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epitome of incomprehensibility
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...had the same middle name as me, but why is that what I notice??
Today's - now yesterday's - "Google Doodle" had a set of pictures about her. Usually those things mark anniversaries. One article said it was for the 75th year since her diary was published, another that it was for her birthday, what could have been her 93rd. That led me to click on things to find out which version was correct, and apparently both are.
But let's back up a little. Why would I be curious about her anyway? Because I think she's underrated as a writer, however weird that sounds.
She wasn't someone whose writing I'd read as a kid, though her life's outline I'd probably encountered around the time I read of Sadako Sasaki. Fifth grade. Maybe a little later.
I thought more about them both when I (allegedly) grew up. I thought it was sort of unfair, sort of limiting, to remember someone mainly for dying young due to the cruelties of war. Especially if the person in question was an artist...but that part's wrong-headed. Self-centred, like the middle-name thing.
Still, I think I was on to something. It led me to discover an interesting book of stories, at any rate. In May or June 2019, I was at the Richardson cottage and I picked up Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex, a collection of pieces she'd written that weren't directly related to her diary / planned autobiographical novel.
I'd seen it on the shelf before, but hadn't been interested enough to get into it. Now, though, I was thinking something like, "It's time we met, writer to writer, without me just thinking of you as a tragic story."
I brought it home, but didn't finish it until my family was there again, end of August and beginning of September.
At one point we were playing Settlers of Catan and I was reading it between turns (also making and photographing several architectural achievements with my not-in-use roads, settlements, and cities; the warmth of the cottage's lighting echoed the blocks' redness). I said the story I was reading was about a fairy or elf; Y. got interested, asking whether it incorporated any mythology. Had she done background research into Dutch or other legends?
I said probably not, that it was a fairly generic magical creature. Y. said that this was too bad, but quickly added that he didn't mean to say bad things about someone who'd died tragically.
This annoyed me a little, for the reasons outlined above. Plus, she could die a tragic death AND be a bad or boring writer.
But she wasn't. Some of the earlier stories were the sort you'd expect a kid to write, not that I finished most of the stories I started at that age (the "epic" Telewa_the_Blue_Jewel, for example). But the rest? "Fear" had a surreal, absorbing quality. "Happiness" intertwined brief narrative and almost hypnotic description (it sounded like the character was in a room you'd find in a dream) with musings on this topic.
It's a bit odd that the editor placed the second one the essay/composition section, while the first was in the story section. But categorization is often tricky. I'd say they were both stories exploring a theme and being experimental about form.
One of the best was "Blurry, the Explorer," about a runaway teddy bear. No, really. It sounded like a book for kids written by a seasoned author, not a teenager. There's humour, imagination, empathy, such as in the part where poor Blurry is picked up by a dog (and it took me a few sentences to realize it was a dog), e.g., "What would the monster do to him? He soon found out, for the beast, without a by-your-leave or with-your-leave, grabbed him by the neck and dragged him through the street" (59).
A little later, it takes the viewpoint of the dog: "The beast was suddenly at a loss to know why he carried this thing in his teeth. Carelessly, he dropped him [Blurry] and ran off" (59). This was so believably dog-like I grinned. How did a 14-year-old (the story's dated April 23, 1944) get so good at perspective??Observation, talent, practice, all of the above?
Speaking of perspective, she also uses this skillfully in her abandoned novel, "Cady's Life." Near the end she integrates references to the war and maybe that's what caused her to stop...either thinking that it was hard to reconcile the war's reality with the tone and topic of the narrative earlier, or considering that she'd better focus her efforts on chronicling her own experience. Maybe she thought adapting her diary might create a story she'd be more confident with, something she felt was more compelling. But I'm just speculating.
Anyway, perspective. In the last existing chapter, the narrative switches scenes to tell of the arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews in 1942. It starts off a little jerky and disjointed, but gets into its stride when it incorporates description - "Night after night she [Cady, the main character] heard cars driving down the street, she heard children screaming and doors being slammed" (93).
It's worth noting that the character Cady isn't herself Jewish, but she's terrified for her friend who is. For Frank to take this perspective is significant, I think - it separates Cady's experience from her own in some ways, giving her space to express her own fears and perhaps guilt for being "safe," while at the same time speaking through a character who affirms that she and Mary, her friend, are equals: "Was she better than Mary in any way? Weren't they exactly the same?" (95)
...That doesn't end the collection, though. The one that does is an essay called "Why?" that's a lighthearted argument for the importance of asking questions, e.g. "I must admit that this [asking questions] can be very tiresome, but I console myself with the idea that there is a saying that 'you must ask in order to know,' which couldn't be completely true, otherwise I'd be a professor by now" (154).
Even after such non-war-related stuff, though, I found myself going full circle: back to regret over her early death, this time because she could have done so much more. If she was this good at storytelling and rhetoric at 13-15, what else could she have written given a longer, fuller life?
But it's inspiring, not in a facile, you-can-do-this-too way, but as evidence of this girl and her family's perseverence, that she wrote what she did in such miserable conditions, that she kept at it, that her father pushed to publish her writing and seemed mostly to honour her wishes for her work.
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