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Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. 254 pp. $28.00, ISBN 0-520-20124-8.
Meyer Levin, the author of The Old Bunch (1937), Compulsion (1955), The Fanatic (1964), The Obsession (1973), and numerous other works of fiction and non-fictional prose, was a well known and widely read American writer of the postwar period. Today, he is remembered, if at all, less for his own books, most of which are out of print, than for his lengthy and disputatious involvement with Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. It is Levin's passionate connection to the famous diary that is the center of Lawrence Graver's attention in the book under review here.
Levin was one of the early readers of the diary in its French translation and was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of American readers through a prominent review he wrote for the Neiv York Times Book Review and articles he placed elsewhere. He took it upon himself to serve as an intermediary for Otto Frank, the father of the diarist, with American publishers (most of whom rejected the book); persuaded Otto Frank that a stage version of the diary would bring it to the attention of a wider Audience; and set about himself to write such a piece for the popular theater, only to have it turned down by a series of potential producers (the extremely successful Goodrich and Hackett version later proved Levin right). This rejection had a radically destabilizing effect on his sense of himself as a writer and a Jew and propelled him to wage a thirty year fight in defense of his play and the memory of the murdered Jewish girl that it enshrined. During this long and bitter campaign, he fought with countless people - in addition to Otto Frank, these included numerous producers, lawyers, agents, journalists and other writers, and assorted friends - in an obsessive and largely fruitless effort to have his version of Anne Frank's diary brought before the public. He saw himself as the victim of a vicious conspiracy, organized by Lillian Hellman and others on the left and directed not only against himself but more broadly against Jewish interests in...