The Most Popular Non-Fiction Bestsellers Books - Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl AKA The Diary of Anne Frank Info, Plot Summary, Review and Anne Frank Biography
Author: Anne Frank
Book: The Diary of a Young Girl (304 Pgs.)
On her thirteenth birthday, Anne Frank’s parents give her a diary. She’s excited because she wants someone, or something, in which to confide all of her secret thoughts. Even though she has a rich social life, she feels misunderstood by everyone she knows. Anne starts writing about daily events, her thoughts, school grades, boys, all that. But, within a month, her entire life changes.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Review
Reviewed by Meyer Levin
ANNE FRANK'S diary is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label ''classic,'' and yet no lesser designation serves. For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over from insight and enjoyment.
The diary is a classic on another level, too. It happened that during the two years that mark the most extraordinary changes in a girl's life, Anne Frank lived in astonishing circumstances: she was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms behind her father's place of business in Amsterdam. Thus, the diary tells the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of being taken by the Nazis. It is, in reality, the kind of document that John Hersey invented for ''The Wall.''
There is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors. Reality can prove surprisingly different from invented reality, and Anne Frank's diary simply bubbles with amusement, love, discovery. It has its share of disgust, its moments of hatred, but it is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature. These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.
Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment -- Anne Frank's voice becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls. It is difficult to say in which respect the book is more ''important,'' but one forgets the double significance of this document in experiencing it as an intimate whole, for one feels the presence of this child-becoming-woman as warmly as though she was snuggled on a near-by sofa.
Her father had already brought the family out of Germany in 1933. In June, 1942, a few weeks after the diary begins, the SS sends a call-up for Anne's sister, Margot, and the family goes into hiding. ''I began to pack some of our most vital belongings into a school satchel . . . this diary, then hair curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a comb, old letters.'' The Van Daans, with their 16-year-old son Peter, join the Franks. Later, because ''Daddy says we must save another person if we can,'' an elderly dentist named Dussel is squeezed into the Secret Annex. He gets Anne's bed; she sleeps on a settee lengthened by chairs.
A born writer, Anne zestfully portrays the Annex inhabitants, with all their flaws and virtues. The common life effect which Mr. Hersey sought to suggest in ''The Wall'' here flowers with utter spontaneity. But Anne Frank's diary probes far deeper than ''The Wall'' into the core of human relations, and succeeds better than ''The Wall'' in bringing us an understanding of life under threat.
And this quality brings it home to any family in the world today. Just as the Franks lived in momentary fear of the Gestapo's knock on their hidden door, so every family today lives in fear of the knock of war. Anne's diary is a great affirmative answer to the life-question of today, for she shows how ordinary people, within this ordeal, consistently hold to the greater human values.
Two years passed in disciplined activities. The hidden ones kept busy with smuggled correspondence courses in speed shorthand, in Latin, in nursing; Dussel even attempted dental operations, hilariously described by Anne. She herself studied mythology, ballet, ''family trees,'' while keeping up her schoolwork. She records the family disputes -- Mrs. Van Daan violently resisting the sale of her fur coat, only to see it smoked up in black market tobacco! And the comic moments, as when her father lies on the floor trying to overhear an important business conference downstairs; Anne flattens herself beside him, lending a sharp ear. But business is so dull, she falls asleep.
Most wondrous of all is her love affair. Like a flower under a stone fulfilling itself, she came to her first love in her allotted time. ''I give myself completely. But one thing, He may touch my face, but no more.'' All is told, from her potato-fetching devices for going up to Peter's attic lair, to the first misplaced kiss, on her ear. And the parents worrying about the youngsters trysting up there in the dusk, sitting by the window over the canal. And her fears that her older sister is lonely and jealous, leading to an amazing exchanges of letters between the two girls, in those hidden rooms. Finally, there is even the tender disillusionment with Peter, as Anne reaches toward maturity, and a character understanding replaces the first tug of love. In all this there are perceptions in depth, striving toward mother, father, sister, containing love-anguish of the purest universality.
It is this unfolding psychological drama of a girl's growth, mingled with the physical danger of the group, that frees Anne's book from the horizontal effect of most diaries. Hers rises continuously, with the tension of a well-constructed novel.
The girl's last entries rather miraculously contain a climactic summation, a maturing self-analysis: ''If I'm quite serious, everyone thinks it's a comedy, and then I have to get out of it by turning into a joke,'' she remarks with typical adolescent self-consciousness. ''Finally, I twist my heart around again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside. . . . I am guided by the pure Anne within, but outside I'm nothing but a frolicsome little goat who's broken loose.''
This frolicsome little goat could write, ''It's twice as hard for us young ones to hold our ground, and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side, and do not know whether to believe in truth and right and God.
''It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. . . .
''I want to go on living even after my death,'' Anne wrote. ''I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.'' Hers was probably one of the bodies seen in the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, for in August, 1944, the knock came on that hidden door in Amsterdam. After the people had been taken away, Dutch friends found Anne's diary in the debris, and saved it.
There is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. But through her diary Anne goes on living. From Holland to France, to Italy, Spain. The Germans too have published her book. And now she comes to America. Surely she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.
The diary is a classic on another level, too. It happened that during the two years that mark the most extraordinary changes in a girl's life, Anne Frank lived in astonishing circumstances: she was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms behind her father's place of business in Amsterdam. Thus, the diary tells the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of being taken by the Nazis. It is, in reality, the kind of document that John Hersey invented for ''The Wall.''
There is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors. Reality can prove surprisingly different from invented reality, and Anne Frank's diary simply bubbles with amusement, love, discovery. It has its share of disgust, its moments of hatred, but it is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature. These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.
Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment -- Anne Frank's voice becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls. It is difficult to say in which respect the book is more ''important,'' but one forgets the double significance of this document in experiencing it as an intimate whole, for one feels the presence of this child-becoming-woman as warmly as though she was snuggled on a near-by sofa.
Her father had already brought the family out of Germany in 1933. In June, 1942, a few weeks after the diary begins, the SS sends a call-up for Anne's sister, Margot, and the family goes into hiding. ''I began to pack some of our most vital belongings into a school satchel . . . this diary, then hair curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a comb, old letters.'' The Van Daans, with their 16-year-old son Peter, join the Franks. Later, because ''Daddy says we must save another person if we can,'' an elderly dentist named Dussel is squeezed into the Secret Annex. He gets Anne's bed; she sleeps on a settee lengthened by chairs.
A born writer, Anne zestfully portrays the Annex inhabitants, with all their flaws and virtues. The common life effect which Mr. Hersey sought to suggest in ''The Wall'' here flowers with utter spontaneity. But Anne Frank's diary probes far deeper than ''The Wall'' into the core of human relations, and succeeds better than ''The Wall'' in bringing us an understanding of life under threat.
And this quality brings it home to any family in the world today. Just as the Franks lived in momentary fear of the Gestapo's knock on their hidden door, so every family today lives in fear of the knock of war. Anne's diary is a great affirmative answer to the life-question of today, for she shows how ordinary people, within this ordeal, consistently hold to the greater human values.
Two years passed in disciplined activities. The hidden ones kept busy with smuggled correspondence courses in speed shorthand, in Latin, in nursing; Dussel even attempted dental operations, hilariously described by Anne. She herself studied mythology, ballet, ''family trees,'' while keeping up her schoolwork. She records the family disputes -- Mrs. Van Daan violently resisting the sale of her fur coat, only to see it smoked up in black market tobacco! And the comic moments, as when her father lies on the floor trying to overhear an important business conference downstairs; Anne flattens herself beside him, lending a sharp ear. But business is so dull, she falls asleep.
Most wondrous of all is her love affair. Like a flower under a stone fulfilling itself, she came to her first love in her allotted time. ''I give myself completely. But one thing, He may touch my face, but no more.'' All is told, from her potato-fetching devices for going up to Peter's attic lair, to the first misplaced kiss, on her ear. And the parents worrying about the youngsters trysting up there in the dusk, sitting by the window over the canal. And her fears that her older sister is lonely and jealous, leading to an amazing exchanges of letters between the two girls, in those hidden rooms. Finally, there is even the tender disillusionment with Peter, as Anne reaches toward maturity, and a character understanding replaces the first tug of love. In all this there are perceptions in depth, striving toward mother, father, sister, containing love-anguish of the purest universality.
It is this unfolding psychological drama of a girl's growth, mingled with the physical danger of the group, that frees Anne's book from the horizontal effect of most diaries. Hers rises continuously, with the tension of a well-constructed novel.
The girl's last entries rather miraculously contain a climactic summation, a maturing self-analysis: ''If I'm quite serious, everyone thinks it's a comedy, and then I have to get out of it by turning into a joke,'' she remarks with typical adolescent self-consciousness. ''Finally, I twist my heart around again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside. . . . I am guided by the pure Anne within, but outside I'm nothing but a frolicsome little goat who's broken loose.''
This frolicsome little goat could write, ''It's twice as hard for us young ones to hold our ground, and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side, and do not know whether to believe in truth and right and God.
''It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. . . .
''I want to go on living even after my death,'' Anne wrote. ''I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.'' Hers was probably one of the bodies seen in the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, for in August, 1944, the knock came on that hidden door in Amsterdam. After the people had been taken away, Dutch friends found Anne's diary in the debris, and saved it.
There is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. But through her diary Anne goes on living. From Holland to France, to Italy, Spain. The Germans too have published her book. And now she comes to America. Surely she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.
Most Popular Non-Fiction Autobiographical Bestsellers Books - Anne Frank:The Diary of a Young Girl AKA The Diary of Anne Frank * 2015@http://albbookspreviews.blogspot.pt
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