Editors at Doubleday, which printed 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 basic 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 impression 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 crew Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich to adapt the guide for the stage, arguing that their model downplayed Anne’s Jewish identification to cater to a large viewers. However even Levin was a part of the preliminary push to focus on the diary’s basic enchantment. In a assessment that ran on the quilt of The Instances E book Evaluation, Levin described Anne as an odd teenager whose emotions have been “of the purest universality.” The characters within the diary, he wrote, “may be dwelling subsequent door … their tensions and satisfactions are these of human character and development, wherever.”
It wasn’t simply the will to promote books that motivated this framing of the diary. It was additionally the existential anxiousness 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 Struggle I, Otto didn’t consider his faith would make him a goal of persecution — till it did. Whereas antisemitism in America took subtler kinds, similar to 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.
Beneath such circumstances, it’s hardly stunning that Jews and their allies would emphasize their commonalities with the remainder of society somewhat than their variations. In so doing, they fell right into a entice. As a way to attain the most important attainable viewers, the diary, and later the play and film primarily based upon it, needed to painting Anne’s Judaism as marginal to her identification. However the truth that a Jewish character couldn’t be seen as universally relatable reveals the extent to which antisemitism remained a social power.
With its essence as a doc of Jewish persecution diluted, Anne’s diary may do little to counteract that prejudice, which Otto appears to have finally realized. Whereas he wrote in a letter to Levin that the diary was “not a Jewish guide,” he went on to say that “not directly in fact [the play] should be Jewish … in order that it really works in opposition to anti-Semitism.”