The Development of Anne Frank
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hen the first installment of the translated textof The Diary of Anne Frank appeared in the spring of 1952, in Com-mentary y 1 read it with amazement The next day, when I went intotown to see my analyst, I stopped in the magazine’s ofSces—I often did,to argue with Clem Greenberg, who was a sort of senior adviser towhat was at that time the best general magazine m the country m spiteof, maybe because of, its special Jewish concerns— to see if proofs ofthe Diary continuation were available, and they were Like millionsof people later, I was bowled over with pity and horror and admira-tion for the astounding doomed little girl/But what I thought was* asane person. A sane person, in the twentieth century^ It was as longago as 1889 when Tolstoy wound up his terrible story “The Devil”with this sentence: And, indeed, if Evgeni Irtenev was mentally deranged, then all peo-ple are mentally deranged, but undoubtedly those are most surely men-tally deranged who see m others symptoms of insanity which they failto see in themselves. Some years later (1955), setting up a course called “Humamties inthe Modern World” at the University of Minnesota, I assigned theDiary and reread it with feelings even more powerful than before butnow highly structured, i decided that it was the most remarkableaccount of normal human adolescent maturation I had ever read, andthat it was universally valued for reasons comparatively insignificant.I waited for someone to agree with me. An article by Bettelheim wasannounced in Politics^ appeared, and was irrelevant The astuteAlfred Kazin and his wife, the novelist Ann Birstein, edited AnneFrank’s short fiction— ah! I thought— and missed the boat Here we have a book only fifteen years old, the sole considerablesurviving production of a young girl who died after writing it While 9 ^
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