The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank by Ellen Feldman

In this novel’s acknowledgements, Ellen Feldman explains that when she visited the Anne Frank House in 1994, she was led to believe by a "misinformed or romantically inclined" guide that Peter van Daan was the only inhabitant of the secret annex about whom there were no records. In fact, the Red Cross does have records of his death, but this, along with the fact that in the diary he says that if he were to survive the war he'd completely reinvent himself, was enough to stimulate her imagination.

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank imagines that Peter, Anne Frank’s closest confident, survived the war, moved to New York, and started a new life, telling absolutely no one about his past or his Jewish origins. The novel starts about ten years after the end of the war. Peter has become a successful man. He has his own business, he is married to a Jewish wife who has no idea that he too is Jewish, and he has two daughters. He avoids thinking of the past, but what he once lived through comes back to haunt him when he sees his wife reading Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in bed one night. After that, there’s the Broadway play, and then the movie. The more time passes, the harder it is to escape Anne's story, and the more troubled Peter becomes.

I can see how a novel with this premise could easily have gone horribly wrong. It’s a daring story, but Ellen Feldman more than succeeds. I've seen the book criticized on the grounds that it doesn't try to recapture Peter's relationship with Anne, but for me that's exactly what makes it work.

The tone is exactly right, and the writing style suits the story perfectly – a lot of very strong emotions are just barely subdued; there's a quietness under which tumultuous feelings hide. The way she depicts Peter’s increasing paranoia is remarkable. As his memories of the War become harder to escape, he becomes obsessed with saving enough money to allow his family to run away in case they come back. He keeps the money in a safe at home and gets up to count it in the middle of the night. He’s also obsessed with not wasting food – there is a scene in particular that greatly touched and disturbed me. He yells at his wife and at his astonished small daughters and tells them that they don’t know what hunger is. It’s true, they don’t, and neither do I.

This book also allowed me to learn about all the events that followed the publication of Anne Frank’s book in America. I didn’t know that Otto Frank had been involved in a lawsuit. Peter’s emotional reaction to the whole thing was interesting to see, and Ellen Feldman raises some interesting question about how the diary was (and still is) received and responded to.

Each of the novel’s chapters is preceded by a citation. Some are from Anne Frank’s diary, some from Miep Gies’ Anne Frank Remembered (a book I didn’t know about until recently, when Trish reviewed it), some from other sources, and some from Carol Ann Lee’s The Secret Life of Otto Frank. This is another book I didn’t know about, but now I really want to read it. Has anyone read it? And if so, what did you think?

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank is a remarkable story about fear, isolation, loss, the weight of memory and what it means to remember – and how perhaps we remember some things in order to forget others more easily.

Some memorable passages:

In the DP camps, if they talked about the past at all, they talked about ifs. If I had been in the front of the line that morning and not at the end. If I had hung back instead of stepping forward. If I had not been the first to start unbuttoning my pants with the SS came through the train. Gradually the ifs led to theories. I survived because I was careful. I lived because I took chances. But beneath those convictions about the effectiveness of certain behavior, going hand-in-contradictory-hand with them, was a fearsome respect for chance.

That was what the audience wanted. The triumph of the human spirit, as my wife called it. The reassurance that in spite of everything, of people going to their death by the millions merely for the accident of their birth, of other people willing and eager to pry gold fillings from their mouths before they shovelled them into ovens, of ghoulish experiments on unanaesthetized individuals in the interest of medical science, of an entire people’s bloodthirsty conspiracy to cleanse the world of another entire people, in spite of it all, human beings are good at heart.

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