Meyer Levin's Anne Frank obsession

Suppose you had a vision that you were forbidden to express? Or suppose the law prevented you from observing the vision of an artist you admire and respect?

Rinne Groff's Compulsion, currently at the Public Theater in New York, concerns the author Meyer Levin's long struggle to stage his own idiosyncratic vision of The Diary of Anne Frank. To Carol Rocamora, writing last week in BSR, Groff's play "serves as a sobering reminder of the fine line between dedication and fanatical obsession (in the theater as well as in politics and history)."

But to my mind, there's a larger point to Levin's travails. The aggrieved party in this case isn't merely Meyer Levin but anyone who's curious to sample Levin's vision of the Holocaust heroine Anne Frank, as opposed to the "authorized" version. For the last 30 years of his life, Levin was like a mother carrying an unborn child— and an unborn child diminishes us all, for who knows what that child might have contributed to the world?

No Jewish market?

Levin (1905-1981) is best remembered today as a moderately successful novelist, especially for Compulsion, his 1956 novelization of the Leopold-Loeb murder case of 1924. As a teenager, Levin resolved to become a great American writer; but the subject closest to his heart and mind— the tensions of American Jewish life— held little interest to book and magazine publishers of the 1920s and '30s (hard as that may be to imagine today, when Jews buy 25% of all hard-cover books published in the U.S.).

"It was felt that non-Jewish readers would not care to identify with Jewish fictional characters," Levin recalled in 1970, "and that even Jewish readers preferred to identify with "'real Americans' in fiction."

As a correspondent in Europe during World War II, Levin was among the first Americans to see the dead bodies and walking skeletons at Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. In his horror Levin believed he had found his mission in life: to bear witness to what he called "the greatest systematic mass murder in the history of mankind."

Yet despite the steady stream of dispatches he sent back to America, Levin later confessed, "From the beginning I realized I would never be able to write the story of the Jews of Europe. This tragic epic cannot be written by a stranger to the experience." Some day, he hoped, "a teller would arise" from amongst the victims.

The diary's rejection

When Levin read a French translation of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1950, he concluded that here was the "teller" he was searching for. At that time, the Dutch text of the diary had been translated into French and German, but in England and America it had been rejected by 15 publishers, largely in the belief that no market existed for "special-interest war books." Thus Levin seized upon the Diary as a means of performing a mitzvah and promoting his own flagging literary career simultaneously.

Levin wrote to Otto Frank, Anne's surviving father and the custodian of the book, offering to translate the Diary into English and to promote it in the U.S. He also offered to adapt the Diary for stage or screen— an idea that hadn't occurred to Frank.

In the next months, Levin wrote scores of magazine articles about the Diary as well as letters to agents, producers and directors. When his lobbying finally helped attract a publisher, Levin— without divulging his personal interest in the work— wrote a rapturous front-page review in the New York Times Book Review that transformed the Diary into a nationwide sensation virtually overnight.

The blander gentile version

But Levin's draft of a stage adaptation was subsequently rejected by Broadway producers, with Otto Frank's tacit consent. The successful play that opened on Broadway in 1955 and enjoys constant revivals even today was written by the gentile husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

Levin took this rejection personally at two levels. It was not merely that he felt cheated out of his rightful due by a powerful cabal consisting of producers, law firms, publishers and Otto Frank himself; it was also that his gritty and unabashedly Jewish vision of Anne Frank had been elbowed to the sidelines by a blander and more commercially palatable Anne. In his fury he came to believe that his play had been "killed by the same arbitrary disregard that brought an end to Anne and six million others."

In 1952 Levin filed a lawsuit that wasn't legally settled until 1959 and, indeed, was never morally settled as far as Levin was concerned: Although Levin at that point signed away any rights to the Diary or to produce his play, he continued to revisit the dispute in a novel (The Fanatic, 1964), in a memoir (The Obsession, 1973), and by encouraging bootleg performances of his stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Conflicting visions

The story of this obsession embraces the full complexity of the human creative process. Levin's problem with his perceived tormentors (unlike Anne Frank's problem with Hitler) was not a matter of villains and victims; it was a conflict among fallible but well-intentioned humans holding valid but different approaches to a literary work.

To Levin, one generation removed from the shtetl, Anne Frank symbolized the six million innocent Jews who were slaughtered solely because they were Jewish; her diary was a distinctly Jewish document; and only a Jewish writer could do justice to her persecution. To Otto Frank, a middle-class German Jew thoroughly assimilated into gentile society (notwithstanding his persecution by Hitler), Anne's story was not specifically Jewish but universal, and for that reason he preferred the perspective of a gentile playwright. To the sophisticated but also commercially savvy Garson Kanin, who directed the Broadway production, the Diary was not a depressing book about Jewish persecution but "an exalting comment on the human spirit."

These disagreements should surprise or disturb no one: Any genuine work of art, by definition, will inspire multiple interpretations. The problem— the obsession— arose from the fact that Levin the artist was legally precluded— first by copyright laws and later by the terms of his settlement— from expressing and staging a vision that had gripped his psyche.

"'Like suing Joan of Arc'

Levin's 1952 stage adaptation was in fact more honest and more faithful to Anne Frank's book than the sanitized Goodrich-Hackett version, and more successful in conveying the political and religious context of her predicament. By contrast, the feel-good script produced three years later by Goodrich and Hackett was hokey and watered down, but it did reach a huge audience. Beyond that, the Goodrich-Hackett play caused audiences the world over (and especially in Germany) to accept the reality of the Holocaust, thereby creating a market for the abundance of Holocaust literature that has flourished ever since.

Of course Levin was wacky to equate his suffering with Anne Frank's; and filing a lawsuit against Anne Frank's father, as Levin's friend Harry Golden told him, was a public relations blunder equivalent to suing Joan of Arc's father. But Otto Frank and the play's Broadway producers were equally myopic to treat Anne's diary as a mere commercial property. Levin's lawsuit was no less ludicrous than his adversaries' belief that they could or should legally prevent Levin from expressing his vision of a cultural icon.

A symbol or a human?

Yet in another sense Otto Frank and Garson Kanin were right to reject Levin's "special pleading" (Kanin's phrase) in behalf of Jews and to universalize Anne Frank's story to embrace all human suffering. How, after all, can we justify the survival of Judaism (or any philosophy or civilization) unless it offers something meaningful to the world beyond its immediate constituency?

Levin was also mistaken to perceive Anne Frank as a symbol of Holocaust victims. She wasn't a symbol; she was a unique human being, just like the six million other victims. Yet in the hands of Levin and subsequently of the Hacketts and many other writers, her words and ideas did indeed force the world to confront first the Holocaust, then the meaning of contemporary Jewish identity and ultimately the aspirations and neuroses of human civilization.

The ultimate issue here is not whose interpretation of Anne Frank was correct. To quote a character in Inherit the Wind— another 1950s Broadway play that pasteurized a historical event (the Scopes trial) for mass consumption— "Ideas are like babies; they have to be born." Meyer Levin's allotted three-score-and-ten expired in a paranoiac funk in 1981, but as Groff's play amply testifies, the labors of this quintessentially unreasonable man are still bearing fruit beyond, I suspect, his wildest imaginings.♦


To read responses, click here.