3
Levin's Anne Frank

Levin's charge of plagiarism against Goodrich and Hackett has proved to be one of the most persistent and difficult-to-assess aspects of the long controversy. When he first made the claim after the premiere of their Diary , it was immediately ridiculed and dismissed as wholly unfounded by everyone associated with the production, but two years later at the trial before the Supreme Court of the State of New York, it was the only allegation on which the jury found in Levin's favor, and he was awarded $50,000 in damages. Frank and Bloom-garden's lawyers called this result "a gross and shocking miscarriage of justice" and submitted motions to have the verdict dismissed and a new trial ordered. Even though the judge did subsequently set aside the jury's decision, he ruled on a technicality about unproven damages, and a later out-of-court settlement left the matter of "wrongful appropriation of ideas" hanging in the air. Levin, deprived of damages, still felt vindicated; Frank, Bloomgarden, and the Hacketts (who were not defendants in the suit) remained incredulous at the allegations

and the verdict; but as late as the 1980s, a critic looking back at the history declared that "Levin has a strong case."^[1]

Now, more than forty years after the argument about plagiarism erupted, a review of the circumstances under which the Diary was first dramatized, the ambiguity of the textual evidence, and the conflicting claims of the parties involved suggests that the case is unlikely to be settled conclusively. The first problem in weighing Levin's accusation is that since he and the Hacketts fashioned dramatic texts from an identical source, many of the same situations, scenes, and pieces of dialogue in their plays have their origins in Anne Frank's book itself. Second, although the Broadway writers said they never saw Levin's rendering and had no idea he had written a radio script as well, the radio play was broadcast twice on CBS, and several of the key figures involved in the process of revising their play—notably Kermit Bloomgarden and Lillian Hell-man—had heard or read Levin's work. Whether and precisely how their knowledge of these two texts influenced Goodrich and Hackett is impossible to determine. Third, Levin's play exists in several versions, and no one can be sure which one Bloomgarden and Hellman had seen. The version most widely available now (the text that was performed by the Soldiers Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1966 and privately printed by Levin a year later) was substantially revised for the Israeli production and is not the script of contention in the 1950s. The versions seen in 1957 by the lawyers and the jury have never been published, and even though they exist in various archives, they are difficult

[1] Stephen Fife, "Meyer Levin's Obsession," New Republic (2 August 1982), 26-30.

to date and order with certainty. To complicate matters further, Bloomgarden and others claimed that the Levin text submitted at the trial had been revised after the Goodrich and Hackett play had opened in New York and reflected his acquaintance with it (although this claim, too, is debatable).

Looking closely now at the various versions of Levin's Anne Frank will not settle the argument about plagiarism beyond reasonable doubt, but it can shed valuable light on what Levin was trying to do (and actually did accomplish) in his adaptations of the Diary ; it also helps clarify some of the most important issues involved in the thirty-year Levin-Frank dispute. Three different texts are relevant: Levin's radio script of 1952; the draft for the stage play that he submitted to Cheryl Crawford (and several lightly revised versions of it); and the play performed in Israel in 1966 and "privately published by the author for literary discussion" in an expanded edition the following year.

The radio script, Levin's first completed adaptation of the Diary , was written in response to a request from the American Jewish Committee to provide a twenty-five-minute dramatization for broadcast on CBS the night before the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Although Levin had trouble producing a draft that satisfied the coordinator, Milton Krents, the final version was aired on 18 September 1952 and was praised by listeners and reviewers. Levin's approach was simple but effective and revealing. Since he could not in less than half-an-hour offer anything resembling a complete dramatic version of the Diary , he chose and connected passages that highlighted some of the main features of the book and demonstrated why it was relevant to Rosh Hashanah, the Ten Days of Penítance, and Yom Kippur, the time at which for

Jews God judges humanity, and individuals examine their virtues, sins, and hopes for the future.

After the announcer establishes the didactic significance of the occasion, Levin blends three distinct patterns of sound: the filtered voice of Otto Frank narrating the history of his family in hiding, their fates in the death camps, and the survival of his daughter's book; the filtered voice of Anne, over the sound of a scratching pen, addressing her diary; and several dramatized scenes in which the inhabitants are heard talking with one another in the annex. Frank's later reportorial narratives are concerned primarily with events in and outside the house—deprivation, bickering, roundups, deportations, accounts of Jews being gassed, the progress of the war. Anne's voice records the pulsations of her inner being—the desires, preoccupations, ideals, and changing convictions of the quicksilver girl. The enacted scenes offer slices of immediate life—Anne receiving the diary or sparring with her algebra teacher; the two families arriving at the secret apartment; the strains of caged existence; and Anne's emerging romance with Peter.

The dominant impression of Anne that comes across from this tightly knit, though very brief, scenario is of a sensitive, reflective girl who broods alternately about sacred and mundane things. Her first speech reveals the lonely child looking for consolation in nature and celebrating God through His creation. But the adolescent Anne is also there, speaking of friends, clothes, boys, movie stars, and of herself as "simply a young girl in need of some rollicking fun." More dominant, though, is the grave, meditative Anne, the child for whom "memories mean more . . . than dresses." Her most vivid moments are speculations about the plight of people during war and the meaning of

present and past suffering. "The whole earth waits. Jews and Christians wait, and there are many who wait for death"—this haunting sentence from the Diary (and several others like it) are given pride of place. Although Levin inevitably uses "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart," he also includes the dark vision of wilderness and destruction. Dramatizing Anne's guilt about deserting Lies Goosens, Levin carefully links the episode to her emerging perceptions of the need for Jewish continuity. Indeed, the climax to the radio play is the passionate dialogue between Anne and Peter in which he denies and she proudly confirms their Jewish identity against a backdrop of air raid sirens, shouts of "Open, Jews!" and the terror of imminent seizure. The drama closes with Anne expressing faith in religion and love, and hoping—now that she is "a woman with inward strength"—to "work for the world, and for mankind," if "God lets me live." Frank, as narrator, then discloses Anne's death and links it to the question raised in a prayer on the Jewish New Year: "Who shall live and who shall die?" Anne lives, he asserts, in her book, and he wonders if he has been spared so that he might return "to receive her diary, to give my little daughter's words to the world, and all mankind."

On the basis of listener response, Levin's radio adaptation looked like an auspicious trial run for the forthcoming Broadway show. Reviewers in Billboard and Variety particularly liked the blend of suspense, character study, and homily, one noting that "the script retained all the sensitivity and moving qualities of the original," while the other observed that "it holds interest for Jew and Gentile alike." But Levin knew well enough that writing a twenty-five-minute sermonic scenario for broadcast-

ing at Rosh Hashanah was far less of a challenge than writing a play that would appeal to a Broadway audience and turn a profit. For that purpose he created a work of notably different tone and structure.

The three-act play written for Cheryl Crawford begins with a good deal more daring. The opening scene, which takes place in the street outside the Franks' apartment on Anne's thirteenth birthday, is designed to be both an alluring sketch of ordinary life and a suggestive ritual about a girl on the verge of becoming a young woman. Anne and some friends talk effusively about school, flirtations, and bodily changes; her mother appears in an upstairs window and the conversation turns variously to plants, puberty, periods, babies, and other subjects unusually explicit for the stage in 1952. Levin even includes the detail from the Diary about Anne's desire that she and Lies touch one another's breasts as a pledge of eternal friendship. The animated, at times comically ardent, birthday mood is suddenly modified by the entrance of Mr. Frank carrying a package and remarking: "We don't want the Nazis to get their clutches on our possessions." He explains the plans for concealment, and minutes later, when Margot receives a letter ordering her to report for service with a labor battalion, Mrs. Frank instructs the family to disappear into the secret annex. The scene ends with the ironical flourish of an errand boy delivering a bouquet of flowers from Harry Goldberg, Anne's admirer, who has tried on occasion to interest her in Zionism.

The discordant notes in this ambitious first scene have considerable dramatic promise. Levin quickly establishes the tensions that will emerge as the major motifs and themes of the story as a whole: the conflict between youthful avidity and

adult concern, between the desire to grow up, and the encircling threat of anti-Semitic persecution. His initial characterization of Anne is appealingly gritty. Although recognizable as an exuberant teenager, she also displays a candid interest in the physical facts of life that makes her more like the realistic author of the Diary (who writes easily of "talk, whispers, fear, stink, flatulation, and always someone on the pot") than the sanitized heroine created by Goodrich and Hackett.

The second scene, in the hiding place itself, efficiently develops these subjects. As the families arrive, talk turns to the conditions of incarceration and the strict regulations for daily behavior in the sealed rooms. Here, the dramatic tensions relate to security, health, and to impending conflict between the occupants over the use of sheets, silverware, and the W.C. The Franks and Van Daans all know the political realities: Anne quizzes her father about the chance of their being taken to a concentration camp or shot; Van Daan mentions Westerbork, and his wife the SS. Anne, though, is still portrayed as the figure associated with expansiveness and growth. She laughs a lot, moves to open a window, compares herself to a caterpillar making its cocoon, and continues to unsettle others with a pert remark about daughters inevitably going through a phase of infatuation for their fathers. Sexual currents are on the surface: Mrs. Van Daan flirts outrageously with Mr. Frank; and Koophuis, jesting about an upstairs harem, calls the Frank sisters his secret loves. At two notable points, characters behave in ways that have marked parallels in the Broadway version and would figure largely in the arguments about plagiarism at the 1957 trial. When they enter the vacant apartment, Koophuis removes the yellow star from Margot's coat, and Margot puts

her finger to her lips and then touches the emblem (because it also is the Star of David) before he puts it away; and soon after, the hunted Jews peel off layers of clothes and a joke is made about Anne "revealing" herself. Levin was later to claim that both these scenes were copied from his play by the authorized adapters, but Goodrich and Hackett maintained that one of these scenes is derived from the Diary itself and the other, although not in the book, was different enough in their version to be accounted for by creative coincidence.

Levin ends this second scene with an exchange designed to mix anxiety and comedy. As the gentile protectors leave the Jews to their confinement, Mrs. Van Daan speaks of feeling as if "we were being sealed in a tomb," and her husband gloomily replies, "In Poland . . . people are actually hiding in holes in the earth." This solemnity is lightened by Anne's burst of laughter at the sight of Peter stumbling under the weight of a sack of beans that snags on a nail and bursts; but the mood immediately darkens again when Anne is chided for making a noise that could jeopardize them all.

Levin's technique here is similar to what was to become the very successful governing strategy of the Goodrich and Hackett play. He too establishes a rhythm of fear followed by relaxation followed by a reminder of danger—a familiar but effective means of shaping the audience's response by accenting both the frightful suspense of the situation and the capacity of the fugitives to respond positively to it. This pattern continues to dominate the third and closing scene of Act I, which takes place six months later, in November 1942, when the Germans are holding much of Europe. At the start, everyone is dejected, bickering about exercise routines and food, quarreling about

books fit for teenagers to read and where the expected new resident, Dr. Dussel, should sleep. When Miep enters to announce that the Allies have landed in Africa, spirits soar; but when Dussel arrives and reports on the arrests and deportations of local Jews they all know, spirits again plunge. Then Levin concludes Act I with his most powerful piece of writing in the play so far. The sleepy Anne overhears Dussel's account of Nazi atrocities, and she at first cries out, "Oh why do we have to be Jews?" But then in bed she has a vision of her tattered friend Lies crying for help. Responding to the shock, Anne expresses guilt at having previously hurt Lies's feelings and shame now at having deserted her, and she prays to God for her own forgiveness and for protection for her friend. The scene is pivotal because it reveals Anne questioning and then, through the power of her maturing imagination, beginning to affirm her identity as a Jew.

On the basis of Act I of Levin's Anne Frank , it is easy to see why Cheryl Crawford had encouraged him in the late summer of 1952, and why other theater people later thought the draft had promise. But reading the second act, one can also begin to understand why Crawford grew skeptical about the play's potential for a New York production. At this point, Levin makes a set of reasonable artistic choices that are faithful to the inner truth of the Diary but that would likely provoke doubts in the minds of a producer who had to consider the exigencies of commercial theater. Instead of trying to intensify dramatic suspense by spotlighting the outside threat to the caged Jews, or to develop the external tensions embedded in the adolescent's relationship with her parents, Levin chooses to explore the interior implications of the material. As he was

to explain years later, he wanted to create a play that was Chekhovian in atmosphere and balletic in form—a work that captured the "probing of a young girl" who was "thwarted at each impulsive moment while she strives for self-realization" but who is ultimately able to express her independent identity as a Jew and as a writer in the face of discouragement and persecution (The Obsession , 68).^[2]

Levin's Act II, which opens on a hot summer afternoon in 1943, does move convincingly in this direction. The inhabitants of the annex, a year after their arrival, are further sunk in despondency and inertia. Peter toys with a magnet; his father sprays his sore throat; his mother reflexively wipes a table; Dussel won't come out of the toilet; and Frank tinkers with an ailing watch. Against this deftly depicted stagnant background,

[2] In the archives at Boston University, there is an undated letter written by Levin (probably in the mid-fifties), addressed "Dear Anne," in which he explains his intentions to the subject of his play: "We agreed that the play should not strive for emphasis of the melodramatic situation. Dramatic tension existed through the awareness of the audience that the fatal knock on the door might come at any moment. The power and the beauty in your diary is in the insistence of life itself to continue its natural development, even in such tension. . . . The task then was to find a dramatic form that could hold together the material of the loosely woven diary. I felt I had found it; in the stages of adolescent emotional development, there was the same dramatic suspense as in watching a child learn how to walk. The reaching first toward the father, toward the mother for support. The effort to attain a chosen object, the boy and the thrusting away of the anxious arms of mother, of father, as they reach out to prevent your fall. And in the third stage, the standing free, in self-realization—the attainment at the very tragic moment of the knock on the door. The form appeared to me as something close to ballet, with the girl in the climax achieving her first sense of maturity, recognizing the separate existence of mother, father, sister, boy."

Levin presents Anne the diarist, the hopeful writer eager to put everything down in her private journal and to publish the book when she is free. Margot, seeming to understand her sister's passion, observes, "I suppose it could be exciting. All the times we've nearly been caught, the robbery in the front office, and that nosey plumber." But Anne answers: "Not only things like that. I want to remember exactly how I felt." To externalize Anne's rich inner life, Levin has her read brief sentences from the daily entries: "Now it is suddenly clear to me what Mommy lacks," or "Yesterday I read an article by Sis Heyster about female bodily change . . ." This effort to represent Anne's growing commitment to record her feelings in language is certainly true to the original Diary ; indeed, that devotion can be said to be the girl's most profound and moving personal affirmation. But it does pose problems for someone writing for the theater. With the other characters becoming increasingly passive and shadowy, Anne's assertion of the vitality of her "written" life only makes the play seem increasingly more internalized and untheatrical, prompting the thought that it is in danger of becoming a staged reading of a diary rather than a journal transformed into a stirring dramatic action, or even an engrossing Chekhovian mood piece.

At the beginning of the second act, Levin's heavy reliance on Diary entries and his difficulty in finding stage equivalents for the life that exists so memorably in the pages of Anne's book are apparent in his handling of the people around her. As he concentrates on the complex inward process of Anne becoming a young woman, a writer, and a Jew, her parents and the Van Daans fade from the play. Otto Frank, who had only a minor role in Act I, is hardly noticeable in the first scene of Act

II; and Edith Frank, who is named as her daughter's adversary, is at this point close to being a cipher. Similarly, the intense focus on Anne's inner development detracts from the overt drama of the plot. The Nazis are barely mentioned in Act II, Scene I, and the palpable suspense that is essential for theatrical effect appears to be draining from the play.

Some of the earlier dramatic energy is recovered again in the concluding scene of Act II, set on the first night of Hanukkah, 1943. Here the physical and spiritual hardships of the characters and their markedly different ways of responding to them are forcefully presented. The Van Daans, running out of money, engage in an electrifying quarrel about the selling of her fur coat. Edith and Otto Frank are brought to center stage in a compelling episode in which they talk anxiously about their insufficiencies as Jews and as parents. Against this background of parental apprehension, Anne and Peter express their deepening affection for each other and provide a touching, if temporary, defense against the disturbing world outside. The scene closes with a suspenseful sequence in which the audience sees two thieves just outside the annex threatening to enter as the families begin to light candles for Hanukkah.

Levin's ceremony is very different from the long, cheerful scene that is similarly placed for climactic effect at the end of Act I of the Goodrich and Hackett Diary . Far more realistic and sober, his ritual is performed by Jews whose tentativeness about their own religious beliefs and fright about the future mute their observance of the festival commemorating one of the great victories of their people. At first Anne balks at reading the prayers for blessing the candles, insisting that all prayers should be private, and she recites only when Margot nudges

her into compliance. Otto and the Van Daans can't recall the words to "Rock of Ages," and Edith has to get the song going on her own. At the curtain, the eight inhabitants huddle close to one another as if they were seeking protection from furies they do not have the resources to combat. Levin's brief, unadorned rendering of Hanukkah in the hiding place seems closer to what most likely went on there than the excessively romantic version in the Goodrich and Hackett play. But again, one can see why a prospective producer might think Levin's quietly authentic scene not quite what was needed to absorb and entertain a large public on Broadway.

The third and final act of Levin's 1952 Anne Frank further highlights both the potential and the problems of the play. Surprisingly, the first of its two scenes opens with a surreal dream sequence: Anne's recorded voice-over is heard reading from the Diary about her crush on a boy named Peter Wessel; and as the curtain rises, she is sitting opposite him as he says, "If I had only known, I would have come." The lights fade, and we are back in the annex with Anne, dressed in a ballet costume, practicing movements and talking with Margot about their hopes for the future. The sequence with Peter Wessel is clearly meant to reveal Anne's preference for him over Peter Van Daan and to prepare for her subsequent disillusionment with her new boyfriend; but given the realism of the rest of the play, the dream vignette strikes a jarring note, and Levin eliminated it in later versions.

The conversation with Margot, though, is essential, for it allows us to see Anne exploring and modifying her sense of her own identity as a Jew. After she hears Margot confirm an earlier decision to be a nurse in Palestine, Anne remarks: "Perhaps I'd

go there, just to see the places in the Bible. I'd adore to go to Paris for a year, and London, and learn the languages. I want to be a journalist, to be something in the world, I can't imagine a life like Mummy's or Mrs. Van Daan's. And just being a nurse in Palestine, Margot—you could do much more." A revealing exchange follows in which each girl tries to define her particular idea of Jewish destiny: Margot sees it as making a free life for herself and doing something for her own people; Anne's desire is more expansive—to do something "for all mankind," without losing her own firm sense of being Jewish.

This striking episode is interrupted by the appearance first of Peter and then of the adults (including Miep and Henk), who bring the idealistic girls back to the tangible reality of black-market rations and threatened arrests, but back also to reports of Allied troop successes and the imminence of a German defeat. Immediately after Miep and Henk leave, Anne and Peter go off to his room to continue their blossoming romance. Impatient for kisses, Anne is also eager for more talk about beliefs and values, but her avid questioning of Peter leads to a disenchantment that soon inspires another affirmation. At this point, Levin skillfully turns the now-famous Diary entry about the meaning of Jewish suffering into an incisive dialogue in which, by interrogating Peter, Anne comes to recognize his shallow evasiveness and her own basic need for commitment—a revelation that ends with a vision: of the war-torn world becoming a wilderness, and of tranquility perhaps returning again.

In the last scene of the play, Anne remains a struggling, often balked aspirant, a figure much closer to the three-dimensional writer of the Diary than to the smiling paragon created

by Goodrich and Hackett. At one moment, she is asserting a new-found inner strength, while at another she tearfully admits being insensitive to her parents' feelings when she wrote them a resounding "declaration of independence." Talking with Otto, she calls herself "a bundle of contradictions" and astutely defines her dilemma as being mercurial and self-divided in ways she is now still groping to understand. As she says this, three men in SS uniforms come up from the pit, pistols in hand. Anne cries out, "And I keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be if—if. . . ." When the pounding on the door starts, Otto walks quietly to a hidden safe and puts Anne's manuscript inside, saying at the curtain, "They'll never touch you. . . . Something of us must live." Except for the awkward posturing in this last line, Levin's concluding scene draws from the most memorable and affecting of Anne's last Diary entries and succeeds in faithfully portraying her as the figure who has captured the world's attention as a vibrant girl, a victim, and an unforgettable emblem of lost possibility.

Levin, then, wrote a play in the fall of 1952 that—for all its first-draft deficiencies—was closer to Anne Frank's book, more successful in capturing the singularity of the young girl and the political and religious issues raised by her predicament, than the Goodrich and Hackett version produced to great acclaim three years later. But, unhappily for him, the fidelity and roughness of his script were considered to be untheatrical and risky by people whose taste and judgment were formed by the more conventional, streamlined products of the popular stage, and by the constrained political atmosphere of post-World War II America. Their view of his play was so negative that

despite his having been told by Cheryl Crawford in the summer of 1952 to "write long," he was never given the chance to revise the script in consultation with a producer and director. Levin had hoped Crawford and others would read with a stage eye and allow for what still had to be done; but this did not happen until the director Peter Frye produced the script in Israel in 1966. The most valuable qualities of Levin's play became apparent only after that production, and others in Boston in 1983 and 1991 and elsewhere. But this afterlife and its implications will be considered in Chapters 4 and 5.

At the beginning of 1956, after Levin had charged Goodrich and Hackett with plagiarizing from his script and diminishing the Jewish content of the Diary , attorneys on both sides continued to explore ways in which the overall dispute might possibly be resolved. Levin himself had approached Ephraim London again in the hope of getting "a fresh start toward a settlement that might preclude a public airing of the whole issue." London, an expert in constitutional law, was especially well known for his work against censorship. In 1950, defending Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle , he had successfully argued that the First Amendment's protection of speech and the press extended to films as well, and he was later to win a similar case for the movie of Lady Chatterley's Lover . Early in February, London telephoned Myer Mermin offering to serve, not as an advocate, but as an impartial mediator, and on the twenty-third the men met for several hours of candid talk about viewpoints and proposals.

London invited Mermin to advance a proposal of settlement, but Mermin said that he did not think it appropriate for

any such offer to be made by Otto Frank or his counsel. Any suggestion for a resolution should come, he said, either from Levin himself or from London, if he thought he could work out a compromise. Mermin contended that the greatest deterrent to a settlement was Levin's practice of regarding agreements as binding only so long as they served his purpose. From Paul, Weiss's point of view, a proposal from Levin, or from London as mediator, would have to meet this problem of fidelity before it could be considered. London agreed to try to frame some compromise in the light of the discussions with both parties.

To their mutual surprise, however, the next day Weinstein and Fredman began a second lawsuit by having Kermit Bloom-garden served in an action brought against him and Otto Frank. Charging fraud, breach of contract, and wrongful appropriation of ideas, Levin as plaintiff asked damages of $150,000 against Frank and $100,000 against Bloomgarden. The producer was also served with a warrant attaching Frank's right to royalties from the Broadway production. The earlier litigation against Cheryl Crawford for damages of $76,500 remained pending.

Mermin canceled further conferences with London, and a new round of accusations began. Mermin claimed that the litigation and the attachment of royalties were begun to put pressure on the mediation discussions, but Fredman argued that preliminary steps for legal action had been taken long before, and the dates were a coincidence. Levin continued soliciting rabbis to sign a petition defending his right to have his play performed in public. In his cover letter, he claimed that there were two ways to destroy Jewish life: "One is physical extinc-

tion as practiced by the Nazis. The other is extinction of Jewish identification. In some countries this is practiced through the extermination of Jewish culture." The suppression of his play was, to his mind, an obvious illustration of the process. Informed by Levin that he had nearly 250 signatures from members of the rabbinate, Frank responded irately, maintaining that Levin was now motivated by wounded pride, envy, and a desire for money (having earlier pledged to waive all fees and royalties or contribute them to charity). He labeled the claim of fraud and deceit "detestable" and charged Levin with abusing his reputation as a writer on Jewish life to influence the Jewish community unjustly. Frank also wrote to several prominent figures in Jewish organizations expressing his disappointment at the large number of rabbis who would sign petitions without knowing anything about the background of the feud and without asking him or Bloomgarden for their side of the story. The producer, too, was active in explaining his view of the quarrel. Responding to Rabbi Samuel M. Silver, director of public relations at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (who had written for a clarification), Bloomgarden declared that Levin was trying to convert his private disappointment into a public moral issue. As for his claim that the Broadway version of the Diary fails to do justice to the spirit of the book, Bloomgarden proudly announced that only two weeks earlier the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had awarded him their highest award for his production of the drama. And he concluded:

obviously one cannot hope for 100% unanimity in appraising any play—but the response to this play from people in all

walks of life and of all religious faiths has been such as to make me feel that it is not only good theater but that it is also an inspiriting communication which carries forward the spirit and the message of Anne Frank's diary. I feel that anyone who takes steps to injure this production is doing a disservice to the spirit of Anne Frank. (24 February 1957, KB)

Meanwhile, the expanding fame and financial success of the play further confirmed Bloomgarden and many others in their assessment of the beneficial influence of this version of Anne Frank's story and in their strong opposition to Levin's behavior and petitions. In New York the play was grossing nearly $30,000 a week; during the spring of 1956, it won all the major critics' prizes; offers to stage foreign productions were coming in from around the world; and several large film studios and independent producers were considering bids of close to half a million dollars for motion picture rights. Enthusiasm for the play and the anticipated film served also to increase sales and new translations of the Diary in book form. Ironically (and painfully for Levin), his 1952 prophecy in the New York Times Book Review that this "wise and wonderful young girl . . . surely will be widely loved" was being fulfilled in ways beyond even his most extravagant imaginings.

Despite their mounting antagonism, however, Frank and Levin both had reasons for wanting an out-of-court settlement. Frank wished to end the continual disturbances of the ongoing dispute and to free the attached royalties for use in restoring the house on the Prinsengracht and starting the work of the Anne Frank Foundation; Levin felt he might be able to get amateur rights for his play (which Fredman had told him he could never get by suing), and he was also finding the legal fees

and the emotional cost draining. Conscientious efforts to locate grounds for a settlement continued during the late spring and summer, but old obstacles remained and new ones emerged. Mermin insisted that Levin would have to withdraw the charges of fraud, breach of contract, and wrongful appropriation of ideas, and that Fredman needed to provide a satisfactory guarantee of finality. Levin demanded nonprofessional rights for his script, an exclusive period for production of his work in Israel, a substantial percentage of royalties from the Broadway play, and payment of five thousand dollars for legal expenses. Goodrich, Hackett, and Bloomgarden refused to go along with the first three demands, and Otto Frank objected especially to the third and the fourth.

Through much of the summer of 1956, the attorneys were also engaged in submitting to the court affidavits and procedural motions about technical matters: notably bills of particulars and the possibility of consolidating the two lawsuits. They also jousted with each other. Edward Costikyan of Paul, Weiss maintained that for years the plaintiff had been conducting a campaign of harassment of the defendants and had repeatedly changed and revised his version of the facts, asserting new claims, repudiating written agreements, and conducting a rancorous public relations campaign in the press. Fredman countered by objecting to the vituperative language and challenging all Costikyan's claims about the alteration of facts. If it was harassment, he said, for the plaintiff to insist on his day in court, then the long delays in the process demonstrated that the defendants, through the earning power achieved from the play that was the cause of the litigation, have harassed the plaintiff. At one point, Costikyan—increasingly skeptical about

chances of negotiation when positions were so far apart—remarked to Fredman that the tone of his letter suggested "that the controversy between our clients might, unless you and I are careful, extend to a controversy between us as attorneys" (16 April 1956, PWRW&G).

Through all the charges and countercharges, talks about settlement possibilities continued. Attorneys for Paul, Weiss repeatedly declared that Levin's claims were entirely without merit, but they hoped to buy Otto Frank freedom from harassment and from a lawsuit that could last for years. For a short time in September, one new offer seemed promising. Frank would be willing to pay Levin five thousand dollars upon the release of the attached royalties, and another five thousand dollars contingent on the movie rights being sold; Levin would have the right to produce a Hebrew version of his adaptation in Israel for a designated period of time (if the other parties agreed); all of Levin's causes of legal action would be dismissed with prejudice, and counterclaims protecting Frank's rights and enjoining Levin from issuing further statements or taking additional action disparaging Frank's rights would be stipulated and entered as a judgment in the case; Frank would pay ten thousand dollars jointly in his name and Levin's to the Women's International Zionist Organization; and statements would be released to the press and interested parties detailing the terms of the final settlement.

When Samuel Fredman read the proposal from Paul, Weiss, he immediately wrote to Levin (who was then in Paris), urging him to accept it. After expressing his fond personal regard, Fredman said that he and all Levin's friends agreed "that it would be to your best interest to achieve a reasonable settle-

ment, with honor, which would free you from the drudgery of what is to follow in the lawsuit, and would at the same time, preserve your position." After explaining why he believed the terms, with some revision, were sensible, the attorney ended by beseeching Levin: "On the eve of Yore Kippur—with all that this day connotes to a person like yourself—[take] the glorious opportunity to achieve a reasonable compromise" (12 September 1956, BU). When Levin read the settlement document, however, he found it both disrespectful and inadequate. His case, he said, was not a "nuisance claim," and given the amount of money Frank and the others were earning from the play and would earn from the film, the sums mentioned were trifling. He recommended that the entire matter be left open until he returned to the States in October.

Between the time Paul, Weiss had made the proposal and the time Levin arrived back in New York, three events occurred that shattered any possibility that settlement deliberations would continue. Levin's novel, Compulsion —the fascinating story of Leopold and Loeb's calculated murder of Bobby Franks—was being set for publication by Simon and Schuster and promoted as a sure-fire bestseller, which, before the end of the year, it was. Then, on 30 September, Frances Goodrich published in the Arts section of the New York Times her "Diary of The Diary of Anne Frank, " excerpts from the journal she had kept during the composition and production of the prizewinning play. Unintentionally, the piece was a bombshell. When Levin read it, he found substantiated nearly everything he had suspected about the role of Lillian Hellman (who had recommended the Hacketts to Bloomgarden and critiqued the script at a critical point) and about the favored treatment given

to the playwrights (who had nearly a year to rework eight versions). Providing a symbolic capstone to the entire affair was the entry for 6 December 1954: "Took plane to Amsterdam. Presents from Mr. Frank waiting in the room. This is St. Nicholas Day." The lawyers at Paul, Weiss were also attentive to some of the same details, but for their own reasons. They protested to Frances Goodrich that the week-by-week report of assistance given the Hacketts might heighten Levin's sense of grievance, exacerbate his bitterness, dampen his readiness to settle, and affect the sympathy of jurors should the case go to court. On each count they proved correct.

But it was the third event that was the most spectacular and had the widest reverberations. On 1 October, Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank opened simultaneously at major theaters in seven German cities and provoked astonishing, unprecedented responses. In Düsseldorf playgoers sat silently in the grip of overwhelming emotion, and at intermission they remained in their seats, "as if afraid of the lights outside, ashamed to face each other." When the play ended, there was neither applause nor curtain calls as the audience, many in tears, filed out of the auditorium. In Berlin, nearly two minutes of quiet followed the ending; then, after the beginning of applause was stifled by hisses, everyone walked out drained, staring straight ahead "as if at a funeral." The impact and reactions were similar in Karlsruhe, Hamburg, Constanz, Aachen, and Dresden (the one venue in the Soviet zone).

The English critic Kenneth Tynan, who had complained that the New York production "smacked of exploitation," was overwhelmed at the premiere in Berlin. "At the Schlosspark," he wrote in the Observer , "I survived the most drastic emotional

experience the theatre has ever given me. It had little to do with art, for the play was not a great one; yet its effect, in Berlin, at that moment in history, transcended anything that art has yet learned to achieve. It invaded the privacy of the whole audience: I tried to stay detached, but the general catharsis engulfed me." And Tynan concluded with the admission that his comments were obviously not drama criticism. "Yet in the shadow of an event so desperate and traumatic, criticism would be an irrelevance. I can only record an emotion that I felt, would not have missed, and pray never to feel again" (7 October 1956).

The day after the opening, newspapers all over Germany reported the impact of the play less as a theatrical event than as a notable chapter in the social history of the country. Within the week, media around the world were describing the seven-city phenomenon as the Germans' "facing up to history"—a mass response to twelve Nazi years of degradation that now included guilt, shame, grief, and perhaps penance and purgation. The experience in a playhouse was continually compared to a religious ritual: The Diary , one reviewer said, had the effect of "a present-day requiem"; the audience seemed to be engaged in an act of contrition.

Within the next few months, Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank , performed 1984 times in fifty-eight other German cities, was seen by more than a million people. Attending this particular play quickly became a national ritual. Theater playbills often contained extracts of comments from President Heuss discussing the subject of collective guilt, and these quotations were accompanied by photographs, statements from Otto Frank and other notables, and eyewitness accounts of his daughter's anguish in Bergen-Belsen. At most of these performances, the

behavior of each audience differed only slightly. Early on, a Hamburg rabbi had protested that the absence of applause transfigured a theatrical performance into a sacred act; but he also felt that it would be inappropriate for the audience to clap loudly as though the play were just another absorbing entertainment. He suggested a compromise: one single, brief burst of applause—a suggestion later adopted in many places.

Anne's diary in book form, which in Germany had only modest sales between 1951 and 1956, became an instant (and continuing) bestseller, and the child herself became a national heroine and myth. Young people especially were obsessed with the book and its protagonist. Early in 1957, for instance, two thousand youths, mostly from Hamburg (in a demonstration initiated by the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation), walked and bicycled in the rain carrying flowers to the mass graves at the former concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank had died—a ritual that was reported in the international media and imitated elsewhere and in later years.

Commentators at the time argued that the staging of the Goodrich and Hackett play marked a milestone in the history of Germany's reaction to its own Nazi past. In 1945, they said, when Germans had first been confronted with pictures and reports of the millions slaughtered in death camps, many responded with disbelief and derision. In the fall of 1956, after seeing or reading about the play, people appeared to be reacting with shock, dismay, shame, and concern. Kuno Epple, the chief producer of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, said that The Diary of Anne Frank succeeded "because it enables the audience to come to grips with history, personally and without denunciation. We watch it as an indictment, in the most humble, pitiful

terms, of inhumanity to fellow men. No one accuses us as Germans. We accuse ourselves" (New York Times Magazine , 17 February 1957). Other commentators, however, were far more skeptical. They pointedly remarked that the play let the Germans off easily; it did not show the SS or the ghastly fate of the hunted; it ended with the hammering on the door, not with scenes at Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Other critics argued that the nationwide purging at a play about a teenage girl was a form of maudlin self-pity and not likely to get people thinking about the historic meaning or the political and cultural implications of state-sponsored genocide and their own relationship to it. Telford Taylor, U.S. chief counsel for the prosecution of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946, once asked Goodrich and Hackett why they thought their play was such a remarkable success in Germany. When they answered that it was a heartrending work about a lovable young girl and her family, he replied that he believed the audiences liked it because the play never pointed an accusing finger at anyone and because it took place in Holland, not Germany.^[3]

Norbert Muhlen, a journalist who spoke with scores of Germans soon after they saw the play in 1956, observed that "the scale of reaction ranges all the way from genuine shock to total rejection of the book's theme." Fairly typical of one extreme was an old Protestant nurse who said: "I was more than shocked. . . . I feel guilty. Yet we had no idea what happened to the individual Jew. Please tell me how to help the survivors." But at another point on the scale was a spectator who confessed to

[3] Handwritten by one of the Hacketts in their copy of the German translation of their play (GH).

being profoundly touched "because the play reminds us of our own fate. . . . After all, we too lost so much during the war." And finally, close to the other end was a man recently back from a Russian prison camp who complained that too much fuss was being made about the Jews. "It was better to be gassed to death," he said, "than to rot slowly in a Russian prison camp." Muhlen found the responses of young Germans more encouraging than those of their elders, yet even they usually linked Anne Frank's fate to their own adolescent anxieties and rarely asked about the relevance of the play to the Jews who once lived among them, or to the roots of the catastrophe in their country's political and social history (Anti-Defamation League Bulletin , June 1957).

Now, forty years after the premiere of the Goodrich and Hackett play, there is no denying the enormous emotional impact it had on audiences all over Germany. Although one can say that its sentimentality and evasiveness—its minimizing the Jewish subject in an effort to achieve an all-embracing, consoling universality—contributed to the tendency of many German playgoers to identify with the victims rather than to see themselves among the perpetrators, a fair claim can also be made that by not confronting the audience with the horrific historical actuality, the Goodrich and Hackett play, however ironically, helped accelerate the long-delayed process of response to the Nazi past, especially among the young. But even this claim is sometimes challenged. In 1962, Hannah Arendt called the admiration for Anne Frank, especially in Germany, a form of "cheap sentimentality at the expense of great catastrophe"; more recently, Saul Friedlander, comparing the opening of The Diary of Anne Frank in Germany with the tele-

cast of "Holocaust" in 1979, has wondered whether "such shock-like confrontations" do not quickly become for the majority of the population, "a set mechanism . . . a near automatic process."^[4]

On a smaller stage, the repercussions for the Levin and Frank quarrel were also considerable. In New York in October, newspapers and magazines—from the New York Times to Life and Variety —ran lengthy articles about the extraordinary impact The Diary of Anne Frank had on German theatergoers. The flood of publicity only served again to support all the antagonists in positions they already held. Having read the "Diary of The Diary, " Levin was now absolutely convinced that a left-wing clique in the Broadway theater (spearheaded by Hellman) had schemed to strip him of his rights and opportunities in order to profit from a uniquely valuable and important property. The excitement in Germany reminded him how the inner truth of the Diary had been distorted and how much he had lost. But now that Compulsion was a bestseller, he could afford to conduct his fight in the courts. Frank, Bloomgarden, Goodrich, and Hackett were more certain than ever that their play was both a powerful force for moral good and a huge moneymaker, and thus there was no reason on any grounds to be responsive to requests and demands they believed to be

[4] Arendt, letter to the editor, Midstream , September 1962, 85-87; Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe , 7-8. For a brief, thoughtful discussion of the complexities of German responses to Anne Frank's Diary and to the Goodrich and Hackett play, see Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank," in Lessons and Legacies , 260-70.

wrong. Indeed, they all thought they had been uncommonly generous in their attempts to work out a settlement agreement, and when Levin rejected the September 1956 Paul, Weiss proposal, they assumed that the case was headed for court. As Myer Mermin icily explained to Fredman in November, they were not prepared to make settlement offers indefinitely just "to satisfy your client's overblown notions of what this litigation is worth." The rejection of Frank's "fair, generous and well-considered proposals must terminate these discussions. We will proceed to litigation" (SCSNY).

Although everyone believed the trial would be held early in 1957, another incident occurred that caused more turmoil and consternation. In the third week of January, news reached New York that the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv had opened a major Hebrew production of Goodrich and Hackett's Diary . First-night applause had been lavish; unlike the Germans and Dutch, the Israelis summoned the performers and director for repeated curtain calls. Afterward, the managers announced that to honor Anne Frank a forest was being planted in the Jerusalem hills. Simultaneously, the establishment by the American-Israel Cultural Fund of an Anne Frank Memorial to support Israeli writers (endowed by the American adapters of the Diary ) was also disclosed.

Samuel Fredman wrote immediately to Paul, Weiss, protesting the staging as a violation of his client's rights established in the agreement of November 1952. Otto Frank was shocked and chagrined; he had regularly declined offers to have the play performed in Israel on the grounds that the question of Levin's rights still had to be clarified, and he had never consented to a production by Habimah. His attorneys, however, saw no

dilemma. According to Mermin, Levin's chance to have his script done in Israel had long passed; Habimah was in violation of copyright; and besides, if Levin was suing on the grounds that the 1952 agreement was obtained by fraud, he could hardly now claim to be protected by it. But in response to Mermin's telegrams to Habimah asking that they desist immediately, the company held off, suggested paying royalties, and kept performing. Frank, who had been increasingly upset by the effect of Levin's many accusations on his reputation in the Jewish community, now felt in another distressing bind. He did not want to sue an Israeli theater company, but on the other hand he did not want to seem to be authorizing the forbidden production.

Interpreting the events in Tel Aviv as a calculated move by Frank, Bloomgarden, Goodrich, and Hackett to further block his rights and suppress his play, Levin escalated his campaign to publicize the charges. In the next few weeks, he appeared on Mike Wallace's Nightbeat television show, on the radio with Barry Gray and then with Tex and Jinx McCrary, and on the lecture platform at several New York synagogues. Invited to discuss the interest in his best-selling Compulsion , he would eventually turn the conversation to an account of how his original adaptation of the Diary was rejected and suppressed by a clique on Broadway who believed it to be too Jewish and not commercial enough. His play was a literary work, he said, not a mercantile property, and it should be given its right to life on the stage. At the Park East Synagogue, for instance, he opened his lecture with an analysis of how the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Franks in the novel was motivated by Jewish self-hatred, a sense of shame leading the killers to wish to destroy

themselves, or at least to obliterate their sense of religious identity. Then he explained how Jewish self-hatred motivated the left-wing, anti-Zionist coterie of Bloomgarden, Hellman, and others to silence him as an adapter of the Diary . He urged all his listeners to help persuade his adversaries to avoid a nasty, protracted lawsuit and agree to settle the matter by arbitration.

The lawyers at Paul, Weiss (who represented both Frank and Bloomgarden) sought without success to convince the broadcasters not to try a forthcoming lawsuit in the media. They also explored the possibility of charging Levin with defamation but rejected the move on the grounds that his attorneys might succeed in getting such a suit consolidated with the pending action, thus broadening the case and giving Levin a chance to make more personal attacks under the privilege of litigation. Furthermore, they continued to oppose Levin's call for arbitration because he wanted a group representing the rabbinate and professionals in the arts, who would consider the issues without being bound by the rules of legal evidence. Paul, Weiss did, however, work with Kermit Bloomgarden to prepare a press release explaining his role in the contentious history and to answer a pro-Levin article titled "The Betrayal of Anne Frank," by Rabbi Jacob Weinstein in Congress Weekly . Similarly, they supported Otto Frank when he expressed a desire to write to prominent Jewish figures. In letters to leaders of B'nai B'rith and other organizations, Frank protested Levin's one-sided representations, personal attacks, and irresponsible behavior. Describing how hurt he was that Jewish community groups and temples were allowing Levin to use their facilities to influence the public through the presentation of misleading and incorrect statements, he asked that they bar his access.

Levin was also meeting resistance to his activities from those closest to him: mainly his lawyer, wife, and editor. Samuel Fredman had urged his client to be more responsive to settlement proposals and now threatened to resign if Levin continued to discuss the legal aspects of the disagreement on radio and television. He also chided Levin for angrily protesting his reputation as belligerent and litigious while continuing to advertise and perpetuate his quarrels. Tereska Torres had often said that her husband's vehement fight for his rejected script was futile and self-destructive—a waste of time, money, and energy that was harmful to his writing and family life. Speaking of the recent past as "wasted years, sick years, dreadful years," she told him "it is yourself you should be suing for damages." Although she acknowledged he had been shabbily treated and hurt by others, she declared, "I am not speaking now about your rights at all, nor about the truth of your case, nor about its justice—all I am speaking about is your reaction to this injustice." And as she had done before, she urged him to forget about a battle he was destined to lose and turn to other creative work.^[5]

But Levin was not convinced, and he kept up his defiant efforts to win the right to have his views acknowledged and his play performed. He wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, asking her to talk with him about "a complex and rather tragic matter" connected with the adaptation of Anne Frank's Diary . Mrs. Roosevelt had been closely associated with the original book ever since she allowed her name to be used as author of the preface, and she had often written and spoken about the importance of the

[5] All quotations are from undated letters written by Tereska Torres to her husband (BU).

work's humanitarian message. Months before, in discussions with attorneys, Levin had proposed her as a possible neutral party. At their meeting in April, he recounted his long struggle with the adaptation and asked her to intervene to bring about a peaceful settlement and to avoid the upsetting consequences of a court proceeding.

Agreeing to help, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to Frank describing her talk with Levin and his desire to avoid a trial that would bring out disagreeable things, such as Frank's motives for moving to Switzerland, which according to Levin had to do with evading high Dutch taxes. She hoped Frank would now be willing to submit the dispute to arbitration. Instead, he was troubled by the letter. His previous correspondence with Mrs. Roosevelt had been amicable, but he felt this most recent letter was formal and cold. Obviously impressed by Levin's impassioned account, she did not seem to him to realize she was listening to an especially partisan view of the history. Responding to Mrs. Roosevelt, Frank admitted his distress and offered an account of the affair from his side. He said that Levin's view was slanted and incorrect, and he expressed particular disappointment that she did not perceive the account of his motives for moving to Basel as both erroneous and a form of blackmail. He could not now act differently, he said, in response to a man who accused him of fraud and who had repudiated a contractual agreement he had earlier signed. Only a court trial would establish the facts of the case.

Having been informed of the exchange between Frank and Mrs. Roosevelt, the attorneys at Paul, Weiss asked one of the partners, Lloyd Garrison, and one of their clients, the public official Nathan Straus (both longtime friends of the Roosevelts)

to intercede. In his letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, Garrison said that Levin had elicited a sympathetic response to his cause that the facts did not warrant; and Nathan Straus similarly supported Frank, his friend from college days in Heidelberg. By early June 1957, Mrs. Roosevelt had decided to back off, and she wrote to Tereska Torres (who had also asked her help with arbitration):

I do not feel it is possible to really be a judge between Mr. Otto Frank and your husband. I have no doubt that both of them think they are right. Mr. Straus, whose opinion I respect and the firm of lawyers whom they employ, and whom I deeply respect, think your husband is wrong. I don't think Mr. Frank moved to Switzerland to escape taxation, as your husband told me, nor do I think he was moved to refuse your husband's version of the play by any but the best advice which was given to him as to the success of the production . . . . It would be well if the case could be settled by arbitration but you would probably not be satisfied with the people they suggested just as they would not be satisfied with the people you would suggest. . . . (5 June 1957, TT)

When Levin found out about the participation of Straus and Garrison, he was perturbed and told Mrs. Roosevelt that he knew Straus was an old friend of Frank's, "but it never struck me that he could have taken the most active part in the entire affair, as it would now seem. It must, then, have been embarrassing for you for me to bring a complaint that turned out to be against someone who had been so close to Mr. Roosevelt" (7 June 1957, BU). From Levin's own point of view, however, the episode was another instance of people with great power moving in consort against him.

Although the court trial had originally been set for March

1957, schedule conflicts and procedural motions kept delaying it throughout the year, and in the meantime the renown of the Diary and its commercial value kept growing phenomenally. Film rights had been sold to Twentieth Century Fox, and the eminent director George Stevens began a much-publicized, worldwide talent search to find a girl to play Anne in what was being heralded as the most anticipated picture of the decade. (The search resulted in the selection of Millie Perkins, an eighteen-year-old, non-Jewish model.) Throughout the summer, reports appeared about the establishment of the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam and about the remarkable impact of the play in Europe and Asia. A long article in Variety noted that Anne Frank was now for young people the most famous figure in Germany and an inspiring symbol of the continuing fight against Nazism. To celebrate her birthday on June 12, Georg Solti conducted the Frankfurt Opera House orchestra; there was also a special religious observance in Paul's Church and commemorations elsewhere.

Levin's fortunes on the other hand were worsening, and his mood was becoming more desperate. When people labeled him a crackpot and a troublemaker, he charged a deliberate character-assassination plot that had had calamitous effects on his writing career. In response, he tried to gather discrediting information about Otto Frank's behavior in Auschwitz, and he wrote several syndicated columns questioning the background of Gusti Huber, who had been praised for her role as Edith Frank on Broadway. In the Cort Theatre Playbill , Huber's career was said to have been "abruptly terminated when the Germans over-ran Austria," but Levin produced evidence to

show that she appeared in films made in Berlin and Munich during the war.

When he turned to his own creative work—an adaptation of Compulsion for the stage—Levin unhappily became involved in yet another ferocious quarrel. The producer, Michael Myer-berg, thought the first script needed work and convinced the playwright to accept a collaborator, Robert Thom; but when the two men could not see eye to eye on revisions, Myerberg proposed that Alex Segal, stager of the show, serve as final judge. After accepting, Levin came to suspect that Segal and Thom were in league against him, making changes that vulgarized the play. Levin applied to the Dramatists Guild for arbitration; Myerberg obtained a court order requiring Levin to show cause why the arbitration should not be enjoined; and Levin countered by instructing Samuel Fredman to get an injunction to halt the premiere of the production.

Although the play eventually opened despite Levin's strong disapproval, the widely publicized argument had distressing consequences for him. Not only was he being branded again as uncooperative, litigious, and a bad playwright, but his decision to take Myerberg to court just before the suit against Frank and Bloomgarden was to be tried caused a crisis in his marriage. After years of differing with her husband about his response to the rejection of his play, Tereska Torres felt overwhelmed by the atmosphere of constant contention. When she learned about the threat of a second suit just as everyone was preparing for the trial of the first one, she left art impassioned note expressing her desperation and came close to committing suicide—a trauma that is depicted in Levin's novel The Fanatic

and his memoir The Obsession , and in Torres's own autobiographical work, Les maisons hantées de Meyer Levin . Torres took the children and planned not to return, but then Levin himself came close to a breakdown and pleaded with his wife to come back and help him get through the difficult weeks of the trial. She did, but the court proceedings were nonetheless a taxing ordeal.

The trial opened before New York Supreme Court Justice Samuel Coleman and an all-male jury on 13 December 1957 and ran for twenty-one days. Levin contended that after he had adapted The Diary of a Young Girl for the stage, a change of producer and writer resulted in his being defrauded of his rights. Otto Frank, he claimed, breached the original oral agreement that gave him the right to do the play, and Crawford and Frank used deceit and misrepresentation to obtain the agreement of November 1952, by which he surrendered those rights. He also maintained that ideas and material from his Anne Frank were borrowed by Goodrich and Hackett for their Broadway version. From Otto Frank and Kermit Bloomgarden, producers of the play, he sought $600,000; and from Cheryl Crawford, in a consolidated suit, $450,000. He declared, however, that any money over expenses he might receive from the lawsuit would be donated to Jewish charities.

On January 6, after more than two weeks of frequently challenged, inconclusive testimony and hostile questioning, Judge Coleman dismissed all the charges related to fraud and breach of contract on the grounds that there was no legal cause for the action. However, he ordered the jury to decide the one remaining issue: whether the Hacketts in their adaptation had used any new character, situation, or plot originally created by Levin

in his version. Two days later, after deliberating for ten hours, the jury returned a ten-to-two verdict in Levin's favor, calling for damages of $43,750 and twenty-five percent of future movie rights and/or royalties. The judge rejected the monetary finding, contending that he had instructed the jury to arrive at a definite, fixed amount which would dispose of the value of any claim Levin might have, and he ordered them to continue deliberations. They soon returned with an award of $50,000.

Reactions to the jury decision were swift and passionate. Levin felt vindicated but indignant at the continued suppression of his work and at the failure of the media to publicize his triumph and expose the authors and producers of a Pulitzer Prize play. The defendants were shocked by a judgment they believed to be totally unjust. The trial, they felt, was a charade: the jury was not qualified to judge a matter as intricate as wrongful appropriation of ideas, and the judge had mishandled this part of the proceeding.

In the days following the jury's award of damages to Levin, the attorneys at Paul, Weiss submitted briefs moving to dismiss the judgment and asking for a new trial. The evidence, they argued, was inadequate to warrant submitting the case to a jury, the verdict was against the weight of the evidence, and there were errors in the charge of the court. In late February, Judge Coleman set the decision aside, but not on the grounds argued by Paul, Weiss. Citing the absence of testimony as to the value of what was taken, Coleman concluded that there was "a complete failure of proof as to damages" and ordered a new trial. Howard Spellman, Levin's trial attorney, claimed a victory for the plaintiff: "There is nothing in the judge's decision indicating that the verdict of the jury to the effect that Mr. Levin's lit-

erary efforts were appropriated was wrong. We intend to press the issue to a conclusion either by a new trial or an appeal" (February 1958, BU).

In fact, nearly all the participants were fed up with the harsh, prolonged confrontation, and both sides hoped to avoid a costly, unpredictable new trial by investigating yet again the possibility of an out-of-court solution. Frank, past seventy, found the affair increasingly burdensome, and he wished to focus his energies elsewhere. Not only was he busy with the Anne Frank Foundation, but he was also having to deal with the disturbing repercussions of another conflict that had erupted the year before: proceedings against a Lübeck schoolteacher, Lothar Stielau, whose article claiming The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery stimulated a series of neo-Nazi attacks on the book and on the old man himself. Most bizarre, perhaps, was the chronic rumor that the fabricated diary was coauthored by the child's father and the American writer Meyer Levin. Moreover, Frank had been wanting, after several delays, to visit Israel, and he did not wish to go empty-handed. Levin, too, was weary and depressed by the long, fruitless controversy; he had settled in Israel, just published a new novel, Eva , and hoped to free himself for other writing.

However, many of the old barriers to settlement still remained, and although talks started, they stalled, started up again, and dragged on for more than a year. Frank's main goal was to end both the lawsuit and the controversy: to get Levin to give up all his alleged rights to the book, play, and movie of the Diary , and to stop airing the subject in public. But because of his feeling of having been injured, Frank strongly objected to paying any money to Levin himself, either for expenses or for

his own benefit. He would, however, consider a payment to charity, though not directly to his adversary. Although Levin also wanted to settle out of court, he was incensed at being deprived of the award for damages and was determined to get authorization to perform his play in Israel and with nonprofessional groups in the United States. The question of production rights continued to be a source of disagreement, as was the matter of "buying Levin off." Goodrich and Hackett were opposed not only for financial reasons but also because they had now been vilified as plagiarists. Frank resisted because he felt that granting permission to stage the rejected play would generate more arguments, not eliminate them. If license were given and an audience liked the work, Levin would assert that his adaptation was better than the Broadway version and might instigate a lawsuit claiming he had been defrauded when Crawford in 1952 told him his script was unstageworthy.

Although Levin was now living mostly in Israel and had given his lawyers carte blanche to work out terms of settlement, he remained in constant touch during the convoluted negotiations. In May 1958, Fredman submitted a proposal with five main points: (1) Levin would be paid $37,500 plus Frank's share of funds held in Israel as royalties for the unauthorized Habimah production; (2) Levin would give up his rights, title, and interest to the play and anything related to the play or Diary ; (3) a public statement would be issued absolving the Hacketts of deliberately copying Levin's material; (4) all the parties would sign a general release; and (5) if the defendants insisted, everyone would agree to make no public statements unless the text was approved by both sides.

Paul, Weiss responded that the sum was too high and the

claim to Israeli rights unsubstantiated and unjustified. In July, their counterproposal (Frank would pay $15,000, perhaps $20,000, as a donation to Jewish charities, with no payment of attorney's fees) was turned down by Fredman as insufficient, and Judge Coleman was informed that the parties were unable to agree on terms for a settlement. Nonetheless, despite the deadlock, conversations continued about levels of payment, who would contribute and to whom, what general-release statements might be accepted, and what finally was being resolved.

Meanwhile, Levin kept up his protest in public. In early June, an article by Moshe Kohn supporting some of his claims appeared in the Jerusalem Post , with information the reporter could only have gotten from the plaintiff himself. Fredman accused his client of wanting to sabotage the settlement efforts. "You will just have to learn," he told Levin, "that your only comment with regard to Anne Frank is 'No comment'" (13 June 1958, BU). But Levin said he would continue to speak out until the matter was fairly concluded. In September, at the time of the Jewish High Holidays, he published an open letter to Otto Frank in the Israeli paper Maariv . At the trial, he wrote, he had realized for the first time that Frank hated him and that this hatred was based on fantastic misinterpretations of a few lines in letters written in the summer of 1952. Reviewing the history of the case—its "deep and dreadful consequences" and "incalculable human costs" (two heart attacks [Bloomgarden's and his own], an attempted suicide [his wife's], financial loss, and harm to his career)—Levin asked Frank to set aside all animosity and submit the quarrel to mediation. In response, Frank said Levin was mistaken in believing he hated him, and he maintained that Levin was responsible for the "deplorable"

damage because he had started and perpetuated the quarrel by distortions and lies. The only terms Frank could accept would be for each man to pay his own lawyer and give a certain amount to Jewish charity. Mediation was out of the question.

The correspondence between the two men—which had been suspended in the year before the trial—resumed briefly and showed more graphically than ever the gulf between them. Levin continued to accuse his opponents of having used Anne Frank's diary "as a shield for a bitter political vendetta against a Jewish writer." Frank dismissed these accusations as nonsensical and repeated his opposition to an arrangement that he believed would benefit a person whose behavior had been so reckless.

Through much of the fall and early winter of 1958-59, efforts to settle the refractory case continued. Frank and his attorneys were further exasperated by Levin's renewed airing of the case in public; Levin approved of the idea of contributions to charity but felt he could never accept a settlement that left him with substantial legal fees; Frank continued to balk at paying any money straight to Levin. In January 1959, Fredman proposed that Levin be given $20,000, outright and unrestricted, in consideration of which he would sell his rights, title, and interest in the play, book, and movie of the Diary . Frank would also contribute a sum of his own choice to charity. This too was rejected. In February, Judge Coleman reaffirmed his earlier decision, which left Levin with the option of appealing further or going forward with a new trial. In April, Levin, who had been briefly in the States, returned to Israel, but before leaving he appointed a Committee of Three in New York to act on his behalf, discuss the affair with his adversaries and among themselves, and propose terms of settlement in his absence. He said

he would accept their findings and recommendation. The committee consisted of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress; Charles Angoff, a writer friend of Levin's; and Abraham Katch, professor of Hebrew and a well-known academic. In the late spring and early summer, the three men discussed the matter on the telephone and in correspondence, but their schedules made it hard for them to meet. Eventually, they decided to turn the problem over to Will Maslow, a lawyer and staff director of the American Jewish Congress, who played an active role in settlement discussions throughout the fall.

Finally, in October 1959, after fourteen months of torturous negotiations, a proposal was with various degrees of reluctance and suspicion accepted by all parties. Frank, anxious to avoid the emotional and financial strain of a new trial, relented and agreed to pay Levin $15,000 outright, in return for which the warrant of attachment of his royalties would be vacated and Levin would assign to him all his alleged rights to the Diary . After weeks of argument and revision, during which Levin objected to "thought control" and Frank's attorneys looked for ways to guarantee that Levin would not keep the dispute alive, everybody consented to the following statement for public release:

The claims made by Meyer Levin with respect to The Diary of Anne Frank have been settled with the aid of a committee composed of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Charles Angoff and Professor Abraham Katch. As part of the settlement, the committee has recommended that Mr. Levin's adaptations of The Diary , and his role in connection with it, should no longer be a subject of public or private controversy.

Both Mr. Levin and Mr. Frank have accepted and approved the settlement recommended by the committee. They consider it an honorable and final solution of the dispute, and join in the committee's recommendation that there be an end to private and public controversy.

Despite his differences with Mr. Frank and Kermit Bloomgarden, the producer of the Broadway production of The Diary written by Albert and Frances Hackett, which are now disposed of, Mr. Levin takes this opportunity to state that he believes that both Otto Frank and Kermit Bloom-garden are honorable men, that nothing Mr. Levin has ever said should be construed to the contrary.

Both Mr. Frank and Mr. Bloomgarden take this opportunity to state that nothing they have ever said was intended to be a reflection upon Mr. Levin's talent or capacity as an author or playwright.

All parties regret that the Hacketts received unfortunate publicity as a by-product of the dispute. (26 October 1959, BU)

Given the history of recrimination and distrust, no one felt especially confident that these arrangements would end the controversy, although the legal proceedings were now being brought to a close. Since Levin had strenuously argued against a "silencer" in the joint public statement, an additional document was drawn up in hopes of clarifying the contested matter of "further discussion." Levin signed it on 26 October 1959.

I want to confirm that I regard the stipulation and the public statement as a final resolution of all the disputes between us. I understand the settlement and the public statement to mean that I will not circularize rabbis or any other groups or persons on the Anne Frank subject or stimulate either public or private controversy about the Diary or my part in relation to

it. Of course I retain my right to discuss any literary questions relating to the Diary , but I understand that such literary discussion does not include a discussion of whether or not the stage adaptation of the Diary which I wrote should or should not have been produced. (BU)

On 1 November, five days after the signing, Otto Frank in Basel was preparing to cable New York, "Settlement approved," when he received a copy of Evidences (a journal published by the American Jewish Committee in Paris), with an article by Levin expanding his attack on the political motives of all those involved in the Broadway production of the Diary . Although the piece had been written months before, Frank saw it as Levin's calculated effort to influence public opinion at the moment the "no controversy" stipulation went into effect, and he decided to delay his final endorsement. Almost simultaneously, in New York, reports reached Paul, Weiss that Levin had spoken again about the case at a city synagogue. Another flurry of letters and phone calls followed: Paul, Weiss to Fredman; Fredman and Rabbi Prinz to Levin, accusing him of violating the commitments he had made in the documents.

As the year 1960 began, developments occurred again on several fronts. Despite the recent flare-ups, Frank decided to sign the settlement papers; the attorneys brought the legal proceedings to completion; and Edward Costikyan ended a letter to Samuel Fredman on 13 January with a tart postscript: "Who owes who a lunch, or should it be a banquet?" But even this guarded expression of pleasure and relief was premature. Levin's rage remained unappeasable, and on 21 January, he wrote Frank that "while the legal phase of our encounter is over

the moral phase is not done. Your behavior will remain forever as a ghastly example of evil returned for good, and of a father's betrayal of his daughter's words." Repudiating his statement that he considered Frank "an honorable man," Levin accused him of a desire to suppress "on stage and screen your daughter's greatest perception" (BU).

At this point, Frank decided to return Levin's letters unopened, and Costikyan told Rabbi Prinz: "I really don't know what can be done with this man. As you can see, he is apparently immune to reason, and totally unconcerned with the value of his word or commitment" (24 February 1960, Bu). Fredman, Prinz, and others tried to persuade Levin to abide by the terms of the settlement and to turn his energies to his other writing. But when Frank finally did visit Israel in March, his antagonist published another open letter in the Jerusalem Post , asserting that Frank had recently confessed to a journalist on board ship that there had been nothing dramatically wrong with Levin's Anne Frank but "he had rejected it because he sought a more 'universal' treatment." At a press conference at the Ramat Hadassah Youth Aliya Centre, Frank denied he had ever said what Levin had reported. Levin countered by claiming the journalist stuck by his story, and again articles and opinion pieces about the sharp exchanges appeared in the Israeli press. For many observers, the quarrel now turned less on legal questions about the dramatization of the Diary than on the meaning of Anne Frank as a symbol. In public remarks during his stay in Israel, Frank insisted that his daughter had become an important emblem to the youth of the world, transcending her specific interest to the Jewish people, although he had never attempted to belittle the significance of her Jewishness. Levin

continued to argue that this was a fundamental misreading of the Diary itself and an interpretation that would lead to a dangerous distortion of the most important meaning of the Holocaust. Popular opinion tended to side with Frank. As Philip Gillon, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post , peremptorily put it, how Otto Frank visualizes the importance of his daughter is his own business. "By what right can Mr. Levin dictate to a parent how his daughter shall be presented to the world. . . . Mr. Levin's attacks are only undignified and irritating. He would please us far more by writing another Compulsion and leaving poor Anne Frank to develop into whatever sort of symbol she can" (4 April 1960). Gillon's argument has a commonsense persuasiveness about it, but he fails to note that Levin, by warning of the real dangers of universalizing the Holocaust, is accurately describing a tendency that was to become increasingly prominent in the following decade and afterward.

When Frank left Israel and continued to refuse Levin's correspondence, the bruising eight-year-old controversy seemed to be winding down. The lawsuit was over, the public now showed little interest in the much-exposed quarrel, and the main participants were in different parts of the world, involved in other activities. In October 1961, however, the fires were ignited yet again by an essay, "A Different Kind of Blacklist," which appeared in Congress Bi-Weekly , the publication of the American Jewish Congress. In it Levin, recounting a series of publishing setbacks he had recently experienced (contracts rescinded, assignments withdrawn, interviews canceled, phone calls disregarded), argued that the campaign of character and career assassination begun years before by the Broadway clique

had by this time effectively deprived him of much of his livelihood as a writer. To explain how this had happened, he recapitulated his version of the history of the adaptation of the Diary and the production of Compulsion ; and he ended with a plea to his readers to help end the blacklisting by telling his true story whenever they heard him described as a troublemaker, always taking people to court.

Levin's account of the history of the affair was by now familiar, but it included one new paragraph that provoked a set of indignant responses from the attorneys at Paul, Weiss. In his description of the settlement agreement, Levin declared that he had refused to sign a "silencer" that would have prevented him from ever speaking or writing about the issues involved. Both Simon Rifkind and Edward Costikyan quickly protested. Writing to Shad Polier, a lawyer active in the American Jewish Congress, Rifkind expressed outrage that an organ of the AJC should print an abusive article by a pathological liar. Embarrassed, Polier agreed, and he replied by saying that everyone has the constitutional right to be paranoid, but that freedom of the press does not apply to the publication of paranoid charges; he promised to do what he could to rectify the situation (17 November 1960, SHSW).

A revised version of Costikyan's response (reworked after consultation with Bloomgarden, Hellman, and others) eventually appeared in the February 1962 issue of the magazine. Declaring that his client, Otto Frank, had for years been "the victim of one outrageous attack after another from Mr. Levin," Costikyan quoted from the settlement agreement to demonstrate that Levin had in fact signed a pledge to end the contro-

versy, and he concluded: "It should be obvious that Mr. Levin by the assertion in his article quoted above, has committed a breach of contract and violation of his solemn word."

In a separate exchange, Costikyan urged the editors to publish an expression of regret and disclaimer of responsibility. Levin, he reported, had been sending reprints of the article, along with "a vituperative covering letter," to a great many people; and the least the magazine's editors could do to "mitigate the damage done to the victims of Mr. Levin's venom" would be to print a clarification. The editors conceded, and in a note following Costikyan's letter, they explained how they had originally published Levin's article in the belief that a reputable writer who thought himself blacklisted was entitled to address the public. But after they learned some key facts from attorneys involved in the case, the editors regretted that they had unwittingly permitted Levin to include statements bearing unfairly upon the Diary and the people involved in the dramatization and production. They also deplored the fact that "Mr. Levin is circulating reprints of the article with a personal letter which contains an unjust attack upon Lillian Hellman and renews the controversy about the Diary , although he had signed a pledge not to do so."

By this point, however, Levin was surprisingly turning his protest and his creative energies in another direction. He had for some time been planning to explore the implications of the dispute over the Diary in an imaginative work. For the next two years, he curtailed the campaign in the mails and the magazines, and he wrote one of his most ambitious and provocative novels, The Fanatic , which was published in 1964.

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Meyer Levin at seventeen, Chicago 1922-23. [Courtesy of Mikael Levin]

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Meyer Levin and his marionettes, 1930. [Photograph by André Kertèsz; 
courtesy of and copyright by the estate of André Kertèsz]

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A self-portrait marionette by Meyer Levin, c. 1931. [Courtesy of Mikael Levin]

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Meyer Levin on the cover of The Saturday Review, 13 March 1937,
 in which James T. Farrell reviewed The Old Bunch.

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Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum, Amsterdam, 1942, age thirteen.
 [Copyright  ANNE FRANK -Fonds, Basel/Switzerland]

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Meyer Levin (left) and Eric Schwab (right) as correspondents attached to 
the U.S. Ninth Air Force, 1944-45. [Courtesy of Mikael Levin]

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Meyer Levin's press pass from Overseas News Agency, late 1940s.
 [The Meyer Levin Collection, Special Collections, Boston University Libraries]

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Tereska Torres and Meyer Levin with film for The Illegals, 1948. [Courtesy of Tereska Torres]

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Meyer Levin's review of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, 15 June 1952.
 [Copyright 1952 by the New York Times Company; reprinted by permission;
 photo copyright by  ANNE FRANK -Fonds, Basel/Switzerland]

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Johannes Kleiman, Elfriede Frank-Markovits, Frances Goodrich, 
Albert Hackett, Otto Frank, and Garson Kanin at 263 Prinsengracht,
 December 1954. [Copyright ANNE FRANK -Fonds, Basel/Switzerland]

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Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich with the script of the third of eight versions of their play,
 The Diary of Anne Frank, 1955. [Bettmann]

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Playbill for the original production of The Diary of Anne Frank at the Cort Theatre 
in New York, October 1955. [Museum of the City of New York; reprinted by 
permission of PLAYBILL^TM  PLAYBILL^TM  is a registered trademark
 of PLAYBILL Incorporated, NY, NY]

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Publicity picture of Joseph Schildkraut and Susan Strasberg, 1955.
 [Museum of the City of New York]

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Otto Frank in 1958. [Museum of the City of New York]

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Meyer Levin in 1958. [Photograph by Judith Sheftel; courtesy of Judith Feiffer]

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Tereska and Meyer Levin in the late 1950s. [Photograph by Eric Schwab;
 courtesy of Tereska Torres]

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Meyer Levin and his family in 1957: Tereska, Mikael, Gabriel, Jo (Eli), and
Dominique. [Photograph by Judith Sheftel; courtesy of Judith Feiffer]

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Meyer and Tereska Levin in Paris, c. 1958-59. [Photograph by Eric Schwab; 
courtesy of Tereska Torres]

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Scene from Israel Soldiers Theatre production of Meyer Levin's Anne Frank, 
1966. [The Meyer Levin Collection, Special Collections, Boston University Libraries]

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Peter Frye and Meyer Levin on stage set of Anne Frank in Tel Aviv, 1966. 
[The Meyer Levin Collection, Special Collections, Boston University Libraries]

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Title page of Meyer Levin's adaptation, printed by the author in 1967. [Courtesy of Tereska Torres]

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Scene from Lyric Stage production of Levin's Anne Frank, Boston, 1991. 
James Bodge as Koophuis, Larkin Kennedy as Margot, and Faith Justice 
as Miep, setting up the rooms before the others arrive. [Courtesy of Sheila Ferrini]

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Meyer Levin in his writing studio in Israel, 1969. [Copyright by Archie Lieberman;
 all rights reserved]

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Dust jacket of The Obsession, 1974. [Photograph by Archie Lieberman; 
courtesy of Tereska Torres]

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Meyer Levin on the South Side of Chicago, 11 December 1980.
In the background is All Souls Church, built by J. L. Silsbee for the
 Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, uncle of Frank Lloyd Wright. [Photograph by Archie Lieberman]