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Dreyfus And Frank: Where The Personal And Universal Collide
The books by Louis Begley and Francine Prose manage to make their subjects relevant to a wide, non-Jewish audience, without losing sight of the specificity of each case. by Eric Herschthal Fifty years later, in 1944, a Jewish teenager in Amsterdam was found hiding in an attic, where she and her family had lived for more than two years. She was sent to Auschwitz, along with her entirely family, where all but one, her father, survived. She was not forgotten, though, as she kept a diary of those years in the attic, recording with assiduous detail the entire ordeal. You probably recognize these stories. The first story is Alfred Dreyfus’, the second Anne Frank’s, and while neither shares much in specific detail, both overlap broadly in the fierce, sometimes bloody debates that followed in their wake. Fin-de-siecle France was torn between Dreyfus supporters and anti-Dreyfusards over what was in part about anti-Semitism but more generally about a country deeply divided over its then new egalitarian ethos. In mid-century America, where Anne Frank’s diary became a best-seller in 1952, the effort to turn it into a Broadway play and later a film, turned into an ugly public fiasco over how to interpret her legacy. Frank’s father, Otto, the lone survivor, wanted to make his daughter’s diary accessible to the widest possible audience, which meant shifting the emphasis away from some of the more pointed Jewish references. Otto’s adviser, Meyer Levin, who helped the book find its publisher, disagreed, fighting instead to keep the Jewish elements front and center. Both affairs — Dreyfus and Frank-Levin — are the subject of two important new books. Louis Begley’s “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” (Yale University Press) and Francine Prose’s “Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife” (HarperCollins) carefully parse the question of who owns this history. Do Dreyfus and Frank matter mainly because they are Jews, or because of the injustices they expose more generally in mankind? What is striking about both books is that they manage to make their subjects relevant to a wide, non-Jewish audience, without losing sight of the specificity of each case. Begley never shies away from the repellant and persistent eruptions of French anti-Semitism, nor does Prose duck from Frank’s bleak death in Bergen-Belsen. Both authors recognize that, far from limiting the reach of their case, the details only amplify their utter humanness. Begley draws a parallel, of all things, between French Jews then and Muslims now. “Just as at the outset of the Dreyfus Affair the French found it easy to believe that Dreyfus must be a traitor because he was a Jew, many Americans had had no trouble believing that the detainees at Guantanamo — and those held in CIA jails — were terrorists simply because they were Muslims.” If you think this is a crude caricature of mainstream American views, Begley backs his statements up with facts. He quotes a recent Quinnipiac University poll showing that, days after Barack Obama’s election, over 70 percent of Americans were either undecided or did not want Guantanamo Bay to be closed. This despite an earlier Brookings Institute report showing that apart from a few unquestionable cases, the vast majority of the 779 Guantanamo detainees imprisoned there since 2002 have been quietly released because of lack of evidence. To date, only two have been successful convicted. Begley’s book is an attempt to overlay the injustices done to Dreyfus with those being done to the hundreds of Muslims held by the United States — still. But Begley, a practicing lawyer until 2004, (as well as an accomplished author, most memorably of “About Schmidt”) nevertheless gives a clear reading of the Dreyfus Affair. He does not muddy the details for the sake of his point, but renders them sharper to prove it. Though Dreyfus’ imprisonment did not stem from a thirst for Jewish blood, “Dreyfus’ being a Jew made it easier for his fellow officers to accuse him.” The case began after a French maid in the German embassy, employed as a spy, found a document with critical French intelligence in the German ambassador’s garbage can. At the time, the French were still smarting from their defeat to the Prussians nearly 25 years earlier, and rather than undergo a rigorous internal investigation, a petty French officer looking for advancement forged a new document that clearly pointed to Dreyfus. Begley shows how the rampant anti-Semitism still held by many Frenchmen, in positions both high and low, made Dreyfus an easy target. Rather than leave the possibility open for an ethnic Christian Gaul to be found guilty, better to frame a Jew, from the hinterlands of Alsace no less, and get the case over quickly. Still Begley puts the trial in its proper context, detailing how both petty fealties to military honor and national pride made the thirst for revenge all the more wild. And yet, that first trial that sent Dreyfus to the virtually uninhabited prison enclave on Devil’s Island was just the beginning of the ordeal. It became l’Affaire only after the renowned novelist Emile Zola and the French left took to Dreyfus’ side with revolutionary zeal, publishing editorials and staging protests that were met with equal force by detractors. By and large, Dreyfus’ supporters were not Jews but Christian Frenchmen who believed the ideals of the republic — liberté, égalité, fraternité — had been trampled on. Dreyfus had to be given a fair and open trial, not the kind of secret military tribunal where he was found guilty — twice, and the second time with even more forged documents. The painstaking legal reversal dragged on until 1906, when Dreyfus was finally exonerated, but not without ensnarling many more victims; Zola, for instance, was tried for libel, fled to England and died four years before Dreyfus was cleared. In the case of Anne Frank’s diary, Prose has her own point to make. Frank was not only the victim of a mass genocide against the Jews but, critically, a highly gifted writer whose talents have been tragically overlooked. Though young readers mostly understand “The Diary of a Young Girl” as an uplifting story about human resilience and teenage maturity, albeit one vaguely shrouded in fear, “it has hardly ever been viewed as a work of art.” Her evidence is clear enough, relying mostly on the existence of Frank’s second draft. A diary, by definition, shouldn’t need a rewrite unless it is to be published, and Frank even gave it a title should that be done: “The Secret Annex.” Frank was prompted by an announcement made by the Dutch government in exile that it would collect “ordinary documents” for a later archive that would reveal the full extent of the Nazi occupation. If Frank’s diary would be included, Prose concludes, she didn’t want to be embarrassed by it later. Of course, Frank didn’t know what her fate would be. But Prose stresses that she could not have been blind to the possibilities. As Frank wrote: “In the eyes of the world, we’re doomed, but if after all this suffering, there are still Jews left, the Jewish people will be held up as an example. Who knows maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason, the only reason we have to suffer. ... God has never deserted our people.” It is passages like these that are the antidote to what became of Frank’s legacy — a bright-eyed optimist who continues to charm millions of teens. After The New York Times had foolishly allowed the book’s agent, Meyer Levin, to write the front-page book review — “a classic,” he called it — Broadway producers quickly hawked the rights for the book. Otto Frank had agreed to include Levin in the process, but the producers eventually elbowed Levin out after he proved too much a nuisance. That is when the Frank-Levin affair becomes a mess of litigation, hearsay and paranoia that includes Levin viewing himself as the victim of a socialist plot. But Prose treads lightly on the legalese and instead raises the more central issue: how Broadway, and later Hollywood, turned Frank’s trenchant work into a sentimental, even cheery all-purpose text. The Pulitzer-winning playwrights Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich took out most the Jewish references and sketched the context — that is, the Holocaust — so vaguely that it became a symbol for any kind of strife. Moreover, the complex views of a burgeoning young writer were dumbed down for mass consumption. That legacy matters because it is how Anne Frank is still taught today, as Prose writes, “Only after the play and the film appeared did the diary begin to be widely adopted as a classroom text.” Prose and Begley have both accomplished something far more challenging than it seems. They have neither blandly universalized Jewish tragedies, nor have they turned their lessons into something applicable only to Jews. It is not surprising that Begley, a lawyer, has focused on what the Dreyfus case can tell us about American justice. Nor is it surprising that Prose, a writer, shows us how Frank is a master of the craft. If there is a lesson from both these books, then, it is not in what gets lost when Jewish stories become universal. It is in how much more is gained when they become personal.
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