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An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary

University of California Press

The American writer Meyer Levin first read Le Journal de Anne Frank in August of 1950, when he was living with his second wife, Tereska Torres, and two children in the upstairs of a bus driver's cottage on the Côte d'Azur near Antibes. Torres, herself a writer, had heard about the stir the translation from the Dutch had made when it was published in Paris that spring, and she bought a copy for her husband at a local bookstore. Years later she recalled what she said as she handed it to him:"Tiens, c'est un cadeau. Il paraît que c'est un livre extraordinaire. Le journal, tenu pendant la guerre, d'une petite fille morte à Bergen-Belsen, à quinze ans "—an offering that would haunt both of them in different ways for the rest of their lives.1 Reading Anne Frank's diary astonished and provoked Levin. Not only was the spirited young girl telling an engrossing story about herself and her family at a convulsive moment in recent European history, but her account and her fate unex-

Les maisons hantées de Meyer Levin , 42.

pectedly touched Levin's deepest feelings about his own identity as a Jew, an American, and a writer.

Levin was forty-four, and although he was reasonably well known as a novelist and newspaper correspondent, his position in the postwar literary world was far from secure. He was not, by his own admission, "much of a literary master. My gifts are basically in the urge towards honest expression and in empathy."2 "My readership," he told a friend at this time, is "faithful but not too numerous," and he spoke often of a constant "scrambling for income," of doing "a bit of everything" to earn a living: magazine articles, opinion columns, radio scripts, film and television work, translating, and ghostwriting. Two decades earlier, Levin had done a great deal of journalism (mainly for the Chicago Daily News and Esquire ) and published six novels in swift succession, each a distinctive and promising accomplishment in its own right but none a financial success. Reporter (1929) refashioned the brassy documentary techniques of Dos Passos to depict and expose the speed-driven world of modern newspapers. Frankie and Johnny (1930) was a spare, affecting story of ill-fated teenage romance in an urban setting. Yehuda (1931), based on Levin's own early visits to Palestine, was the first novel in English to dramatize the clash between individual and group concerns on a modern kibbutz. Two years later, The New Bridge offered a stark picture of the lives of an unemployed construction worker and his family evicted from a tenement at the beginning of the Depression. In 1937, Levin published what many readers thought (and still think) was his best book, The Old Bunch , a densely textured chronicle of the inter-

Introduction to unpublished first draft of The Fanatic (BU).

twined lives of two dozen young Chicago-born Jews (children of immigrant West Siders), which James T. Farrell called "one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists" (Saturday Review of Literature , 13 March 1937). And Citizens (1940) was a vigorous fictional response to the 1937 strike and subsequent Memorial Day police shooting of workers at the Republic Steel Company plant outside Chicago.

Although these works had received mixed reviews and did not sell especially well, as a group they established Levin's reputation as one of the most able and enterprising young novelists of the 1930s, and The Old Bunch became a favorite book for many readers. The early interest in his fiction was a response in part to the energy and range of his social realism, but also to the fact that almost alone among the writers of the period, he seemed to be on the verge of shaping "a career" as an American novelist writing frequently and convincingly about the tensions of Jewish life. In the 1920s and 1930s, the commercial market for literature with any ethnic subject matter was both limited and extremely sensitive, and very few Jewish writers were able to make a living or to sustain a body of work. Elmer Rice and Clifford Odets in the New York theater might be considered exceptions, but the situation for novelists was less promising. Ludwig Lewisohn and Anzia Yezierska both gained followings in the 1920s, but either the quality or the volume of their work dropped off after that. Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) was widely noticed, but he remained primarily an essayist. Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), now prized as one of the splendid novels of the period, sold about four thousand copies in the thirties, and Roth did not publish another novel until 1994. The three books that make up

the fresh, wryly disenchanted Williamsburg trilogy of Daniel Fuchs sold four hundred, four hundred, and twelve hundred copies between 1934 and 1938, and he abandoned fiction for screenwriting until the 1970s.3

At the beginning of his career, Levin himself was hesitant about using his own experiences as a Jew in his fiction. After writing some ethnic sketches and stories ("Roosevelt Road" and "A Seder") for the Menorah Journal and other magazines, he also worried about being labeled parochial and limiting the potential audience for his work, and he deliberately concealed the Jewish origins of the characters in his first two books. But after basing his third novel, Yehuda , on his formative visits to Palestine, he began writing with increasing frequency and openness about the problems of acculturation and self-definition for Jews in Chicago and elsewhere. Once he did, however, he too suffered from the timidity and the often biased, narrow, or nervous tastes of publishers and readers. One editor called on him to diversify the eth-

Daniel Fuchs, "Author's Preface," Three Novels , p. vii. Forty years after Levin published his first fiction, he provided a vivid description of what the marketplace had been like when he first began to write: "The magazines were cold to [Jewish] material, and book publishers avoided it with the same avidity with which they were to pursue it three decades later. It was felt that non-Jewish readers would not care to identify with Jewish fictional characters and that even Jewish readers preferred to identify with 'real Americans' in fiction. As a result, some talented writers who had begun quite naturally by writing about people with backgrounds with which they were familiar soon abandoned Jewish material or falsified it. They gave Jewish characters in their imaginative vision new, characterless names like Dick Benson or Jane Meredith, and homey Dr. Shapiro could always be endowed with a country twang and changed into Dr. Carmichael." Introduction to The Rise of American Jewish Literature , edited by Levin and Charles Angoff, 10-11.

nic identity of his characters in The Old Bunch , arguing that the book would be more typically American if it consisted of a melange of nationalities ("a few Irish, an Italian or two, and maybe a Greek") rather than a homogeneous group of Jews. The publisher of Citizens tried to get him to change the doctor protagonist from a Jew into a gentile to make the book more salable. Jewish readers themselves often complained of Levin's blunt treatment of the personal problems of Chicago Jews; Jews, they felt,...