stories.

• And Francis Fukuyama, in the course of an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, argues that the crazy/brilliant German philosopher transformed from a run-of-the-mill casual anti-Semite to “a principled anti-anti-Semite” and enemy of “German chauvinism.”

And a bonus! In the Week in Review section, film critic A.O. Scott declared that this is the year of Generation X’s midlife crisis in an essay whose central juxtaposition was the new Noah Baumbauch film Greenberg and the new Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask, which both feature similarly schlemiel-like protagonists. Wish we’d thought of that connection. Oh, wait, our very own Marissa Brostoff did.

Related: Look Out! [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Kirsch, Heidegger, and Némirovsky, Oh My!

Kirsch reviewed the correspondence between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (his lover!) in 2004 for Nextbook.org, Tablet Magazine’s precursor.

Paul La Farge reviewed an earlier Irène Némirovsky biography for Nextbook.org in 2006.

And Francine Prose discussed Anne Frank on a Vox Tablet podcast last year.

This NYT podcast is really good by the way. Not, you know, National Magazine Award-winning good, but good.

Book Review Podcast: Heidegger, Irène Némirovsky and Anti-Semitism [Arts Beat]

• 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.

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.