December 2025 Book Review

Review of Ruth Franklin, The Many Lives of Anne Frank (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025).

by Rich Robinson

Ruth Franklin’s hot-off-the-press book is, to my knowledge, the most recent biography of Anne Frank you will find, and it will likely be helpful even for those who have read other treatments of her life. Ruth Franklin is a former editor at The New Republic and an adjunct professor at New York University.

Her book is divided into the biography proper (Anne Frank) and the “uses” to which she has been put (“Anne Frank”). Those uses include being set forth as an author, a celebrity, an ambassador, a survivor, and a political pawn. Her Diary has been the subject of endless books, discussions, and debates. Frank herself has been idealized, normalized, commodified, and further “-ized”:

Anne’s story, the novelist Cynthia Ozick writes, has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.”[1]

But on to the biography itself. Seven chapters detail her life from her birth in 1929, to her iconic death in a concentration camp in 1944. The chapters are titled Child, Refugee, Target, Witness, Lover, Artist, Prisoner, and Corpse. That succinctly summarizes the trajectory of her short life, fleshed out vividly in gripping prose. An “interlude” brings up the subject of the betrayal of those in hiding in the famous Annex, which has spawned numerous and inconclusive theories about who in fact gave up the family and others in hiding with them.

Under the “Lover” chapter, we find the reason that the Diary has lately been removed from the shelves of school libraries, at least in North America from where I am writing: namely, for its alleged bisexuality, especially in the graphic novel version. Anne’s account of her sexuality became - and still is - an explosive fulcrum around which various editions of the Diary developed, at one time including it, at another omitting it, and at yet another editing it in particular ways. And so, it is worth emphasizing here. It is the reason you may not find the Diary on your local library shelves, should you live in the United States. But as Franklin writes, quoting Elisheva Jacobson:

“Speculating over a minor’s sexuality - no matter who they are! - is predatory behavior, especially when said minor is in no position to comment. Labeling Anne without her consent is disgracing her memory.”  Although “predatory” goes too far, it seems presumptuous to impose a label on Anne’s developing sexuality. [2]

Part two examines the “uses” to which Frank has been put, beginning with “Author,” an account of her father Otto’s management of the Diary’s editing and publication. “Celebrity” chronicles the publication and reception of the Diary in post-World War II America. Here we learn about the development of a version for the stage, with a quasi-villain, the Jewish writer Meyer Levin. “Ambassador” begins with the 1955 opening of the controversial stage play, criticized among other things for taking Anne’s line about people being “good at heart” out of context and making it sound like her final pronouncement about things. Then - of course! - came the movie. Each iteration beyond the printed book seemed to move further and further from the facts. “Survivor” discusses the “dozens of works” of fiction that Anne Frank’s story has spawned, including counter-histories in which she literally does survive the Holocaust. Such works will have their ardent advocates as well as their determined detractors. Finally, “Pawn” ponders the way Anne’s story has been utilized in the service of numerous political causes, including in Japan and in anti-Zionist circles, thereby critically highlighting the tension between reading the Diary as a Jewish story and/or as a universal one.

A series of intriguing “Interludes” punctuate the second part. A young Ethiopian man finds the Diary and translates it into the language of Tigrinya. A rock album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is inspired by, or perhaps inhabited by, the Diary. Then there is Otto Frank, a one-man theatrical production performed by Roger Guenveur Smith, who is, surprisingly, Black. A film, The Book of Ruth, finds Anne in old age, the secret about her identity suspected by her granddaughter.

This is an excellent book in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. The issues that surround Anne Frank herself spill over into questions about Jewish particularity vis-à-vis universal applicability, as well as questions about what responsibility we have to the memory of those who are gone.

[1] P. 7, Kindle edition.

[2] Elisheva Jacobson, “Stop Calling Anne Frank Your Bisexual Icon,” Hey Alma, July 8, 2020. Quoted on p. 119 of the Kindle edition.