Editors at Doubleday, which revealed Anne’s guide in America as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Younger Lady,” shared Otto’s imaginative and prescient, and marketed the guide aggressively to a normal viewers. The introduction — signed by Eleanor Roosevelt, however written by a younger Doubleday editor, Barbara Zimmerman — didn’t embody the phrase “Jew,” emphasizing the diary as a commentary “on battle and its influence on human beings.” Doubleday even marketed the guide as a Christmas current.
Meyer Levin, a author and journalist who had reported on the liberation of Buchenwald, would later take Otto to process for permitting husband-and-wife screenwriting staff Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich to adapt the guide for the stage, arguing that their model downplayed Anne’s Jewish id to cater to a large viewers. However even Levin was a part of the preliminary push to focus on the diary’s normal attraction. In a evaluation that ran on the duvet of The Occasions Ebook Overview, Levin described Anne as an bizarre teenager whose emotions have been “of the purest universality.” The characters within the diary, he wrote, “is likely to be residing subsequent door … their tensions and satisfactions are these of human character and progress, anyplace.”
It wasn’t simply the will to promote books that motivated this framing of the diary. It was additionally the existential nervousness felt by many Jews —People in addition to Holocaust survivors like Otto — within the aftermath of the battle. As a German Jew so deeply linked to his nation that he served as an officer within the German Military throughout World Battle I, Otto didn’t imagine his faith would make him a goal of persecution — till it did. Whereas antisemitism in America took subtler types, reminiscent of inns that marketed a “restricted clientele” (code for excluding Jews and Blacks), it was nonetheless a supply of discrimination that saved Jews out of sure faculties, social circles {and professional} positions.
Underneath such circumstances, it’s hardly shocking that Jews and their allies would emphasize their commonalities with the remainder of society moderately than their variations. In so doing, they fell right into a lure. To be able to attain the most important doable viewers, the diary, and later the play and film based mostly upon it, needed to painting Anne’s Judaism as marginal to her id. However the truth that a Jewish character couldn’t be seen as universally relatable reveals the extent to which antisemitism remained a social drive.
With its essence as a doc of Jewish persecution diluted, Anne’s diary might do little to counteract that prejudice, which Otto appears to have ultimately realized. Whereas he wrote in a letter to Levin that the diary was “not a Jewish guide,” he went on to say that “indirectly after all [the play] should be Jewish … in order that it really works in opposition to anti-Semitism.”
