Looking for Anne & Finding Meyer, Part 3

2,924 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here ^[3], Part 2 here ^[4])

It was as though he was so filled with hatred that he no longer knew where to direct his bitterness.

That was familiar. It was the hatred of oneself included in a blind fury at a senseless world. It was our Jewish hatred.[1] ^[5]

The Compulsion is Levin’s second autobiographical work and was, I suspect, written to repair the damage to his reputation that his embroilment in the Anne Frank project had caused. I have no way of determining whether his story is true or not, so I’ll just summarize his version of events. According to Levin, he first encountered Anne Frank’s diary via its French translation (1950), which his second wife, Tereska, had bought for him. The couple was living in Paris at that time.

Tereska Torrès ^[6] was likewise a Jewish novelist, and is credited with writing the first pro-lesbian pulp-fiction novel to be published in America. So if we assume Levin to be the real author of the diary, we certainly should not overlook his wife. After all, revisionists have pointed out that diary-Anne appears to have shown lesbian tendencies, as well as plainly perverted ones. Oh, and guess what? Tereska wrote a diary ^[7] of her own.

Did Levin and Torrès perhaps collaborate in writing the diary? Since I don’t speak French, the only language Torrès’ diary has been published in, maybe somebody else would like to pick up the thread there.

Coming into my hands soon after I had written, in In Search, that “a teller would arise,” the Diary was like a direct, personal answer. It was Tereska who put the book into my hands, shortly after it had been published in French . . .[2] ^[8]

What a coincidence, eh?

It was then, in Antibes, that Tereska gave me the Diary, just published in French from the original Dutch. The book had received warm reviews and attained a succès d’estime, without, however, attracting a wide readership. As the Diary dealt with what so absorbed me, she had bought it — and from the first page the seizure was complete. Here was the voice I had been waiting for, the voice from amongst themselves, the voice from the mass grave. As I read on, I became certain — this was the needed document. For here, instead of a remote story-book Jewry, was an urban family with which every American reader could feel empathy. “There I go, with my sister, with my mother and father.”[3] ^[9]

Again according to Levin, he contacted Otto Frank after reading the diary:

I wrote to Otto Frank at once, in care of the French publisher. It was a simple, practical note, for throughout my contact with survivors the feeling had grown in me that expressions of commiseration were embarrassing to both sides, perhaps in some way presumptuous, since no expression could be adequate. I quite simply asked whether publication in English was arranged, whether Frank might want help with publisher contacts, and even offered, if need be, to do the translation, though it would have to be from the French.

Very quickly there came a reply from Otto Frank, to Tereska and myself. For she, too, had impulsively written him of how deeply she had been touched.[4] ^[10]

Is this realistic? Wouldn’t the Levins have written a joint letter, or at least told each other that they planned to write to Otto Frank? Do these letters still exist? At any rate, a “copious and warm” correspondence consequently developed between Levin and Frank. Levin “saw” the diary as a “play and film,” he wrote to Frank, and although the latter did not share his vision, he trusted Levin to go ahead.

While Levin sought an American publisher for the diary — Otto Frank’s efforts had failed because the book was considered “too heartrending” — he also began to look for producers for his planned stage play. After a British publisher had been found and two American publishing houses had made offers as well, Otto Frank visited the Levins in Paris. According to Meyer Levin, the visit was very open and friendly. Only in hindsight did several things about Frank become clear to him.

Quoting Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of Otto Frank’s character as seen in the diary, Levin speaks of a regressive quality, a child-like impulse to hide or to return to the womb (an analysis he would return to in a different case), in the whole plan of going into hiding. There is certainly something to it. Frank had all the right connections to get his family out of the Netherlands and into the United States; in his youth, he had spent time there with a friend, Nathan Straus, Jr. ^[13] of Macy’s, and during his visit in Paris he had also visited a member of the local Rothschild family. Otto Frank was not a nobody, and that would later play a major role in Levin’s perception of the stage play affair.

Suspicious natures might jump at the fact that Levin, in the plagiarism trial, mentioned having met Otto Frank in person twice, when in reality, as Frank’s lawyers pointed out, it had been only once. Aha! A Freudian slip! Levin explains in his book that he had split that long day in Paris in his memory into two days — which is not at all unlikely. If you read up on eyewitnesses and the tricks our memory plays on us, this is a rather common occurrence. But, of course, it could also point to an earlier meeting of the two men.

Fast forward to 1955, and the relationship between Meyer Levin and Otto Frank had turned sour:

Continuing from my war correspondent experiences my intense absorption with the Holocaust, I had helped Otto Frank to secure publication for the Diary in English, and had dramatized it. Mr. Frank had come to New York, to see to the authenticity of the staging, but at that point the prominent playwright Lillian Hellman ^[14] and her producer, Kermit Bloomgarden ^[15], had persuaded him, he told me, that as a novelist I was no dramatist, that my work was unstageworthy, that it had to be discarded and another version written.[5] ^[16]

This time around, Levin’s enemies weren’t fascists and anti-Semites, but underground commies running Hollywood, Broadway, and the press. Apparently, Jewish Communists and Zionists didn’t get along very well at the time. According to Levin, the Communists who had survived the “red purge” now had their own reverse-McCarthyism blacklists, and Levin, with his emphasis on Zionism, became once again too Jewish to publish.

Alternatively, it was the rich, sophisticated, assimilated German Jews such as Otto Frank and his associates ganging up on the Yid — the poor, despised, backward Eastern European Jew. Or maybe it was both. With Levin’s neurosis, it’s hard to tell.

The Bloomgarden-produced play ^[17], written by Frances ^[18] and Albert Hackett ^[19], premiered in 1955 and was a success. Levin, already smarting from having been sidelined, watched it and recognized several scenes that could only have come from his original script, thanks to Lillian Hellman’s involvement in both projects. But for him, there was something much worse going on in the version he had to watch unfold on stage:

The transference had to be true in its deepest rather than its surface sense; it had to be true especially in its Jewish essence, for this was the particularism that gave Anne Frank her universality. . . .

It would have been better . . . if, in the only way for Anne Frank to be reincarnated, to speak and live again briefly each time she was created on the stage, she could have been allowed to be truly herself . . . There would have been a certain cleansing value, too, . . .  in having her passionate outcry as a Jew, her declaration of faith, heard by tens of millions all over the world. And the censorship of those words was indeed a shame, for they epitomized all our baffled striving for meaning in the Holocaust, the entire tormenting question of God and the Six Million. These, then, are the stage-censored words in The Diary of a Young Girl that crystallize the whole issue:

Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God who has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or just . . . representatives of any other country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.

These words, so purely written by an adolescent girl, are actually forbidden utterance on the stage, even now, and it is over this I am obsessed.

In their place Anne Frank is made to say, “We’re not the only people that have had to suffer. There have always been people that have had to . . . Sometimes one race . . . sometimes another.“[6] ^[20]

There is every possibility that Levin simply became obsessed with Anne Frank’s story because of what he considered the de-Jewification of the play. He seems to have been that kind of high-strung person. In his books, he keeps going on about publishers rejecting his novels and articles because they were too Jewish. Reverse McCarthyism hit him, because Jew. And apparently, he once told Otto Frank in a letter, “You have been my Hitler,” something he later claimed in a perfect manifestation of E. Michael Jones’ dream trope not to remember clearly: “I am no longer sure whether I sent the letter.”[7] ^[21]

Also, according to Levin, his wife who by that point was sick and tired of his obsession with Anne Frank gave him an ultimatum: It was either Anne or her. He went through four therapists trying to cure his paranoia. He was clearly mentally unbalanced. Which, on the other hand, is interesting. One of the things Anne Frank revisionists have pointed out is the fact that diary-Anne was “popping” daily doses of valerian pills.[8] ^[22] Meyer Levin surely must have taken some kind of medication for his mental problems. (Simon Sheppard, on the other hand, suggested that Anne herself might have had mental issues. Alternatively, the pills could have been used to shut up “the incorrigible chatterbox” . . .)

The whole affair about who plagiarized what and who blacklisted Meyer Levin is absolutely farcical: Jews out-Jewing each other. Almost everyone involved was Jewish, and the whole dispute erupted over the removal of particularly Jewish passages of the diary from the stage adaptation, which is the reason why Levin at one point requested settlement by a Jewish council of elders. You can almost see his worldly adversaries rolling their eyes.

In the middle of all that, Levin got hit with a lawsuit of his own. Nathan Leopold — of German Jewish extraction — of the Leopold and Loeb case ^[23], whose story Levin had novelized in Compulsion ^[24] partly in order to get him released from prison, made it his first business after having been granted parole to sue Levin for violation of privacy, defamation, and unjustly appropriating his story for profit. You can’t make this up.

In Levin’s mind, however, the case had in reality not been so much about the perfect crime but — what a surprise — about Leopold’s Jewishness:

Given my own absorption, I was bound to seek this in the Jewish identity problem, but again, the fact that this was my own absorption, my own tendency, probably inviting distortion, did not in itself make it poetically untrue. Even if it might be untrue of these particular individuals, Leopold and Loeb, if what I drew from the material made a form in itself — wouldn’t it nevertheless be a truth? — A truth reinforced, so to speak, because it was drawn from, and fitted, a known set of events, character traits and even fantasies.

And the central king-slave fantasy, wasn’t that the case of the Jew — exalted and despised?

One day, out there in the snow-covered isolation of the Westport house, the basic symbols of the act of murder aligned themselves. I experienced a literary elation, the sense of creative rightness. The burial — by stuffing the boy’s body into the culvert — a return to the womb. With it, in Leopold’s case, an identification with his victim, a self-murder, as I had always felt it to be, a rejection of life as he had been born into it, a rejection of being a Jew. The mutilation of the penis, a savage response to circumcision, interconnected with the early traumatic incident when the neighborhood toughies had pulled his pants down, and linked also to his enslaved homosexuality.[9] ^[25]

Is Levin saying that he is yet again remaking a real-life person into the Jew Levin wants him (or her) to be? “It is my truth.” ^[26]

Let’s examine other hints that might point to Levin’s authorship of Anne Frank’s diary:

But why, I have ceaselessly been reproached, why should you, personally, be so disturbed over this? After all, the Diary itself was not your creation! An opposing lawyer was given to quipping, “Levin has the hallucination that he actually wrote the Diary.”[10] ^[27]

Okay, that one was too easy. But it’s still funny.

Amazon reviewer “Jayne1955,” while never doubting the diary’s authenticity, unwittingly might have had the clearest insight into the heart of the matter when she wrote about Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary ^[28]:

This is very well written, but it is still too biased toward Levin, who insisted that he knew Anne Frank better than her father did . . . Part of the problem has always been that there was a great urge to make Anne the face of Jewish children lost in the holocaust, and the Franks were by no means Orthodox. Otto Frank was never even bar mitzvahed.

Good point, Jayne. So where do Anne’s ruminations about tikkun olam ^[29] come from? Who had a deeply personal and emotional interest in making her “the face of Jewish children lost in the holocaust”?
Now, contrary to most revisionists I don’t consider it out of the question that a teenaged girl could develop a religious and/or ethnic awareness of her own. It would depend. How exposed was Anne to Jewish “culture,” for lack of a better term, before moving to the annex? What about the people she lived with there, aside from her father — did they perhaps contribute to the strengthening of Anne’s ethnic awareness? Was there relevant literature she might have had access to?

Anne was about that age, that Sturm und Drang phase, when idealism soars in young people. There might not be anything suspicious about Anne’s ruminations on Jewishness at all, but simply a romantic ideal.

So did Meyer Levin write Anne Frank’s diary? It’s hard to say. A novelist is, of course, uniquely enabled to craft a fictional persona, and Levin did take artistic license even in his autobiographical work. But based on the image he presents of himself, especially in The Obsession, the question naturally arises: Would Levin in his frequent, uncontrolled outbursts, tirades, crazy letters, and ads really have been able to refrain from dumping the hard truth on all his perceived and real enemies — that his version of Anne Frank was the only genuine one because her words had been written by him? Maybe; he was an ardent Zionist, after all. Or maybe he did speak out, and his revelation was, like many things, hushed up. We only have his word to go by, after all.

Or maybe, judging from the persona in his two autobiographical books, he was simply hopelessly biased. In 1950, he believed in the lampshades because they fitted his idea of what had been going on in the concentration camps. Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, he visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and didn’t notice any of the discrepancies other writers would notice, because he was too focused on what he considered the erasure of the Jewish essence from Anne’s story. Why would he, when he first read the French translation of The Diary of Anne Frank, have had any doubt about its absolute veracity?

There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that, after all of Levin’s agony and isolation over the loss of Anne’s Jewishness in stage and film adaptations and even the Anne Frank House, his faction eventually carried the day. In our time, Anne Frank is very much a Jewish victim, and don’t you dare doubt it! Today, Levin’s Zionism has returned with a vengeance. Ironically, it is now Otto Frank who, after his death, is being used to deflect all sorts of questions. The confusion about those different versions of Anne’s diary? Blame Otto and his desire for privacy. Where do the five “new” pages of the diary suddenly come from? Oh, Otto left them with someone for safekeeping. If the diary really is a hoax that Otto Frank was involved in, then I guess karma is a bitch.

Notes

[1] ^[32] Meyer Levin, In Search (1950), p. 227.

[2] ^[33] Meyer Levin, The Obsession (1973), Kindle edition, loc. 357, 366.

[3] ^[34] Levin, The Obsession, loc. 406.

[4] ^[35] Ibid., loc. 397, 406, 414.

[5] ^[36] Ibid., loc. 28.

[6] ^[37] Ibid., loc. 331, 340, 349.

[7] ^[38] Ibid., loc. 482.

[8] ^[39] Karl Haemers, Introduction to Ikuo Suzuki, Unmasking Anne Frank, p. 19.

[9] ^[40] Levin, The Obsession, loc. 1531, 1539.

[10] ^[41] Ibid., loc. 432, 440.