By J.T. Stone | February 19, 2025
Ruth Franklin (middle) discussing her new book, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank,” in the University at Albany’s Multipurpose Room earlier this month. The event was part of the New York State Writers Institute’s 2025 author speaker series.
Photo Credit: J.T. Stone / The ASP
As a child, biographer Ruth Franklin remembers reading Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” to learn about the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Now as a critically acclaimed author, Franklin is the first Jewish biographer to publish a book exploring Anne’s life – bringing new context to better understand one of the most well-known personal narratives in history.
Anne’s diary details the 13-year-old’s experience hiding from the Nazis with her family in an Amsterdam attic for two years. It has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 70 languages – making it one of the most well-known literary works to arise from the Holocaust – according to the Anne Frank Center.
Franklin’s new book, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank,” which was published by Yale University Press last month, explores how the young girl went from “ordinary teenager to cultural icon.”
At a New York State Writers Institute event hosted in the University at Albany’s Multipurpose Room earlier this month, Franklin spoke to over 100 students, faculty and community members about her book-writing journey. She described her approach to telling Anne’s story in a fresh way, misconceptions about the diary’s contents and why preserving Anne’s identity as a Jewish girl remains important to fighting antisemitism today.
“Anne Frank is so totemic in our imagination. She is such a touchstone for not just Jewish women, not just for girls, but for so many people who read her diary and identify with it,” Franklin said. “However, she becomes a symbol that in many ways is something completely removed from her historical reality and from who she was as a human being.”
From Shirley Jackson to Anne Frank
In 2016 Franklin released her first biography that explored the life and literature of Shirley Jackson, a 20th-century horror and mystery novelist, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was described by The Guardian as “a feminist reappraisal of a tortured genius of American gothic.”
Nearly a decade after publishing her first biography, Franklin said she struggled choosing the topic of her next project. She told the UAlbany crowd she was initially discouraged from writing about Anne, calling literature surrounding her life a “crowded field.” However, Franklin said her narrative approach was rooted in writing “alongside Anne rather than over her,” such as by weaving together a variety of other voices and perspectives to provide historical context about what was happening beyond the walls of the Franks’ hiding place.
This included researching testimonies from Anne’s friends, classmates, teachers and neighbors, as well as government officials and Holocaust survivors to provide additional context about the ways in which Jewish people were persecuted during World War II.
“With Shirley Jackson, I wanted to write about her to recuperate her as an important figure in American literature and put her life in literary context,” Franklin said. “Anne Frank doesn’t need me to make her important. The world already knows who she is.”
Redefining literary storytelling
Franklin said a common misconception about Anne’s diary is that it was an “accidental” document of history. In fact, she said Anne intentionally edited her diary with the hope that it would become a testimony of the Holocaust, including by removing many personal passages in which she wrote about clothes she wished to buy, conflicts with her classmates and the romance she had with Peter van Pels, a boy whose family hid in the Secret Annex with the Franks.
Anne’s diary was originally published in the Netherlands in 1947 at the request of her father, Otto Frank, who chose to publish these disregarded entries so readers worldwide could feel a personal connection to his daughter, Franklin said.
Along with providing first-hand testimony of the Holocaust, Franklin credited the 13-year-old with helping to establish the genre of young adult literature.
“She makes the idea of a teenage girl as a narrator legitimate,” Franklin said, noting that Anne’s diary was the first book published in Japan to mention a menstrual cycle. “When Otto wanted to publish Anne’s diary, people literally said to him, ‘Who is going to read that?’ The answer is, I guess, 100 million people all around the world over the last 80 years.”
However, there have been concerns in recent years that portions of Anne’s diary are not appropriate for children. In one passage, Anne writes about asking to touch a friend’s breast during a sleepover and goes on to describe her affection for the female body. Conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty have argued that students should not be exposed to this material, which they call “LGBTQ content,” and have successfully banned a graphic novel adaptation of the diary depicting this account in school districts in Texas and Florida.
“It’s quite disingenuous when people from these groups say we’re not censoring Anne Frank, just this new graphic novel, because this story has existed in every publication of the diary in the United States,” Franklin said. “I see it as anti-semitic to target the diary in this way and I also see it as anti-gay. I think it’s a tragedy that these groups are hoisting their agenda on kids in this country.”
Erasing Jewish identity
Otto didn’t want his daughter’s diary to be perceived as a “Jewish book,” but instead one that could inspire people of all religions and backgrounds to fight for peace, according to Franklin. His dream came true, as Anne’s diary has influenced many non-Jewish groups in their fight for equal rights, including anti-apartheid activists in South Africa like Nelson Mandela who read the diary while imprisoned.
But Otto also wanted his daughter’s life to serve as a reminder of the threat of antisemitism to prevent another Holocaust from taking shape. However, the significance of Anne’s Jewish identity has been the subject of controversy in various adaptations of her diary, such as a 1955 Broadway play that was accused of downplaying the diary’s Jewish content to “universalize” the show.
Franklin said efforts like this paint Anne as a “poster child for oppression” instead of the unique human being she was. Franklin also said she believes Anne’s life has been exploited by figures across the political spectrum who assign her political positions she couldn’t have had in order to support their agendas, diminishing her humanity in the process.
“Without also appreciating her individuality, to say that today’s Anne Frank is a refugee from the Middle East, a Latin American migrant or whomever else we might imagine her to be plays into the hands of those who persecuted her,” Franklin wrote in a recent opinion essay published by The New York Times. “The erasure of the specifics of Anne Frank’s life and death risks implying that antisemitism is no longer a destructive force.”
After the hour-long event, Paul Grondahl, director of the New York State Writers Institute, said in an interview that the institute hoped this talk would further people’s understanding of the Holocaust in order to better recognize present-day injustices.
“Ruth didn’t want to be overtly political,” Grondahl said, “but I think in this time of authoritarian rule around the world, and certainly beginning in this country, I think it’s really timely.”
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