2
The Old Jewish Question

Levin's indignation at the prospect that Carson McCullers, or indeed any gentile, would adapt Anne Frank's book for the theater brought the subject of Jewishness to the forefront of the dispute, where it was to remain. Levin and Otto Frank had discussed the issue before. Six months earlier, just after the publication of Diary of a Young Girl , when producers and agents were soliciting Doubleday for the dramatic rights, Levin sent Frank in Basel a summary of the various applicants. The publisher, he said, may well favor Maxwell Anderson, one of the most prolific and highly regarded of contemporary playwrights, but Levin was against him for several reasons. Anderson's recent plays were not popular, and his grand style, Levin felt, was wrong for the intimate subject matter of the child's book. Besides, Anderson would not work with a collaborator, and he wasn't Jewish. The Anne Frank story, Levin insisted, required an identification with the persecuted that only a Jew was likely to have. As he put it in a subsequent letter: "All literature, all art, is an expression of the soul; no

stranger can as well express the soul of a people as someone from that people" (31 December 1952, BU).

Frank's answer was swift and equally heartfelt. Although he was not "pro Anderson" (he was not familiar enough with the American theater to have a decisive opinion), he felt Anderson to be at least a defensible choice. He was not Jewish, but he had certainly written often about discrimination. And Frank went on:

As to the Jewish [issue] you are right that I do not feel the same way you do. I always said, that Anne's book is not a warbook. War is the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is the background. I never wanted a Jew writing an introduction for it. It is (at least here) read and understood more by gentiles than in Jewish circles. I do not know, how that will be in USA, it is the case in Europe. So do not make a Jewish play out of it! In some way of course it must be Jewish, even so that it works against anti-Semitism. I do not know if I can express what I mean and only hope that you won't misunderstand.^[1]

Frank's reply boldly highlights fundamental differences between the two men. He himself came from a cultivated, well-to-do Frankfurt banking family that had assimilated into middle-class German society in the nineteenth century. Following his graduation from Lessing Gymnasium in 1908, he had enrolled briefly at the University of Heidelberg but cut short his studies to go to New York with a fellow student,

[1] Quoted in Judith Doneson, "The American History of Anne Frank's Diary," 152, and Levin papers, 28 June 1952 (BU).

Nathan Straus, whose family owned R. H. Macy's, where Frank hoped to learn about business practices. When his father died in 1909, he returned to Germany to work for a metal engineering company in Düsseldorf. As a young man, he thought of himself essentially as a German businessman, not as a marginal Jew; and he moved in a liberal circle of Jewish and non-Jewish acquaintances. He did not attend Hebrew school, nor was he bar mitzvahed.

During World War I, Frank rose to the rank of lieutenant in a German artillery regiment, served during the major tank battles at Cambrai, and afterward observed that he could not recall ever encountering an anti-Semite in the army or as a youth in Frankfurt. During the 1920s he was very active in the family's banking business at a time when inflation and then the depression caused devastating losses. After the Nazis gained power in Frankfurt in March 1933 and intensified their persecution of Jews, Frank decided to protect himself, his wife, his two children, and his livelihood by moving to Amsterdam, a city he knew and one where he had friends and business connections. He was soon able to open an agency of Opekta-Werke, which manufactured and distributed pectin, a powdered fruit extract used to make jam. Although he became a member of a liberal synagogue in the city and was proud of his later activity in Reform Jewish organizations, he thought of his identity mainly in racial rather than in religious terms. Hiding during the war, he read Goethe and Schiller in German and Dickens in English to his two daughters, and the family celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas more eagerly than Hanukkah. He once proposed giving Anne a children's Bible for Hanukkah, so she could learn something about the New Testament, but he responded to her

sister Margot's perturbation by backing off: "Yes—er, I think St. Nicholas Day is a better occasion. Jesus just doesn't go with Hanukkah" (Diary , 3 November 1943).

After Auschwitz and the phenomenal fame of his daughter's book, Frank devoted much of his life to memorializing Anne by interpreting the "message" of her diary in affirmative, universalist terms. For him, the most effective way to fulfill her desire "to live after my death" and "to do good" was to construe her book as the work of a young idealist expressing horror at the cruelties of bigotry and war and voicing hope for a more peaceful, tolerant world in the future. To further this image, he helped found the Anne Frank Foundation in 1957 and participated regularly in its many activities during the last years of his life. He also kept up a large correspondence with people around the world who wrote to him about their reactions to his daughter's book. He often ended his reply to a young person who had written to him with words such as these: "I hope that Anne's book will have an effect on the rest of your life so that insofar as it is possible in your circumstances, you will work for unity and peace."^[2]

The original purpose of the foundation was to maintain the premises at Prinsengracht 263 (the Anne Frank House) and eventually to operate an international youth center nearby. The center would conduct educational and philanthropic programs designed to promote among young people "the ideals bequeathed to the world in the diary of Anne Frank." These ideals were at first deliberately defined very generally, as can be

[2] Rian Verhoeven and Ruud van der Rol, Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary , 105.

seen from the formulation in an early planning document: "The principal purpose of the International Foundation would be to use the name Anne Frank as a symbol for all constructive activity, relating in any way to adolescents (young people from 12 to 20 years old), which furthers inter-group understanding in an atmosphere of freedom and of hope." Although the aims of the Anne Frank Foundation were soon expressed much more concretely and have evolved over the years to respond to contemporary events, the initial intentions were to promote democratic ideals among the young and to combat prejudice, discrimination, and repression in every form.^[3] That Anne Frank's diary was also an indelibly affecting account of the outer and inner worlds of a keenly observant, life-affirming girl who wished to be a writer ensured its appeal and immense influence.

Before he had read his daughter's diary, Otto Frank thought of her as a high-spirited, occasionally feisty child, whose energy had to be channeled as she moved toward adolescence. After reading the entries, he confessed that in important ways he had not really known her. Although they were very close, he hardly suspected "anything about her innermost thoughts, her high

[3] The following statement of the goals of the Anne Frank Foundation in the late 1980s reveals some of the ways in which aims and activities have evolved over three decades: "Seeks to educate the public on events of World War II, particularly the Holocaust, and to make known the current prejudices, discrimination, and persecution affecting Jews today. Supports efforts to pressure governments in countries where human rights violations occur. Maintains the home of Anne Frank as a museum and memorial for the victims of Nazi repression. Documents research and education programs in racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Fascism. Holds courses for teachers, social workers and others dealing with minority problems and discrimination. Maintains collection of anti-Semitic and neo-Fascist material."

ideals, her belief in God and her progressive ideas."^[4] Anne, her father once told an interviewer, cared for God, but "she didn't show any feeling for religion. Margot showed an interest, but Anne never did. She never had a real Jewish education" (Times , London, 16 April 1977, 12).

But even after reading and editing his daughter's diary in 1945, Otto Frank was inclined to discount the significance of her many revealing observations about Jews and Jewishness. Not only does the diary contain chillingly matter-of-fact descriptions of anti-Jewish laws enacted in occupied Holland—how "the gaudy yellow star spoke for itself"—but it is also filled with terse, graphic reports of Jews dragged from houses, loaded into cattle trucks, and sent to the transit camp at Westerbork and then to Poland, where according to radio reports many were being gassed or murdered in other ways. Furthermore, as the child matures, she ponders the meaning and implication of being a Jew at a time of previously unimagined evil. Some of these reflections reveal Anne's extreme sensitivity to the fates of friends and acquaintances directly exposed to Nazi viciousness; others express her anguish at having betrayed the less fortunate by being "safely" secluded in the secret annex. "I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed," she confides to Kitty, "while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!"

[4] Reported by Frank's second wife, Elfriede Frank-Markovits, McCall's , January 1986, 108.

Anne Frank's specific identification with the misfortunes of other Jews deepens as the months in hiding pass. Recording a frightening dream about her recently deported friend Lies, she insists that Lies is "a symbol to me of the suffering of all my girl friends and all Jews. When I pray for her, I pray for all Jews and all those in need." In the second half of the diary she occasionally asks questions of a kind that suggest a rapidly expanding moral and philosophical nature and a need to inquire about ultimate human mysteries. One instance is especially striking and has often been cited as illustrative of her rapid growth in a time of peril. Describing an attempted break-in at the warehouse, Anne reports that the concealed Jews were reproached by their gentile protectors:

We have been pointedly reminded that we are in hiding, that we are Jews in chains, chained to one spot, without any rights, but with a thousand duties. We Jews mustn't show our feelings, must be brave and strong, must accept all inconveniences and not grumble, must do what is within our power and trust in God. Sometime this terrible war will be over. Surely the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews.

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or represen-

tatives of any country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.

Be brave! Let us remain aware of our task and not grumble, a solution will come, God has never deserted our people. Right through the ages there have been Jews, through all the ages they have had to suffer, but it has made them strong too; the weak fall, but the strong will remain and never go under! (11 April 1944)

Part of what makes this passage so remarkable (aside from its having been written by a fourteen-year-old) is its status as an impassioned compendium of topics that have absorbed the Jewish people for more than two millennia: the origin and meaning of persecution and the possibility that suffering may be morally redemptive; the nature of the Jews' special relationship to a severe but faithful God; the role of the Jew as "different" among the world's peoples; the perplexing, often paradoxical, relationship between rights, duties, and obligations; and the dogged assertion of the value of Jewish life in the face of affliction and uncertainty. And all these subjects are expressed in a fervid tone that moves in a rush from resentment to challenge, wonderment, doubt, incipient rebellion, and finally to faith, acceptance, and proud affirmation of Jewish identity—an extraordinary range of feelings about essential ethical and historical issues the child is now first beginning to articulate.

That Otto Frank tended to minimize utterances such as these is, of course, understandable. He himself was a modest, reserved man who did not often verbalize his innermost thoughts and concerns. Having survived Auschwitz and the devastating loss of his wife, daughters, and friends, he felt compelled at fifty-six

to repress the horrors he had lived through in order to rebuild a shattered life. Furthermore, when Anne's Diary was so favorably reviewed in Holland and France, he wanted to help create an atmosphere in which the book would be bought, read, and appreciated more widely. For this he felt it imperative to sound a healing note, and he felt confirmed in his constructive instinct by daily letters from readers all over the world (the vast majority of them not Jewish) who testified that his daughter's rare book was an inspiring celebration of life in the face of hostile forces. Few correspondents or friends spoke of the specific crime of Germans murdering Jews or of the more general human capacity for abusing people of different beliefs and appearances. Otto Frank, then, would be inclined by temperament and upbringing to continue to see his daughter's book as most admiring first readers around the world saw it.

Levin's background and view of life differed from Frank's in vital ways. Descended from eastern European shtetl Jews, Levin was born on Chicago's Sangamon Street in 1905, after his parents, Joseph and Golda Bassise, had come separately to America from Lithuania. (The family name had been changed to Levin in the commotion of passing through immigration at Ellis Island.) His father ran a small shop called "Joe the Tailor," near the old Dearborn Station, where he did pressing and mending and sold secondhand clothes. He also dabbled in real estate, and by the time Meyer was an adolescent he owned several apartment houses on Independence Boulevard, a respectable street on the west side of the city. By the 1920s, the family was becoming fairly well-to-do (they had a car and a baby grand piano and eventually lived in a good-sized house with two bathrooms), and

Joseph Levin was able to close his shop (although after losing his investments in the Depression, he opened another).^[5] Like many Jewish immigrant parents, the Levins greatly valued family ties and education. Joseph scrimped and saved to bring his widowed mother, brother, and sister to America, and to educate all his children. Meyer graduated from the University of Chicago before he was nineteen; his sisters, Bess and Bertha, also went to college, and both became teachers; Bess married a doctor and Bertha a high school teacher.

When the novelist Levin later wrote about his childhood, however, he remembered most vividly not the parental sacrifice and emerging opportunities for the children, but the apprehensions of his earlier years on Racine Avenue in the notorious "Bloody" Nineteenth Ward, when the family "seemed always on the edge of catastrophe" and he was often threatened by Italian kids yelling "kike," "Jewsonofabitch," or "I'll cut your nuts off, you lousy little sheeny." Although he was a timid boy who avoided confrontation, he often recalled one fight when two Italian kids ordered him to kiss a cross of sticks. In a sudden rage, he knocked one of them down and, astonished at his own prowess, ran away.

His parents, though, always treated him as the gifted son, indulging most of his whims and ambitions. Even though they would have preferred him to study medicine or law, they went

[5] Levin's cousin, Judith Klausner, remembers this shop as "a small place. There were three pressing machines and a sign in the window 'Pants Pressed While You Wait.' The old men sat in cubicles, curtains hung from a sagging string for semi-privacy. I recall watching the men sitting inside the cubicles in their underwear reading the daily Forward " (letter to author, 2 May 1994).

along with his decision (announced dramatically at the age of nine) to be a writer. They tearfully accepted his marriage to the gentile Mable Foy; but when they learned that she had entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, his mother said, "Like you!" and expressed relief that "our prodigy affinity somehow balanced the shikseh part: a brilliant girl."^[6] After he established himself as a writer, his parents accepted his being different and expressed great pride in his many accomplishments.

Despite his affection for his parents and his gratitude for their sustenance, the young Levin often had confused, conflicted feelings about their Jewishness and his own. In his autobiography, he confessed that "my dominant childhood memory is of fear and shame at being a Jew" (13). As an adolescent succeeding at school, he was especially sensitive about his parents' coming from "ordinary village folks, proster Yidden , plain Jews"; and he once remarked that "ours was perhaps the only old country Jewish family in which I never heard a claim to being descended from some important line of rabbis." He was also embarrassed by some of the ways his mother and father behaved. They spoke Yiddish at home and when he was a child did not make much of an effort to become Americanized. Early on in Chicago, their Jewishness was a source of concern. "All through childhood," Levin once told an interviewer, "I sensed, and resented, this terrible shame and inferiority in my elders; they considered themselves as nothing, greenhorns, Jews."^[7] From their son's point of view, there was little notably positive

[6] The quotations in this paragraph are from the unpublished memoir In Love (BU).

[7] Ira Berkow, Maxwell Street , 272.

or inspirational about the way they led their lives. "Like so many immigrants," Levin later wrote, "my parents were observant in a deteriorating way, as it seemed only by habit." Although his mother went to a kosher butcher, she rarely objected to milk in the coffee during a meat meal. His father had to keep the shop open on Saturday, his busiest day; and though he observed the Sabbath eve meal, he attended the synagogue only on the High Holidays. For a while, the son went along, but disliking the crowds, the noise, and the talk of business, he gradually stopped going. Like Otto Frank, he was never bar mitzvahed, though he did attend an after-school Hebrew class; the class was more like a social than a religious event, run by a college student rather than "a traditional knuckle-rapping melamed." After he left school and traveled in Europe, young Levin became emotionally detached and increasingly distant from his parents.

Predictably, the son's ambivalence about his mother and father, and his fear of harassment in the alien urban world around him, were reflected in his many apprehensions about himself. As an adolescent, he tended to make the family version of Jewishness his scapegoat, and he later spoke of his boyhood environment as "a prison." His earliest stories were full of images of severing and amputation that can be seen to reflect his guilt at being Jewish and lower-class and suggest a longing for self-punishment. At fifteen, he published a ghetto tale about a boy who was ashamed to have his gentile girlfriend meet his parents. When he and the girl happened to stop at his father's clothing stand on Maxwell Street (the busy market center for Jews), the boy pretended not to know him. At the University of Chicago, despite his achievements as a student and journalist,

Levin was nagged by a sense of unworthiness and of not belonging; soon after graduation, his trips to Europe and Pales-tine—although motivated by a desire for adventure—were also (as he well knew) efforts to escape a feeling of Jewish inferiority and to discover a more secure place in the world. But as he once explained, the old apprehensions would sometimes resurface and then, for all his "labor . . . to fit myself into the world pattern," he would still feel "a little member of my clan, overanxious, self-centered, insecure, the eternal bright and troublesome Jew. As soon as I got into the world among the goyim, I messed up" (In Search , 169). At the same time, however, his early writing often embodied a father-and-son search theme, reflecting his sharp regret that the American-born children of immigrants had lost touch with their parents.^[8]

In later years, Levin's relationship to his Jewishness went through many other stages and modifications: from nervous avoidance in his early twenties, to the excited discovery of Zionism and kibbutz life, to worries about whether he could be both American and Jew, to an ultimate acceptance of his problematic identity and condition as a Jew (and as a writer about the predicament of being a Jew) in such books as The Old Bunch and In Search . It was, however, only after he had encountered the death camps and tried to write about them

[8] Levin's ambivalent feelings about his parents lasted all his life. Tereska Torres recalls him "almost never speaking of them," and his judgmental unpublished memoir, quoted above, was written when he was past seventy. On the other hand, after Joseph Levin's death, his son wrote lovingly about him in public print and private letters. And Judith Klausner reports that he regularly consulted his sisters by telephone and mail about his parents' welfare.

that he identified himself in a positive way with the Jewish people, if not the religious beliefs of Judaism. As he once wrote: "My Jewishness was a jumble. Under religion, if I had to fill out a form with such a line, I would usually put, 'None.'"^[9] But despite his perpetual doubts and questioning, he came in his maturity to a powerful, almost mystical, faith in his membership in the larger Jewish family—a family with whom he shared a common history and a passion for the pursuit of truth and justice. To promote in his writing the renewal and continuity of this entity—the Jewish people as a dynamic spiritual being—became one of the commanding principles of his life.

Levin could, as he revealed in his memorable review for the New York Times , see Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a various, fascinating, and uplifting book; but most tellingly for him, it was a specifically representative book: the story of one innocent girl who symbolized the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis simply for being Jewish. This was the particular story that in 1952 he so eagerly wished to bring alive on the stage.

So when the disagreements between Levin and Frank continued and intensified in January of 1953, the question of contracts and assignment of rights became inextricably tangled with profound convictions and beliefs, and with the two men's feelings for each other. At the start of their relationship Levin admired and identified in complex ways with Frank. The dignified elder man was cooperative, evenhanded, and kind. Since he owned the rights to the Diary , he held the key to Levin's golden opportunity, but he also became an emblematic char-

[9] Unpublished memoir, In Love (BU).

acter for the American writer. As the dead child's father, he was already playing the role Levin himself now so ardently wished to play: the man who helps the teller get the story told and disseminated to a large audience. As a survivor of Auschwitz, Frank was himself a kind of teller—a man who had lived through hell and whose struggles to rebuild his life demonstrated the great challenges faced by postwar Jewry. People who knew him spoke often of his compassion and generosity. At sixty-three, he was sixteen years older than Levin, and given his background and personal history, he was a kind of father figure for the younger man. Yet at the same time, certain things about Frank unnerved Levin. He had the high-toned reserve of many cosmopolitan German Jews, and the two men's emerging disagreements about the Jewish content of the Diary clearly threatened Levin's own confidence and position.

As Levin continued to insist that he was the victim of deception and that "at bottom it was still the old Jewish question," Frank tried on several counts to be sympathetically responsive to his claims and frustrations. Although he kept denying Levin's charges that Crawford and Mermin were duplicitous, Frank always acknowledged his gratitude: Levin had contributed a great deal to the fortunes of the Diary in America and he was the first person to recognize its dramatic potential. Frank was also willing to seek advice from others on how closely tied to a concrete Jewish situation and atmosphere a stage adaptation of his daughter's book ought to be. To get more information, he earnestly informed Levin, he had written to seven American liberal Jews and had gotten answers that supported his position. As one correspondent wrote: "The theme of Anne's diary seems to be a universal one. The fact

that it was written by a Jewish girl is a very fine thing for any Jew. But, so far as the world is concerned it would seem to me a distinct advantage, if the play were written by a non-Jew. In the first place, that would emphasize the universality of the theme. In the second place, there is, to my mind, little doubt but that the play would be much more readily accepted on its merits if it were written by a non-Jew" (19 January 1953, BU).

But Levin was not satisfied with Frank's attempts at consolation. Appreciating the gratitude, he nonetheless took the arguments about universality from American liberals as an all-too-familiar effort to evade the horrific implications of the German program of mass murder of the Jews. He continued to press his claims to Frank and others. He wrote to Variety hoping that his account of the history of his script might get people to support him, or at least might serve as a cautionary tale for other dramatists considering the writing of a new adaptation. Hobe Morrison, the editor of Variety , checked Levin's letter with some of the parties involved and, after receiving an indignant response from Crawford dismissing Levin's charges as unfounded and slanderous, decided not to print it. Levin then protested to the Dramatists Guild, only to be chided by Mills Ten Eyck, the general secretary, for setting out to write without a contract and for thinking that the signed agreement of 21 November might be disavowed. He again threatened to sue Cheryl Crawford and came finally to conclude that he was not morally bound by an agreement based on what he believed to be false representations. He therefore repudiated the contract and refused, he told Frank and Mermin in January, to consider his play withdrawn. Indeed, he announced that he was thinking of staging a performance of his script to test an audience's reac-

tion, and he continued to talk to theater people about the possibility of mounting it on Broadway.

Levin's behavior in the early months of 1953 had several nerve-racking consequences for Otto Frank. Cheryl Crawford, who had just lost a substantial sum after the failure of Camino Real , decided that she could not bear the strain of a possible Levin lawsuit and the risk of backing another serious drama, and she decided in April to cancel plans to produce the Anne Frank play. Carson McCullers, who had been considering adapting the Diary for either Crawford or Robert Whitehead, felt her health could support neither the test nor the controversy. By late spring, Otto Frank's nine-month effort to contract with a producer to adapt the Diary remained obstructed.

Throughout this period, Frank's letters to Levin (whose activities continued to cause him so much trouble) were marked by a desire to be friendly and fair. He would argue each of Levin's contentions about tricks and deceitful maneuvers and try to demonstrate how he believed it to be factually wrong, or—if seen in another light—a matter of honest disagreement. When he discovered that Levin had decided to make the controversy public by writing to the newspapers and was threatening to sue Cheryl Crawford, Frank was wounded, lost his composure, and angrily accused Levin of grasping self-interest and cruelty. Yet as they argued by mail, Frank kept trying to separate the disagreement from his personal feelings for Levin, repeating his gratitude, expressing regret for the failure of Levin's script to win a backer, and saying he wished they could resolve their conflict and remain friends. He also corresponded separately with Tereska Torres (who did not think her husband had been cheated of his rights and was distressed by his tactics)

and invited her and the children to visit him. Levin, too, tried to convince Frank that his anger was directed not against him but against powerful editors, theater people, and lawyers, who had disregarded his rights and the quality of his work.

While exchanging urgent letters with Levin, Frank was also in close contact with other people in New York, notably Barbara Zimmerman, the young editor, and Myer Mermin, his lawyer. Since Zimmerman had been involved with every stage of the publication of the American edition of the Diary and the snarled negotiations for dramatic rights, she and Frank were in constant touch by mail and quickly grew to be exceptionally fond of each other. Zimmerman was twenty-four (the age that Anne Frank would have been had she lived) and was thrilled about the Diary and its prospects. She was also, for Frank in Basel, an ideal correspondent: very bright, attentive, and eager to pass on colorful accounts of the book's unanticipated triumph. Frank complimented her often for devotion and reliability, sent her small gifts, and was soon addressing her affectionately as "dearest little one" and "little Barbara." She told colleagues and friends that Mr. Frank was "absolutely charming, a self-contained, thoroughly good person. . . . amazing" (3 October 1952, BE). He soon came to rely on her not only for editorial advice but also for judgments about personalities and business decisions. At the start, she also liked Levin ("a very pleasant guy") and was convinced he loved the book as much as she did. But in the early days of the flurried negotiations with agents and producers, she began to have misgivings about his motives and actions, no matter what his original intentions might have been. After 7 July 1952, when Doubleday withdrew, she felt (as others at Doubleday did) that Levin was increas-

ingly rash and untrustworthy, absorbed only in getting his own play staged in New York, no matter what that might mean for the entire venture. Following Cheryl Crawford's rejection of Levin's script and her reluctant agreement to go along with the plan to allow him to submit it to fourteen additional producers, Zimmerman felt that Levin had been given every chance to make the case for his play, and she was steadfast in advising Frank not to give in to any impulse to reconsider the rejection.

"Levin's bitterness has no basis in fact," she told Frank in January 1953, and when he sent her copies of the accusatory letters Levin was writing, she kept reassuring him that he and Crawford had been perfectly ethical and honest, and that Levin was unscrupulously twisting every fact for his own advantage. When Frank asked her whether a Jew or a non-Jew should write the play, she admitted that a Jew would feel in certain ways more intensely about the book, but in other ways this might be a disadvantage. "I don't believe that a non-Jew will not feel as strongly in other ways about Anne's book, and at the same time they will not have the danger (which a Jew might have) of limiting the play to simply Jewish experience. The wonderful thing about Anne's book is that it is really universal, that it is a book, an experience, for everyone. And I think that just a little objectivity would, on the part of the writer, ensure this very broad appeal" (7 January 1953, PWRW&G).

A week later, in another discussion of the same subject, she argued that Carson McCullers (who at the time was still considering the adaptation) would be a superb choice because she was a woman writer with uncommon understanding of adolescent girls, and her religious background was less important than the nature of her talent.

I am a Jew and I've thought about it deeply and I do feel honestly that the problem of whether a Jew writes this or not makes no difference at all. I thought Meyer's radio adaptation false to the book because it did not at all give any credit to Miep and others, yet purported to be a Religious Adaptation. (15 January 1953, PWRW&G)

In response to Frank's question about the advisability of getting a Jewish director for the adaptation (to help guarantee "the atmosphere"), Zimmerman replied: "There seems to be no danger about whether the director chosen is a Jew since all of them are! Daniel Mann, Kazan, etc. But that too makes no difference." When Frank expressed compassion for Levin and questioned whether he was treating him fairly, Zimmerman reacted by apologizing for not "sounding particularly charitable . . . but I shall try to be certainly. I understand how he must have felt, but I could never agree with him. Sympathy comes after understanding and I expect that this is what I feel for Levin." But Levin's intensification of his campaign of writing to the papers, spreading derogatory stories about Crawford, and threatening to sue her finally eroded the sympathy Zimmerman was trying to have for him. "He is impossible to deal with in any terms, officially, legally, morally, personally." She maintained that he was "a compulsive neurotic who was destroying both himself and Anne's play" (15 January 1953, PWRW&G). Although Frank clearly valued Zimmerman's assessments, he told her that he was not as angry as she was with Levin, for he tried to keep in mind his love for the Diary and his personal disappointment. "I agree," he told Zimmerman, that his actions were wrong and ugly, but in his innermost [nature] he

is not a bad man. Difficult, not 100% normal, oversensitive" (14 February 1953, JM).

Similarly, Myer Mermin, as Otto Frank's lawyer, was altogether devoted to protecting his client's property and advancing his interests, and he also admired "that unusually gentle and sensitive man," who had suffered such catastrophic personal loss. Mermin had come on the scene in the third week of October 1952, soon after Levin began entreating Frank to intercede with Crawford to allow him to offer his rejected script to other producers, several of whom had recently given him some encouragement. Although there were no contracts, Mermin believed the summer letters between Frank, Crawford, and Levin had made the agreements about time, assessment, and consequences clear to everyone. Levin had been given two months to submit an adaptation of the Diary , and when Craw-ford judged it unsatisfactory, she was free either to call in a collaborator or turn to another writer and compensate Levin for his work. According to Mermin, Levin had no legal rights, and his multiplying, unreasonable appeals were causing Frank a great deal of bother and distress. But Mermin also recognized that his interpretation of the situation might not be entirely shared by others. Frank was still nagged by the possibility that Levin was being treated unjustly, and though he felt fully committed to Crawford, he could conceivably be swayed by Levin's persistent arguments and pleas. Besides, other people might find some of Levin's claims of priority convincing.

In his protracted, often antagonistic negotiations with Levin, Mermin came to some of the same conclusions about his character and motives as had Zimmerman and others at Double-

day. In the lawyer's view, Levin's original idealistic zeal for promoting the success of the Diary had become subsumed in his desperation at the prospect of not getting his own adaptation produced on Broadway. As his chances diminished, his obstructionist tactics and the unpredictability of his shifting claims increased.

During much of 1953, Zimmerman and Mermin worked to discredit Levin's case even further. In February, when Levin reported that Harold Clurman and Robert Whitehead wished to stage his Anne Frank , Zimmerman assisted Mermin in correctly proving to Frank that Levin was exaggerating their commitment. In April, after Crawford withdrew, Kermit Bloomgarden (whom Levin had opposed the year before) again indicated his desire to take an option on the dramatic rights to the Diary , and both Zimmerman and Mermin strongly supported his petition. They tried to reassure him that Levin's allegations were legally groundless, but they remained worried that Bloomgarden, like others before him, might be deterred by the controversy. When another producer, Teresa Hayden, came forward in August with a clear bid to stage Levin's version, Mermin said, "Absolutely no," on the grounds that he was negotiating with a leading theatrical figure whose name (Bloomgarden) he could not disclose. Zimmerman responded to Frank's inquiries about Hayden's qualifications by reporting that from everything she had heard the new applicant was difficult to work with, not especially accomplished, and not very smart. Moreover, she had recently been associated with a string of failures. When Bloomgarden finally signed a production agreement on

1 October 1953, Mermin arranged to have him indemnified against any possible claim Levin might make.

Once Bloomgarden had signed a contract to arrange for and then stage an adaptation of the Diary , Levin's script was effectively shelved, but his campaign to rectify what he believed to be the wrongs against him continued unabated. A short time before, when he had been invited to take part in a conference on moral and ethical values at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he had hoped to discuss his case with Simon Rifkind, a partner at Paul, Weiss, who was also participating in the conference. But Rifkind disregarded him. At this same period, Levin was also conferring with a rabbi from the Society for the Advancement of Judaism and frequently seeking advice from friends and acquaintances about his options. He now spoke often about artistic and moral values superseding questions of mere legality, if the legitimacy of an agreement could be persuasively challenged.

In October, when he learned that Bloomgarden was going to do the play, Levin offered the producer, who had been so critical of his first script, a revised version, expressing a willingness to work with a collaborator and to assign all his royalties to an Anne Frank memorial. Bloomgarden showed no interest. Levin also began to speak more aggressively in his letters to Frank. He would not, he said, bring a legal action against Anne's father, but he wanted him to know that he felt about his work exactly as Frank felt about his daughter. He had created his play out of love and would continue to insist on its right to have a normal life and a normal death, and that was why he intended to stage it before an audience. Frank was quick to point out the

inappropriateness of comparing the creation and rejection of a theatrical adaptation to the conception, life, and death of his daughter, and he dismissed Levin's assertion that his creative work was being "suppressed."

In his continued attempt to get Levin to cease his efforts to have his dramatization produced, Mermin wrote him a detailed assessment of the case, stressing again the insubstantiality of his claims and the pain he was causing Otto Frank. He also warned him of the consequences he and others would face were he to infringe the copyright by staging his play before an audience. In a postscript, Mermin moved out of his role as Frank's lawyer to add a personal note. Having recently read In Search , he expressed admiration for Levin as a person and a writer, especially for his instinct and capacity to share the "actions and passions of our time," but he now felt that Levin's emotional attachments had led him to behave completely out of character, and he was in danger of doing damage to Frank and himself. This plea to get Levin to live up to his part of the agreement was clearly a rhetorical calculation, for a week earlier, summarizing the situation for Otto Frank, Mermin described Levin as irrational and unpredictable, and saw him as indulging a fantasy that he was discharging the solemn duty of an artist to his creation (letter, 20 October 1953, PWRW&G). Responding to Frank's suggestion that they might postpone signing the contract with Bloomgarden until the situation with Levin was cleared up, Mermin remarked that any such delay "would be a postponement forever." Even if they decided to institute litigation against Levin and were to obtain a court judgment, the procedure would be costly and there was no guarantee that even a court judgment would silence him.

Any hope that Levin might be placated vanished in December, when he learned that Bloomgarden, after abortive talks with John Van Druten, George Tabori, and again Carson McCullers, had engaged Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the married team of Hollywood screenwriters, to do a new stage version of the Diary . Working mainly for MGM and Paramount, Goodrich and Hackett had since the early 1930s contributed to dozens of popular musicals and comedies, most of which were adaptations. They refashioned Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta for Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett's Thin Man for William Powell and Myrna Loy, Irving Berlin's Easter Parade for Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, and Edward Streeter's Father of the Bride for Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. After scripts by Marc Connelly, Clifford Odets, and Dalton Trumbo failed to satisfy Frank Capra, he called in Goodrich and Hackett to help rescue It's a Wonderful Life , and they were two of the four writers to earn credit for a film that has remained very popular. Several of their screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, and throughout the studio era they were widely admired for their debonair dialogue and ability to craft plots that had box-office appeal. Although they rarely worked on material as somber as the Anne Frank story, they had been warmly recommended to Bloomgarden by a mutual friend, Lillian Hellman, who described them as versatile professionals able to make something winningly stageworthy of the young girl's diary.

After initial reservations about the fit between their talents and the Anne Frank text, Goodrich and Hackett responded enthusiastically to Bloomgarden's inquiry. The project was a fine opportunity, they said, because the story offered tense

drama, a possibility of intimacy, and "moments of lovely comedy which heighten the desperate, tragic situation of the people" (November 1953, GH). Introducing themselves to Otto Frank, they expressed a desire to catch "the spirit and indomitable courage of your daughter." Although Frank himself had qualms about Hollywood screenwriters going to work on the Diary , he was reassured by the seriousness of their intentions and commitment. The project, they told him, was "a tremendous challenge." They had already begun reading books about Holland, Judaism, and modern European history and were consulting with Jewish friends and even with a rabbi about the ritual for celebrating Hanukkah (27 December 1953, GH).

Frank saw the exchange of letters with Goodrich and Hackett as an opportunity to impress upon them his own conceptions of the direction he hoped the project would take. Again, as in his discussions with Levin, he emphasized his belief that the play should not be focused on a distinctively Jewish situation but should emphasize the universal appeal of the girl's personality and growth, and "propagate Anne's ideas and ideals in every manner" in order "to show to mankind whereto discrimination, hatred and persecution are leading." When the writers queried him about the religious orientation of the people in hiding, he observed that the dentist Dussel "had a rather orthodox education whereas my wife was progressive and had a deep religious feeling." Margot "followed more or less my wife." He himself was "not educated in a religious sphere," but after his marriage and "all the experiences of the Hitler regime," he had become more conscious as a Jew. Anne was more inscrutable. Religious forms and ceremonies did not seem to impress her very much, but she did stand "next to me

while the candles were lighted and joined in singing the 'Maoz Tzur' [Rock of Ages], the well-known Hanukkah song" (2 February 1954, GH).

Frank's comments had a considerable impact on the way Goodrich and Hackett conceived of their adaptation. They had heard Bloomgarden's opinion that Levin's first version was weakened by lots of "breast-beating," which they took to mean solemn didacticism about the wretched fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Following Frank's lead, they wanted to tell an intimate story that would above all emphasize the positive, so as to have an inspiring effect on a wide audience, an ambition that governed their thoughts and choices throughout the drafting process.

For Levin, the selection of the team he called "the Hacketts of Hollywood" was another in a series of insults and blunders. He protested to Frank that the screenwriters were merely "hired hands," not playwrights of any particular distinction, who had no connection to the Jewish subject matter. Given their backgrounds and experience, they would probably try to engage a general audience at the expense of the inner truth of the diary, and the result would be a conventional Broadway play. Levin also wrote to Goodrich and Hackett themselves, explaining his engagement with the project and his bitter sense of grievance at the stifling of his work. At first, Frances Goodrich was sympathetic to the writer who had lost a creative opportunity, and she admitted that if what Levin said was true, he had gotten "a pushing around." But she and her husband were reassured by Bloomgarden that "an understanding had been reached with Levin," and they embarked on their exacting new assignment (5 January 1954, GH).

On 13 January, however, Levin took a step that instantly

turned the simmering private conflict into a public scandal. He placed an ad on the theater page of the New York Post that read:

A Challenge to Kermit Bloomgarden

Is it right for you to kill a play that others find deeply moving, and are eager to produce?

When you secured the stage rights to Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl" you knew I had already dramatized the book, but you appointed new adaptors. Anne's father, Otto Frank, said of my play, "I can't imagine how anyone could more truly recreate the characters."

Cheryl Crawford was to produce it but had a change of plan, common in the theater. Thereafter, three good producers made offers for my play. One said, "I'm in love with it." Mr. Frank was influenced to reject these offers. A powerful theatrical law firm gave me just thirty days to secure an acceptable producer from a restricted list. Barred from this list were the producers of Life With Father, Junior Miss, The Time of Your Life, The Watch on the Rhine and many of like stature. Is such manipulation fair to my play, to the public, to the theater itself? You thereafter acquired the rights to the Diary, and shoved my play aside. The Diary is dear to many hearts, yours, mine, and the public's. There is a responsibility to see that what may be the right adaptation is not cast away.

I challenge you to hold a test reading of my play before an audience.

A Plea to My Readers

If you ever read anything of mine, The Old Bunch, In Search, The Young Lovers , my war reports from Europe and Palestine, if you saw my films, My Father's House or The Illegals , if you read my sequel to Anne Frank's Diary in this paper, if you have faith in me as a writer, I ask your help. Write to Mr. Frank and request this test.

My work has been with the Jewish story. I tried to dramatize the Diary as Anne would have, in her own words. The test I ask cannot hurt any eventual production from her book. To refuse shows only a fear my play may prove right. To kill it in such a case would be unjust to the Diary itself.

This question is basic: who shall judge? I feel my work has earned the right to be judged by you, the public.

Write or send this ad to Otto Frank c/o Doubleday, 575 Madison Avenue, N.Y., as a vote for a fair hearing before my play is killed.

Meyer Levin

The immediate effect of Levin's extraordinary action was to rally nearly everyone involved in the affair in disdainful alliance against him, but it also had an unexpected and different impact on the broader public and on some people in the Jewish community. When Bloomgarden read the notice, he mockingly told Goodrich and Hackett that he would "decline the challenge" because it was beneath his dignity to reply. "The truth c the matter," he continued

is that there isn't a person in the theater who has not found him ridiculous and laughable by his unethical attachment to the book originally. The New York Times , for instance, was furious that he had written a glowing book review for the book and was acting as the agent at the same time. It is also well known that any producer wanting to have a dramatization made of the book originally would have had to take Mr. Levin as the dramatist or there would have been no sale. This was the position that Cheryl Crawford found herself in when she bought the rights to have the book dramatized. (18 January 1954, KB)

And he concluded that the best response would be simply to ignore Levin's attacks and to get on with plans for the play.

In a letter to Basel, Frank Price (who, since Barbara Zimmerman's marriage to Jason Epstein and departure from Doubleday, was in charge of the book) condemned Levin's advertisement as preposterous and his meddlesome behavior as blackmail. Nothing was being served by all this commotion, he told Otto Frank, "but the personal vanity of a paranoic man." Price was so indignant at Levin's tactics that he could not resist mildly rebuking Anne's father for "your own gentleness of spirit," which in many ways "has allowed this matter to go on to the point where it has reached this impasse" (19 January 1954, PWRW&G).

Frank himself was clearly coming to the end of whatever sympathy and patience he had for Levin. Responding to an inquiry from Goodrich and Hackett, he told them that the persistent attacks no longer touched him, and he offered a brief account of the history of the controversy that emphasized the distortions and omissions in Levin's newspaper challenge to Bloomgarden. "He has no legal and no moral right to act as he does," Frank concluded. "I have the impression that he formed an 'idée fixe' in his mind and tries to make trouble without any real base. I think he will stop if he sees that his attempts have no result" (24 January 1954, GH).

Otto Frank's hope that Levin would end his protest and that the clamor might die down was wishful thinking, for some of the Post's readers felt sympathy for Levin, seeing him as the intrepid writer, defending the life of his art against censorship, or as the Jewish underdog, standing up against power brokers and mighty institutions. Levin's appeal to have his play read in

public seemed modest and reasonable, even if another version were eventually to be preferred to his. Why couldn't two renderings of the same story exist in the public domain? Why couldn't the audience be given a more active role in determining what they might see and read? As a columnist in Publishers Weekly put it: "The notion of the public deciding in advance what is going to be worth seeing, instead of waiting for the critics' verdict, is unusual and provocative. Maybe it's just what the theater's been needing!" (23 January 1954). Several dozen people wrote Frank urging him to allow Levin to give his work the hearing he asked for, and others (among them Norman Mailer and James T. Farrell) responded to the protest by signing petitions and writing letters of support.

Although at first the number of written responses was small, Levin saw them as a conspicuous endorsement of his cause, and he intensified a public campaign to enlist backers that was to go on for many years, and was to become one of the most notorious aspects of his ongoing quarrel with Otto Frank. In the early months of 1954, however, the supportive responses could not relieve the enormous frustration Levin felt at the silence of Bloomgarden and Frank (who was beginning to ignore his letters or return them unopened). The previous autumn, Levin had approached Ephraim London about the grounds for a possible suit against Crawford, Frank, and Bloomgarden, but the lawyer discouraged him. Now, angrier than ever, he consulted others, and by the spring, he was able to arrange terms by which a young attorney, Samuel G. Fredman, of Weinstein and Fredman in Manhattan, agreed to determine if he had a case.

Through much of April and May of 1954, Levin continued discussions with Fredman about prospects for a lawsuit, but he

was also busy at the various creative activities by which he supported himself and his family. He worked on a documentary film about Frank Lloyd Wright; wrote a regular column, called "Candid Commentator," for the New Jersey Star-Ledger and Long Island newspapers; did some reviewing and ghostwriting; and continued to do research for a novel on the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, the early part of which he had covered as a young reporter in Chicago—a project that would result in his powerful, best-selling book, Compulsion , in 1956. This subject attracted Levin for many reasons: Leopold and Loeb had been high-powered intellectuals at the University of Chicago; they were self-hating wealthy German Jews revolting against their fathers; and they claimed to be motivated by Nietzsche's ideas of the Superman (which linked them forward to the Nazis). "It was inevitable," Levin had written, that their "'crimes of decadence' should appear to me as a symbol. I, the west-side boy, had turned my precocious energy into accomplishment; they, the rich south-siders, turned the same qualities into destruction" (In Search , 27). That the victim's name was Franks has been noted by many commentators.

Meanwhile, Goodrich and Hackett were writing successive versions of their adaptation of the Diary . At first they stayed especially close to the entries themselves, quoting many passages directly and at length, basing their scenes on events that Anne herself recorded. Much of what they selected seemed designed to illustrate Anne's quip that she was "on vacation in a very peculiar boarding house"—a place where sequestered people got on one another's nerves but tensions were amusingly relieved by the mischievous high spirits of a thirteen-year-old girl who kept a diary. The grim historical specificity of the

story—Jews in hiding from Nazi persecution during World War II—was clear enough (each character's behavior was shaped by fear of the fatal knock on the door), but its implications were far less important than the immediate domestic situation and the life-affirming personality of the protagonist. Many of the notable theatrical features of the final play are not present in the earliest drafts, where, for example, Otto Frank, not Anne's voice-over, reads the narrative passages from the Diary . And several now-famous scenes—Anne's nightmare, the Hanukkah celebration, Van Daan's stealing bread, and the security police hammering on the door at the end—are absent. Frances Goodrich later admitted that at the start she and her husband were constrained by their deference to the seriousness of the project and their concern for how the already revered book would be faithfully presented on the stage. "We were," she said, "so afraid of making people unsympathetic that we have not made them human."

When they finished the fourth version, Goodrich and Hackett sent copies to Bloomgarden, Hellman, and their agent, Leah Salisbury, and then flew from Los Angeles to confer with the readers. They also mailed a copy to Otto Frank in Switzerland. In New York they were greeted with a barrage of negative criticism. Bloomgarden and Hellman complained that the writers were still excessively close to the Diary ; the play had too much direct narration and not enough dramatized action. By accentuating dailiness, comedy, and Anne's playful charm, moreover, they were turning a unique, electrifying experience into something mundane and episodic—a kind of "Scenes from Life in Hiding." The abnormality of the situation and the effects of confinement were being softened, Bloomgarden told them, and

their preoccupation with the endearing personality of Anne led them to neglect the characterization of Otto, Edith, and Margot, and to forgo the theatrical potentialities of the intricate family dynamics.

Otto Frank also objected to the script, but he was so worried about hurting the playwrights' feelings that he kept his letter in his pocket for three days before mailing it. His critique paralleled but extended Bloomgarden's: the portrait of Anne was superficial; the writers were neglecting her interiority and maturation. Having read thousands of reviews and letters about the Diary , Frank was certain that audiences reacted most powerfully to Anne's struggles during puberty (especially her relationship with her mother and with Peter), to her revulsion at war and discrimination, and to her inextinguishable idealism. The present draft, with its emphasis on adolescent hijinks and domestic humor, did not do justice to these elements.

Taking these criticisms to heart, Goodrich and Hackett went back to revise again. When stories about their difficulties were reported in newspaper theatrical columns, Levin wrote them to say that his play conveyed the inner lives of the characters, and he offered his services as collaborator, but they ignored him. Two other people did, however, have decisive influence on the shape the play was eventually to take: Lillian Hellman and the well-known playwright, screenwriter, and director Garson Kanin. In early September, Goodrich and Hackett met with Hellman on Martha's Vineyard to continue discussing her reactions to their work. "She was amazing," they later reported, and gave the writers "brilliant advice on construction," particularly about reducing narration and intensifying dramatic impact in

the scenes of Dussel's arrival, Anne's nightmare, and the Hanukkah celebration.^[10] Exactly what else Hellman told them is not known, but a look at the consecutive drafts of the later summer and fall allows a few conjectures. Version six (on which Hellman had the most influence) was markedly better than the fourth draft the writers had submitted in late May. Now, the play was less static and episodic: suspense was more successfully sustained, and scene divisions (marked more clearly here) were beginning to hint at what was to be the work's most pronounced and affecting emotional rhythm. In the final version, each scene varies and develops a tension that had been established at the end of the previous scene or at the beginning of the current one—the tension between, on one hand, the rigor of confinement and the dread of discovery and, on the other, the main characters' unquenchable desire for freedom and their affirmation of life. Although this is a familiar and perhaps even a hackneyed theatrical device, it is ultimately used to great effect by Goodrich and Hackett. Bloomgarden had earlier remarked that the script was not taut enough and lacked spiritual inspiration. After Hellman worked with the playwrights, melodrama and uplift were fused in ways that were eventually to exercise a legendary hold on audiences around the world.

More than a year later, after The Diary of Anne Frank had opened in New York and Levin learned of Hellman's role in advising both Cheryl Crawford and the Hacketts, he charged that because of her German-Jewish assimilationist background and her Stalinist and anti-Zionist sympathies, she had

[10] Frances and Albert Hackett, "Diary of The Diary of Anne Frank," New York Times , Sunday, 30 September 1956, sec. 2, p. 1, col. 3.

prompted Crawford to reject his play for being "too Jewish" and had altered the Goodrich and Hackett version to tone down the accent on Jewish issues and make the play more international. This idea of a Hellman-inspired attempt to de-Judaize and universalize the text became the core of a conspiracy theory Levin espoused in different forms for the next twenty-five years (it will be examined in later chapters). But unpublished documents from the period now make it clear that the person who had the greatest influence in universalizing the play was not Hellman but Garson Kanin, who joined the team as director in late October. Enthusiastic about the project and certain the script "would not need masterminding or doctoring," Kanin did have specific suggestions designed to heighten intimacy, suspense, and audience identification. His recommendation that Anne's voice-over read the diary entries as orchestrated bridges between scenes gave the final play one of its most compelling features. He also had dozens of valuable proposals about pacing, momentum, sound effects, and ways of intensifying the atmosphere of alarm on stage. But it was in his determination to make the stark story more accessible and pleasing to a wide audience that Kanin had his most telling influence.

The director declared that the Diary was not a gloomy or depressing book about the persecution of the Jews but rather "an exalting comment on the human spirit," a play about what G. B. Shaw called "the life force"; and he urged the writers (and later Boris Aronson, the designer) not to emphasize a bleak, tragic tone that might put theatergoers off. When, in reading the closing moments of the sixth version of the play, he came upon a vital exchange between Anne and Peter, he pressed

Goodrich and Hackett to revise it to broaden its appeal. Anne has just spoken of the strength she has gotten from religious belief, and Peter answers ironically: "That's fine! That's wonderful! But when I begin to think, I get mad. Look at us, hiding out for two years! . . . Caught here, like rabbits in a trap, waiting for them to come and get us! And all for what? Because we're Jews! Because we're Jews!" And Anne replies: "We're not the only Jews that've had to suffer. Right down through the ages there have been Jews and they've had to suffer."

Kanin found this "an embarrassing piece of special pleading." Throughout history, he told the writers:

people have suffered because of being English, French, German, Italian, Ethiopian, Mohammedan, Negro, and so on. I don't know how this can be indicated, but it seems to me of utmost importance.

The fact that in this play the symbols of persecution and oppression are Jews is incidental, and Anne, in stating the argument so, reduces her magnificent stature. It is Peter here who should be the young one, outraged at being persecuted because he is a Jew, and Anne, wiser, pointing out that through the ages, people in minorities have been oppressed. In other words, at this moment, the play has an opportunity to spread its theme into the infinite. (8 November 1954, GH)

In a subsequent version of the script—developed after a three-week collaboration with Kanin in London—Peter's reference to the persecution of the fugitives "Because we're Jews! Because we're Jews!" disappears; and Anne says: "We're not the only people that've had to suffer. Right down through the ages there have been people that've had to suffer. Sometimes one race . . . Sometimes another . . ."—which is very close to what

she says in the final rendering. At other points, too, Kanin urged changes that de-emphasized the connection of the annex inhabitants to their Jewishness. Noting a reference to Anne, Margot, and Peter's attending the Jewish Secondary School, he asked if it would be possible to convey that this was not from choice but because they were forced to do so by the authorities. And in the very last stages of revision, he urged that the sober "Rock of Ages," the traditional hymn in the Hanukkah scene, be replaced (as it was) by a more light-hearted, joyful melody, to prevent the close of Act I from becoming "as flat as a latke."^[11]

Following their three-week working session in London, Goodrich, Hackett, and Kanin spent ten days in Amsterdam, where Otto Frank gave them information about the backgrounds and characters of all the people who figured in the diary. He took them through the house, walked about the city, answered endless questions, and provided a density of personal context that they found both indispensable and emotionally

[11] In later years, although he did not know of Kanin's role, Levin often deplored the omission of the specific reference to Jews in Anne Frank's lines in the play. In 1976, he told Ira Berkow that "the actual psychological effect of omitting such a passionate Jewish speech from the stage . . . who can imagine it? The attitude is that the Jew would assimilate and disappear. To take out 'Jewish suffering' and put in 'all people suffer' is to equalize the Holocaust with any kind of disaster. If you do this, you unhook the search for meaning, you unhook the wrong to the Jews. Then you go on over the years with statements like 'There weren't six million. There were four million. There were two million. There were a lot of Russians and Poles who were killed in the camps. So the Jews are just exaggerating.' And you end up with what they're using now. The bottom line reads: 'The Jews did worse to the Arabs in Palestine than the Nazis ever did to the Jews.' It's been stated that way by any number of leaders in the United Nations" (Maxwell Street , 276).

chastening. Frances Goodrich later spoke of the experience as "harrowing," and she told a friend, "I thought I could not cry more than I had. But I have had a week of tears." For Frank the meeting was also exhausting, but it confirmed his belief that the writers and director were sensitive people who had caught the spirit of Anne's book and were working with the utmost sincerity and devotion. "I have," he told Bloomgarden, "every possible confidence in their work" (letter, 12 January 1955, KB).

Toward the end of 1954, Goodrich and Hackett were completing the play, which was scheduled to open in the next two months. But events did not proceed as smoothly as everyone associated with the production had hoped. Personal problems forced Kanin to ask for a delay, and since he was seen to be an indispensable member of the team, the opening was postponed until autumn. Coincidentally, as this decision was being made in the last days of December, Levin began litigation against Cheryl Crawford and Otto Frank. In a verified complaint filed by Samuel Fredman in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Levin alleged that the producer and the owner of the rights to the Diary breached agreements made between 1950 and 1952 to allow him to write or collaborate on a stage adaptation of the book. From Crawford he was seeking $76,500 for fraudulently inducing Frank to break the contract of March 1952. From Frank he was asking that the agreement of November 1952 be set aside because it was obtained by fraud, and that he now be given the right to either write or work with someone else on a dramatic adaptation of the play.

In the weeks following the filing of the complaint, Levin continued his efforts to explain and gather support for his actions. He went to court, he said, because he had exhausted

every other avenue for settling the dispute. After rational discourse broke down, he had suggested arbitration, a hearing before a committee of theatrical professionals or even mediation by a panel of rabbis, but all these proposals were rejected. Now, he was suing Otto Frank, not for money, but for the right to have his adaptation performed, since Frank had authorized and approved it; and he was suing Crawford for the loss of several years of time and for damage to his reputation. In an article in the National Jewish Post , in letters to "friends of the theater" and to members of the rabbinate, in public statements distributed to other groups, Levin reviewed the history of the controversy and urged that the matter be seen as a subject of serious concern to the larger community, not as a mere personal quarrel. Anne Frank's Diary , he wrote, was not a mere commercial property but folk material and a legacy to humanity, and his play was a contribution to its correct understanding.

For Otto Frank's attorneys and people involved in the production of the play, Levin's litigation and subsequent publicity campaign provided only new evidence of what they believed to be the absurdity of his claims and behavior. The suit, Bloom-garden reassured Goodrich and Hackett, was "the ridiculous act" of "a wacky and unethical character" and would certainly be thrown out of court. Levin, he said, was a disappointed writer who had tried his hand at the dramatization of a great book and failed to write a good enough play (14 January 1955, KB). Myer Mermin saw little point in wasting time and money contesting an action he considered vexatious, and he advised Frank to move to vacate the summons on the grounds that he was not a New York resident doing business in the state, a

motion that the court upheld at the end of March. But in the meanwhile the lawyers exchanged affidavits, attended hearings, and conferred among themselves to determine if there was any basis on which the dispute might be resolved.

As if the situation were not tangled enough, another unexpected difficulty arose early in 1955, when the Ohel Theater in Israel wrote Levin to ask if they could produce his version of the Anne Frank Diary . As the agreement of November 1952 stipulated, Levin did have the option to stage his play in Hebrew in Israel, but now a disagreement developed about terms and duration. Levin claimed the original contract gave him the unconditional right to permit such a production at any time; Mermin pointed out that if Levin insisted on the invalidity of that contract (as his suit contended), he could not assert that his right was protected by it. But Mermin briefly considered using authorization of a possible Israeli production as a negotiating tool on the chance that Levin might withdraw his lawsuit and stop interfering with plans for the New York staging. Such an arrangement, however, required the consent of Bloomgarden, Goodrich, and Hackett, who, stung by Levin's threats and obstructive behavior, had little faith in Levin's willingness to uphold an agreement if he later felt his interest was not served by it.

For much of 1955, lawyers on both sides explored possible resolutions of this particular disagreement (as well as other conflicts) between the parties. In the fall, however, these talks were eclipsed by the opening of The Diary of Anne Frank in preview at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia and then, on 5 October 1955, at the Cort in New York. Greeted with nearly unanimous acclaim, the Goodrich and Hackett play was praised the next

day for just those qualities that the writers and director worked so painstakingly to embody in the script. "The genius of this play is that there is nothing grim or sensational about it," William Hawkins reported in the New York World-Telegram and The Sun . "Instead it relates the flowering of a youngster who was pure in heart, whose faith bloomed with her mind and body, under the terrible scourge of history." That terrible scourge of history and the budding faith, though, were for most reviewers rather abstract. In the Daily News , John Chapman announced that "The Diary of Anne Frank is not in any important sense a Jewish play. . . . It is a story of the gallant human spirit." Richard Watts in the Post applauded its understatement and quiet conviction. "There isn't a Nazi in it," he wrote. For Brooks Atkinson in the Times , it was "a lovely, tender drama" about "the shining spirit of a young girl," enchantingly played by Susan Strasberg. The words "glow" and "warm" appeared in five of the seven next-day reviews, and every critic testified to seeing something magical, iridescent, or mesmerizing happen on stage at the Cort. Even the set of the hiding place, Walter Kerr marveled in the Herald Tribune , "is brilliantly drawn, a stunning background for a play that is—for all its pathos—as bright and shining as a banner."

These ecstatic reviews defined the terms by which The Diary of Anne Frank was to be discussed by the millions of Americans who would see it on stage in New York and around the country in subsequent years (as well as on film in the pious 1959 version directed by George Stevens from a screenplay by Goodrich and Hackett). Not only was the play a phenomenal popular and critical success (playing to capacity houses, moving audiences to tears, and winning the Antoinette Perry "Tony"

Award, the New York Critics' Circle Award, and The Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 1956), but it became a staple of community and school stages as well. Most theatergoers adored the Goodrich and Hackett Diary because they felt it transformed horror into something consolatory, inspirational, and even purgatorial: the characters may have been doomed, but the play was full of hope, energy, humor, lyricism, and "ineradicable life." People came out of the theater thinking not of all the eradicated lives and the monstrous implications of the German attempt at genocide, but rather of a smiling young girl who affirmed that "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." In her diary, Anne Frank followed that sentence with an apocalyptic vision of "the ever approaching thunder," destruction, and "the suffering of millions." But in the play one is left as the curtain falls with the sanguine, reassuring observation about human goodness—a repeated utterance so mindfully placed and so resonant that it soon became a tag line summing up the message of the Diary for countless people around the world. Indeed, so famous is the closing scene of the play that many people—including the editors of the Oxford Companion to American Theater (1992) and the Cambridge Guide to American Theater (1993)—mistakenly believe the line affirming human goodness is actually the last line of Anne's own diary.

Of the dozens of reviews that appeared in the fall of 1955, only a handful raised objections to the way Goodrich and Hackett had adapted the book for the stage. In the November Commentary , Algene Ballif shrewdly argued that the Broadway Anne Frank was a stereotypic American teenager, more like a Jewish Corliss Archer, the adolescent girl in Kiss and Tell , than

the singular Dutch girl in the Diary . In its desire to entertain, Ballif suggested, the play told the audience mostly what they already knew and what they wanted to hear. Similarly, Richard Hayes in Commonweal protested that the writers and director offered "only their stagey counterfeits, fragile shells of emotion," and failed to translate the recorded facts of the Anne Frank story into "another kind of truth—dramatic, poetic" (28 October 1955)- Eric Bentley, writing in the New Republic , noted that the play ended "weakly with Anne reflecting on the goodness of human nature—a principle which her story is far from confirming." But even Bentley seemed pleased that "contrary to most people's expectations, including mine, the Diary proves to be a touching, charming and not at all harrowing piece of theater" (2 January 1956).

When Levin saw the preview in Philadelphia, he had some of these same sound criticisms, but his immediate response was far more personal and impassioned. Writing to Otto Frank at the time of the Jewish High Holidays, he began by speaking of "a final effort at reconciliation," but he then went on to express again his anger and profound sense of grievance. "I have seen the play," he told Frank," and "need hardly tell you that it is very much like the play I wrote; you can read." The three years of "delays, of torment, of difficulty" were all unnecessary. His finished play, he argued, would have been the same in tone, "except for the fact which you too must be able to recognize, that in my play the characters are more fully and truly developed." The rest of Levin's letter consisted of his habitual attack on the people in positions of power who had persuaded Frank to reject his original dramatization, and he ended with this plea about justice and ethics:

I have urged you always to make it possible for me to find justice without recourse to the long, costly, and sometimes unpleasant processes of the law. I urge it again, I urge you to recognize the highest belief of our people in ethical conduct, and to place it above commerce, and above commercial loyalty, and above even the forms of legality, though for my own part I am quite confident that I could receive justice within these forms. (24 September 1955, BU)

Given Levin's passionate dedication to getting the story of the Jews of Europe told, his great contribution to the original success of the Diary , his enormous disappointment at the rejection of his play, and the chance that he may have been badly treated, it is difficult not to wonder at this point (and at many other points in the protracted controversy) if there might have been ways in which he could have been accommodated and even satisfied: some effort made to allow his play to be performed by community groups or small theaters (now that the Goodrich and Hackett Diary was such a tremendous success); some compensation given for his setbacks and loss of time. But in fact the situation had by this time taken on a kind of fated-ness, of inexorability, with everyone holding views that became harder and harder to reconcile, and each disputant becoming further enclosed in positions from which he or she seemed unable to withdraw.

Frank was now convinced that Levin was a sick man in the clutches of "a persecutional mania," and he spoke frequently in his letters to Mermin and Tereska Torres about feeling utterly helpless and full of pity at the tragedy in his former friend's life. But he was also deeply wounded by Levin's repudiation of their written agreement and by his accusations of fraud and deceit.

Yet even when Frank thought of trying to alleviate Levin's pain and to rescue them both from the distressing situation, he was hemmed in not only by temperament and morality but by prior commitments and legal constraints. During this period, he sometimes asked Mermin about the prospects of a settlement with Levin, but he was opposed for different reasons by everyone involved in the dispute. Bloomgarden, Goodrich and Hackett were now interested primarily in protecting their valuable property, and given Levin's previous behavior, they saw no justification for being responsive to him. They continually blocked any effort to give him even amateur rights to his play, arguing that royalties from such rights were often considerable and that an extension could jeopardize touring-company presentations of their work. They opposed allowing his Anne Frank to be done in Israel on the grounds that a staging there (whether it succeeded or failed) would depress interest in European productions of their version. Mermin, after the Goodrich and Hackett play was successfully launched, was becoming less and less inclined to negotiate with a man whose case he believed to be groundless and whose demands were often vague and constantly changing. Furthermore, the spectacular reception of the play on Broadway and the far-reaching talk of how "good it would be for the Jews" confirmed Frank's belief that Goodrich and Hackett had given him the adaptation he wished for and that he was right to have refused Levin's. Similarly, the more often the play was praised for eliciting pity and concern for the Jews and for stimulating contributions to Jewish charities, the less patience people were likely to have with Levin's campaign against it, especially his claim that Goodrich and Hackett had diminished the Jewish content of the story. Yet

despite the determined opposition to responding at all to Levin, lawyers on both sides did conduct many conversations and negotiations in an effort to resolve the conflict, but to no avail.

In the weeks following the premiere of the play, stories about its stunning impact appeared daily in publications around the world. Susan Strasberg was featured on the cover of Life, Newsweek , and many Sunday newspaper supplements; inquiries about production rights came in from scores of foreign theaters; and discussions with film producers were intense. In reaction, Levin's protest took new and increasingly belligerent forms. In his letters to Frank and others, he often drew on analogies to Nazi genocide to express what he felt had been done to him and his work. To Brooks Atkinson, he declared that his play had been "killed by the same arbitrary disregard that brought an end to Anne and six million others. There is, among the survivors, a compulsion to visit on others something of the evil that was visited on them" (27 September 1954, BU). To Otto Frank himself Levin compared the way his play was dealt with to "the arbitrary way in which the Germans took away some business that a Jew had created, and simply handed it to one of their own onhangers." And he went on: "When you were shut in the Annex, and later when you were in the barracks in Auschwitz, there must have been night after night, year after year, night after night, when you could not get to sleep because over and over in your mind the question kept asking itself, why, why, why have they done this to me?" Similarly, he concluded, he has had the same sleepless nights asking, "Why has Mr. Frank done this to me?" (19 October 1955, BU).

The cutting extravagance of Levin's language understandably deepened the resistance of Frank and others to respond-

ing in any positive way to his accusations and claims. It also exposed a great deal about the depth and nature of his own disillusionment. Not only was Levin voicing his anger at the loss of an opportunity to adapt the Diary , but he was expressing the shock of his perception that he was now in potentially destructive conflict with the man who for several years had meant so much to him: the dead child's father, the esteemed survivor, the holder of "the rights," a justice figure, and in insinuating ways his own surrogate father. But Levin continued his public and private campaign. He tried to organize writers to protest in his behalf by signing a petition urging that Anne Frank's Diary be considered a legacy to humanity, a literary work rather than a commercial property, and that qualified productions of his original play be permitted. Although Norman Mailer, James T. Farrell, and others supported him, the petition was dismissed by Frank and Bloomgarden as just another tactic. Through much of the fall, Levin also continued to gather material for his lawsuit, interviewing people who had been involved in the negotiations with publishers and producers in the summer and fall of 1952.

One prickly point of contention in those early negotiations had concerned the role of Herman Shumlin, the well-known Broadway producer and director, who had among his credits several of Lillian Hellman's most successful plays, as well as Grand Hotel (1930) and The Male Animal (1940). In April 1952, Levin had asked Shumlin to read Doubleday galleys of Diary of a Young Girl to see if he might be willing to produce a play based on the book. Although initially skeptical about the prospects of a play on such a grim subject—audiences, he said,

would not come to see people they know have ended in the crematorium—Shumlin had admired the work and said that he wanted to see Levin's adaptation before considering an option on the material. Six months later, after Crawford had rejected his draft, Levin had asked Shumlin to read it, and the producer told him that he had done a remarkable job so far and expressed an interest in seeing the script again after he had completed further revisions. At about the same time, two young producers, Norman Rose and Peter Cappell, contacted Shumlin and said that they had been and still were interested in producing the Levin dramatization, but that Frank and his associates would not grant them the rights because they did not have sufficient prestige. They were approaching Shumlin now because they believed that if he, an established producer, would join them, their opportunity to do the show would be improved.

Shumlin agreed to explore the matter further, but when Cappell and Rose's lawyer phoned Mermin, he was told that Shumlin was not among the fourteen acceptable producers and their inquiry could not be considered. Afterward, Levin said that he had tried desperately to get Shumlin's name on the original list of producers but was opposed by Mermin, who blocked him because he wanted at any cost to keep Levin's play from being produced. Mermin and Frank later maintained that Shumlin was rejected not because he favored Levin's play but because he had had no box-office hits in recent years, his reputation had fallen, and he was not of the caliber of Cheryl Craw-ford. They added that Shumlin wanted to coproduce with Rose and Cappell, who Levin himself had earlier agreed were too

young and inexperienced; and Frank continued to assert that Shumlin never actually made an offer but only expressed an interest.

In an affidavit prepared for Samuel Fredman in October 1955, Shumlin stated unequivocally that had he received an opportunity to produce Levin's play in association with Rose and Cappell, he "was ready, willing and able to accept that opportunity. I found the Levin adaptation satisfactory at that time as a first draft for a production and I affirm that I made an effort to acquire production rights prior to the 21st day of November 1952." Although this clearly supports Levin's contention about Shumlin's positive interest, it does not decide the arguments about Mermin and Frank's motives. As owner of the rights to the Diary , Frank had the prerogative to rule against Shumlin on any grounds, whereas Mermin could be defended on the basis of his belief (after the testimony of Crawford, Bloomgarden, and others) that Levin's script was a poor bet for success on Broadway. In later years, Shumlin voiced regret on several occasions about having gotten involved on Levin's side and said that Levin was making "a scandal of something that was not."^[12]

But noting all this, one can still see why Mermin's handling of Shumlin's interest in producing the play—like so much else in the controversy—could justifiably have inflamed Levin. Not only was he angered at the exclusion of a reputable producer who saw promise in his script, but he could never accept his having been given so little time to work on the project before

[12] Letter from Rabbi Samuel Silver, editor of American Judaism , to Meyer Levin, 27 September 1957 (BU).

Crawford and others turned it down. Goodrich and Hackett had more than a year to shape their play through at least eight versions, and they benefited from the criticism of many seasoned Broadway talents. Levin had no such good fortune; his first draft—despite the promise first seen in it by Frank, Craw-ford, Shumlin, Harold Clurman, and others—was rejected before he had any sustained opportunity to revise it.

But Levin's most significant new charges—and the ones that were to resonate for a decade and more—concerned not Shumlin but rather the relationship of the Goodrich and Hackett Broadway version to his original unproduced script. Once he saw the play in Philadelphia, Levin began arguing in print and privately that the adapters had plagiarized material from his work and that they had misrepresented the meaning of Anne Frank's Diary by eliminating vital material about Jewish identity, which was in his view the most important aspect of her life and book. As he put it in an article for the National Jewish Post in mid-October, Anne's diary was "the representative document . . . of all who perished in the great catastrophe," and it "was an adaptor's duty to find in it and to project the basic themes, the basic meaning of the ghastly experience." Of all Levin's charges, these were the two that were to prove hardest for his adversaries to counter, and they became dominant subjects of the controversy from this point on.