People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.
ā¦Hereās how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frankās diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museumās managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might āinterfereā with the museumās āindependent position.ā The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
ā¦[The] runaway success of Anne Frankās diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frankās parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frankās endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
ā¦And here is the most devastating fact of Frankās posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: We know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we donāt want to hear it.
The line most often quoted from Frankās diaryāāIn spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heartāāis often called āinspiring,ā by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girlsāand if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frankās hiding place, in her writings, in her ālegacy.ā It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ātruly good at heartā three weeks before she met people who werenāt.
Hereās how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them. Anne Frankās writings do not describe this process. Readers know that the author was a victim of genocide, but that does not mean they are reading a work about genocide. If that were her subject, it is unlikely that those writings would have been universally embraced.
We know this because there is no shortage of texts from victims and survivors who chronicled the fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents has achieved anything like the fame of Frankās diary. Those that have come close have only done so by observing the same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who donāt insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frankās international fame might be Elie Wieselās Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frankās experience, recounting the tortures of a 15-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Kept Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story, but it exploded with rage against his familyās murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate FranƧois Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version of the book under the title Nightāa work that repositioned the young survivorās rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach did earn Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a spot in Oprahās Book Club, the American epitome of graceā¦
[Read Dara Hornās full piece at Smithsonian.]
ellievsbear
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
titsay
andulkaphoto
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
