4
The Fanatic, Anne Frank in Israel, and the Obsession

After 1960, Neary every creative undertaking in Levin's life can be seen as an effort to confront, directly or indirectly, his long, bruising involvement with The Dairy of a Young Girl . In The Fanatic (1964), he tried to imagine his way to an understanding and a release by turning personal history into fiction; in the staging of his Anne Frank in Israel (1966), he hoped to demonstrate that the script was indeed "playable" and closer to the inner truth of the girl's book than the acclaimed Broadway version; and in his memoir, The Obsession (1973), he set out to cure and vindicate himself by brooding on and talking through the controversy, revealing what he believed to be the motives of his adversaries, and demonstrating precisely how he was victimized and injured. Even in those works that have nothing to do with Anne Frank—the saga novels The Settlers (1972) and The Harvest (1978)—Levin offers a reading of twentieth-century Jewish history focusing on the Zionist struggle to ensure a continuity and renewal that were to be threatened but not destroyed by the Holocaust—an

interpretation of the past on which his adaptation of Anne Frank's book is grounded.

The Fanatic views the subject through the lens of one of the most fascinating stories of Jewish folklore: the plight of the dybbuk, the soul of an unfulfilled dead person who enters the body of someone living and directs his or her conduct. In many versions of the tale, the demon can be exorcised only with great difficulty through the intervention of a Hasidic tzaddik , or wonder-worker, with occult powers. Levin's novel is narrated by the dead man, Leo Kahn, a European Jewish poet and intellectual who had been interned by the Nazis in the so-called model camp, Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, and then sent to Auschwitz, from which he miraculously escaped. Hoping to warn the remaining Jews in the first camp about what would happen to them, Leo returned there but was ignored, betrayed, and eventually shipped back to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he died of typhus.

As narrator of the fiction set in the 1950s, Leo tells the story of the Chicago-born Maury Finklestein, who before the war studied for the rabbinate but avoided the pulpit because of doubts about God and his own fitness to minister, deciding instead to write dramas on biblical themes. When America entered World War II, Finklestein joined the army and was assigned to the chaplain service in Europe. In the spring of 1945, following the liberation of the camps, he worked tirelessly to help survivors. Traveling to Theresienstadt in search of Leo's father, David Kahn, the author of classic texts on Jewish mysticism that had influenced him during his years in seminary, Maury learned that Professor Kahn had been killed; but he met his widow, who was trying to arrange for the publication of a

manuscript called Good and Evil , which their son, Leo, had managed to write and preserve while in the camps. Leo's book, which combined fiction and impassioned philosophical dialogues on the meaning for humanity and God of the Nazi assault on the Jews, stunned and exhilarated Maury because of its hard-won affirmation of men, women, and God in the face of an unflinching confrontation with evil. Maury immediately offered to try to get the book published in the United States and then to adapt it for the theater. In Theresienstadt, he had also met Anika, Leo's sweetheart, whom he helped to convalesce, came to love, and asked to return to New York to marry him. From this point, the lives of the dead Leo and the living Maury and Anika become permanently intertwined.

All this is background. The novel actually begins with the arrival of Maury and Anika at the airport in New York and then depicts their marriage and his efforts to bring Leo's theodicy to the attention of the American public—a plot that in outline follows Levin's actual experience but alters chronology, characters, and events for fictional and didactic purposes. Leo's manuscript is translated, published in New York, and, thanks in part to Maury's glowing review, becomes an enormous success. The adaptation, however, is turned down by a producer, Richard Sharr, on the advice of Robin Adair (né Ruben Adler), a theatrical gossip columnist, unacknowledged Communist, and self-hating Jew, who insists Maury's work is nationalist propaganda, an unstageable Zionist tract. Hollywood writers are hired to do an authorized version and they produce a well-made play that moves and inspires huge audiences because of its "tip-toe aura of reverence" and its easy-to-swallow anti-fascist, universalist message. The embittered Maury fights for

the right to perform his own script—a battle that the dead Leo sees as a noble, if quixotic, effort to preserve the true spirit of Good and Evil , to give the anonymous victims of Nazism their voices, and to defend individual rights and artistic freedom against the forces of narrow self-interest and conformity.

Nevertheless, the campaign against "injustice multiplied by ingratitude" is waged at a frightful personal price. Disapproving letters to Mrs. Kahn, petitions to rabbis, newspaper ads, TV appearances, press conferences, protests from the pulpit, a lengthy lawsuit and court trial, all are damaging to Maury's health, marriage, friendships, and relationships with people in a position to publish or produce his work. As the disputes multiply, he develops a conspiracy theory linking his victimization to the commercial and political schemes of a communist clique on Broadway and to the liquidation of Jewish writers in the Soviet Union. Yet, despite the near-ruin of his personal and professional life (he is denounced as conniving, litigious, red-baiting, and paranoid), Maury writes a second play, Job , another attempt to explore the contemporary meaning of extreme suffering; this work, too, is appropriated by an unscrupulous producer and his coterie, who stage a heavily edited, vulgarized text that distorts the playwright's vision. Sick with frustration, Maury sends to both producers a dime-store knife inscribed "The Big Knife of Broadway. . . . Use this. It's more humane." At the climax of the raw, protracted story of rejection, suppression, and ineffectual protest, Maury takes his adversaries to court and is vindicated by a jury that awards him $100,000 for wrongful appropriation of ideas. As the novel ends, although still disillusioned, he receives several small windfalls: an amateur group in New Jersey performs the authentic script of Job, a

movie company buys the rights, and the Finklesteins prepare to leave for Israel. In spite of the harm done to Maury's health, marriage, and career, the narrator, Leo, in a series of reflections and prayers, closes by affirming the value and strength of Jewish continuity.

To have this story told by Leo Kahn, a voice from a mass grave in Bergen-Belsen, is certainly a bizarre yet potentially promising narrative design. Given his age, subject matter, observational powers, philosophical cast of mind, and lamentable fate, Leo is a grown-up Anne Frank: a writer who could describe and assess the aspects of the Holocaust that were implied in the girl's diary but not, because Anne Frank wrote it before her arrest and death-camp sufferings, explored there. Not only, then, is Leo the "teller" Levin had been looking for, but he is also potentially the truth teller, the figure who suffered and was there, writing while the systematic extermination of Jews was going on. And now, as the narrator of a story that takes place in the 1950s, he should be able to infuse present events with an awareness of the atrocities that killed him and so many others, and to reflect on modern history and the immemorial subject of evil.

At the start, Leo does function in this way. His first descriptions of Maury and Anika arriving in New York are suffused with a haunting sense of the weight of recent catastrophe for victims, survivors, and witnesses. Leo, though, makes it clear that he is not literally the demon from folklore—a hovering, dispossessed, sinful soul—but rather a benign mid-twentieth-century version of the folk figure: an artist seeking to complete his savagely aborted life through a sympathetic connection with someone else who shares his values.

It is not as I sometimes fantasied, half-accepting, half-toying with our legendary; it is not as though an unfulfilled spirit were to enter as a dybbuk into a living being. . . . I have not entered into Anika, nor into this American, into Maury who came and found my Anika. Surely I cannot cause his behavior, I cannot live through him; but he is much like me, there is very much in him that is like what I was, except that he is less ready with anger. . . . But could there be strength of will left in me, it is true that to experience the continuation of my curtailed life, I would exert that life through such a one as he. (22)

Conceiving of Leo Kahn less as an active agent than as a reflecting narrative consciousness, Levin uses him to present the disasters of recent history as a dark shadow over the living and then to explore his fictional characters in terms of their particular relationship to the Jewish concentration-camp dead. Leo himself is a casualty; Anika and Mrs. Kahn are maimed survivors; Maury is a shocked witness with a consuming need to testify; the New York producers, agents, playwrights, lawyers, columnists who determine the theatrical fate of Good and Evil either deny or suppress their relationship to the Holocaust and treat Leo's book as a property to be used for their own commercial and ideological purposes. For most of them, as Gary Bossin has said, Maury's script is "an unwanted and uncomfortable reminder of the consequences and responsibilities of Jewish identity" (The Literary Achievement of Meyer Levin , 287).

In the mutual identification of Leo Kahn and Maury Finklestein one can locate many of the strengths, weaknesses, and problematic aspects of Levin's novel. So strong is Leo's devotion to telling the story of Maury's quest to publish Good and

Evil and transform it into a play that the result is a sharp, sympathetic portrait of Maury as wounded fanatic. We see him in all his admirable idealism and intensity: his love for Anika, his steadfast loyalty to Leo and the murdered Jews of Europe, and his passion for getting their stories told as part of a desire to carry on the time-honored Jewish fight for truth and justice. Yet we also see him as the "rabid rabbi"—obstinate, self-righteous, and self-destructive—refusing to compromise or to admit loss; blurring the fight for justice with an endless campaign for self-justification; endorsing himself in the martyr's role as solitary fighter for artistic and social truth; worsening his wound and then constantly examining it; doing permanent damage to himself, his wife, family, and friends.

But the authenticity and force of Leo's depiction of what it is like to fight these battles and to suffer this fate are diminished by his inability to provide the reader with cogent explanations (or more than intermittent conjectures) about the roots of, and reasons for, Maury's obsessive quest and his inability to relinquish it. Leo traces some of the problems to Maury's childhood insecurities about being Jewish: his fear of beatings from neighborhood kids, his shame at having unpolished immigrant parents, and his deep sense of inadequacy in his early choice of the vocation of rabbi and then of writer. Yet when Leo approaches the event that engendered the obsession—Maury entering the death camps in the days after their liberation—his commentary gradually becomes a form of partisan endorsement rather than balanced analysis and measurement. At first, Leo's descriptions of conditions in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen appear to provide a context for understanding some of the extremity of Maury's responses and behavior: after

witnessing the effects of Nazi barbarism, a man afflicted by questions of meaning and responsibility might justifiably be called "normal." In fact, though, the narrative ultimately does not work this way. The more drastic Maury's behavior becomes, the more Leo approves of it as a comprehensible and appropriate response, not to the Nazi horror, but to the entirely self-serving conduct of the New York theatrical crowd. For Leo, Maury is at bottom the virtuous man who acts on his inner beliefs, battles for justice against a pack of conformists, and is branded a fanatic for his fervid idealism.

Late in the story, Leo offers an account of events that looks as if it is meant to give the reader the long-sought-for understanding of why Maury is caught in the fierce grip of his conspiracy mania:

In a letter from his father, there unexpectedly comes to Maury the thread to the source of his long and peculiar ordeal.

Again and again through his troubled connection with my book there has awakened in him the sense of some ulterior source for the persistent hostility directed upon him. Over and over he has traced every thread of motive, to Gaylord [the publisher], or to my translator's greed for a big name, or to Lustig [the lawyer] . . . but he has never been able to understand what happened to Sharr, after that luncheon of acceptance, to turn him to a complete rejection as though Maury were poisonous. Could it all be put down to a sudden personal dislike?

Against all this Maury has been troubled by his persistent sense of the beshert , the destined; is it destined that his work should never be seen—perhaps as some punishment? Until he

proves there is another cause, he will be troubled by this self-doubt of his worthiness.

And whether the cause be a divine judgment or a human motivation, his is the sort of mind that must go on seeking the eventual source. (337-38)

In the following paragraphs, however, when Leo explains the meaning and effect of Maury's father's letter, it becomes only too clear that rather than illuminating Maury's condition, he is entering into an evasive plot of his own to validate it. Mr. Finklestein tells his son about recent accounts in the Yiddish press of Soviet persecution of Jewish writers and intellectuals, and within hours Maury finds in these reports the key to the puzzle—the missing motive to explain the virulence in his enemies' rejection and suppression of his work. Stalin's brutal campaign against Jewish culture and identity in the Soviet Union is now being imitated in Communist circles all over the world, and Maury has been targeted as one of its victims! Thus Maury's fanaticism is said again to be the result of external forces: the Broadway insiders are now shown to be products of Cold War conditions—a worldwide Communist conspiracy and the related American anti-Communist conformity of the 1950s.

Compounding the problem of Leo's increasing support of Maury's most extravagant interpretations and conduct is his characterization of the large cast of producers, agents, writers, editors, lawyers, and hangers-on who are united in opposition to the script. Instead of examining the motives and views of Maury's opponents, or probing some of the metaphysical and

ethical issues he raised earlier in the novel, Leo becomes as preoccupied as the playwright himself with the minutia of the controversies and with the need to expose and condemn all the other participants, whom he at times even compares to Hitler's henchmen. As the plot unfolds, Leo sounds more and more like a stand-in for Levin at his most aggrieved and importunate, and less like a fully imagined independent character who might possibly look at the situation from all sides and thus enhance the fiction with detachment and depth. The result is a novel that in the middle almost sinks under the weight of hundreds of melodramatic pages detailing the misfortunes of an innocent idealist contending alone against a group of cynical power brokers in a battle of options, rights, and contracts. Levin's request in the book's foreword that the reader approach the story "to seek ideas, meanings, beliefs, rather than to seek personal histories" becomes impossible to comply with. Although some of the satiric exposure is stingingly apt and funny, most readers are likely to agree with David Boroff, who complained in the New York Times Book Review that "we participate in [Maury's] vexations almost beyond endurance" and after a while "want only to be quit of this airless world of recriminations and obsessive hate" (26 January 1964, 5).

These problems are further intensified by the flaws of the ending. A reader who has participated in Maury's ordeal and who has accepted Leo's role as a benevolent spirit is going to expect a resolution that evolves convincingly out of the story of chronic possession the dead narrator has been telling. If this is a radical revisioning of a dybbuk's tale (no matter how modern and attenuated the form), Levin would be obliged to invent a conclusion in which some kind of exorcism and release occur.

What he offers instead in four scant pages is a string of inadequately rendered incidents that fail to provide a satisfying emotional and logical finish to the book. First, just after the $100,000 jury award is announced, Maury stands with Anika "bathed in that curious sense of the final goodness of man, of the world, that comes at such rare moments in life . . . when evil has been vanquished"—a Pollyannaish description so inappropriate to the unfolding narrative that the climactic scene dissolves into mawkishness. More convincing is what follows: the "slowly-returning knowledge" that must temper the couple's gratification, "the knowledge of waste and pointlessness." A dispute that began with claims of major moral significance is now being treated by the media and even Maury's friends as a mere money matter, with everyone buzzing about the size of the award and the motions for appeal and dismissal. The disenchanted plaintiff has to look elsewhere for sources of renewal, and after the performance of the original script of Job , he pledges to commit himself unstintingly to playwriting, since "this—his work alone—is what can vindicate him." Yet the performance of Job at a tiny theater in New Jersey is oddly tangential to the harsh, prolonged main-stage fight for Good and Evil and is too small a success to provide much resonance for the optimistic note Levin is so earnestly trying to sound. The Finklesteins' imminent departure for Israel is also meant to signify a new beginning, but since little has been said about the Jewish state earlier in the novel, this too has an inflated ring.

The most jarring note at the end, however, is a more elaborate and unconvincing attempt to reclaim lofty significance for a story that has concentrated for so long on Broadway infighting. In the closing paragraphs of The Fanatic , Leo delivers a

peroration and blessing designed to celebrate Jewish continuity through the ages.

And so this account has been written, by myself through Maury, by Maury through me. . . . Is not each consciousness interlaced with thoughts, words, visions from all others, from those we have known, from those we have read, from those who have projected themselves into us through thoughts, visions, ideas they have caused to rise in the world? . . . People live with fragments and with entities of all who have lived before; our people live with the persons who have risen in them from stories and memories of Adam, of Abraham, Leah, Ruth, Moses, David, Jacob called Israel, Isaiah, Maimonides, the Baal Shem; we live with Herzl, with Hannah Szenes, with Einstein, with our nameless companions in Auschwitz.

. . . Let [Maury and Anika] find some peace, let them be dear to each other, and to their children, let them have years of blessing.

. . . And I? Like all, eventually I recede from I want, I must have, I must be, I must do ; I recede from I hate, I hurt, I am happy, I am satisfied, I am angry, I am alone ; I recede, and at last I feel that I approach—can it be that I shall soon feel—I am included, I am? There remains in me I love . (477-78)

Most people reading this passage, thinking about the tribulations of the characters and the author of The Fanatic , and of the European Jews with whom they are so closely associated, would be inclined to sympathize with the zeal and desire for reconciliation and release expressed in Leo's finale. The language is so heartfelt, the biblical evocations so sonorous, the aspiration so high. Unfortunately, though, there is little con-

nection between the sentiments and the history of the characters, the fates they have suffered, and the pain they will continue to endure. Not much at the end of the novel can be said to affirm Jewish continuity: the antagonists (most of whom are Jews) remain acutely hostile, and Maury feels betrayed by prominent Jewish organizations that now, after failing to back his earlier protests, invite him to contribute to their charities. Levin's need to affirm his own cherished beliefs results in an ending connected to the plot more by severe authorial hunger than by artistic logic or the facts of the case.

The difficulties Levin had with The Fanatic began before and continued after its publication. When he first sent the manuscript to Simon and Schuster late in 1962, his editor Robert Gottlieb responded with compliments, reservations, and serious concern about the prospects of libel. Gottlieb especially liked the sections dealing with Leo in the camps and the "round and real" characterization of Maury throughout the novel, but he was less admiring of the parts in which Levin wrote directly of actual events. "I felt," he told the writer, "that in these matters you stopped being a novelist and became a documenter and propagandizer—the characters stopped being people and became black-and-white counters in your argument. I felt I was being shouted at—forced " (9 January 1963, BU). Levin's view of himself was fine, the editor said, it was the others, the villains, he could not believe in. Gottlieb also took pains to insist that he was not partisan and had no judgment about whether "Meyer is right" or "Meyer is nuts" or anything else. But in his view, none of these reactions mattered very much until the firm's attorneys could read the text. He had already spoken with Ephraim London (who was currently

representing Levin in a suit brought by Nathan Leopold over Compulsion ); and the expert on libel law warned that with a novel so clearly based on a well-known controversy involving figures many people could identify, the problems were potentially immense.

After editors and lawyers spent weeks discussing the evidence and legal precedents, Simon and Schuster finally decided (not without apprehensions) to go ahead with publication on the grounds that a plaintiff was rarely able to mount a successful court case against a writer's representation of real-life events in fiction. The situation, however, changed radically in early June, when attorneys at Paul, Weiss read a newspaper report of a forthcoming novel by Meyer Levin about a rejected, suppressed manuscript that resembled his experience with the adaptation of Anne Frank's Diary . They telephoned Ephraim London to discuss the agreement of October 1959, in which Levin had pledged not to provoke further controversy about any aspect of the book, the adaptation, or the quarrel with the girl's father.

Both London and Gottlieb were flabbergasted; Levin had never told them that he had signed such a document. When they expressed their chagrin and disappointment, he argued that he had not violated the original agreement, since that covered only such matters as circulating petitions, speaking in synagogues, appearing on television, and sending accusatory letters to Otto Frank and others. He had written The Fanatic to interpret life, not to arouse public or private controversy about Frank, Crawford, Bloomgarden, Hellman, or anyone else. The book was not in his view about the infamous "case" (there was no Otto Frank character in it) but was concerned with Jewish cultural issues, problems of faith, and threats to freedom of

expression; and he would not accept any restrictions on his right to publish it. But, he said, if the consensus was that the novel did violate the agreement, he was ready to pay back the $15,000, so long as the book could be printed.

Discussions continued in various forms and forums for several months. For Simon and Schuster, the worries about libel were now compounded by the possibility that Paul, Weiss would move to enjoin the book's publication on the grounds of breach of contract. For Levin, the prospect of another suppression was intolerable, and he threatened to protest and even go on a hunger strike if the book were withdrawn. Publication was delayed again. The Committee of Three and others who had been involved in the negotiations four years earlier were contacted. Samuel Fredman upheld Levin's contention that the settlement agreement had never been intended to cover anything Levin planned to write in the way of fiction. After weighing all the arguments and concluding that Otto Frank was not likely to get involved in yet another lawsuit (especially one that would increase the sales of Levin's book), Simon and Schuster decided again to go ahead with publication, and The Fanatic appeared in January 1964.

The reception did little to assuage Levin's feelings of anger and frustration. Although the novel was promoted as a dramatization of the Jewish obsession with justice and the relationship of God and the six million, nearly everyone familiar with the writer's history read it as a thinly disguised roman à clef. Reviewers in the popular press could hardly restrain their irritation at what they saw as a recycling of recent scandal and a flagrant example of special pleading. Although David Boroff, in the New York Times Book Review , admitted that the novel

"conjures up with stunning authority the nightmare world of its protagonist," he remarked that the familiarity of the Levin-Frank feud (and the novelist's lack of proportion and disguise in dealing with it) reduced the book to the merely topical (26 January 1964, 5). Other reviewers were less generous. For David I. Segal, in Book Week, The Fanatic was simply a bore, the plot manipulated to prove a preconceived thesis, the characters Good Guys versus Bad Guys, the narrative point of view oppressive, and the style full of self-pity and empty rhetoric. Levin, he insisted, "is as guilty as his Communist characters" for narrowing the focus of his novel and using it "as a weapon against only one kind of conspiracy against truth" (2 February 1964, 2). The Newsweek critic called the novel "a long tedious whine, possibly of some chest-lightening benefit to the author but dull in the extreme for the blameless reader"; and Stanley Kauffmann, in the New York Review of Books , summarily dismissed it as "spurious" and Levin as "an ambitious mechanic who thinks he can bruise and shove his way through reams and reams of paper to Apocalypse" (27 January and 20 February 1964). Half-a-dozen other notices were far more sympathetic and positive, but (with the exception of a piece in Saturday Review ) these appeared in less widely read and less influential journals, most of which had a religious orientation: the Catholic weekly America , the Christian Science Monitor , and the Jewish Congress Bi-Weekly and Circle .

Levin's disappointment with the reviews and sales of The Fanatic was keen, but he had predictable, and in part persuasive, explanations for its failure. His wife, friends, and editors had been saying for years that his strident, aggressive actions against Otto Frank and the famous, much-loved play would

alienate many people who might otherwise be sympathetic to him and his work. Indeed, his friend Harry Golden told him that suing Anne Frank's father was like suing the father of Joan of Arc, and probably the worst public relations blunder of the century (letter, 30 April 1961, BU). Levin was, in fact, often mocked in New York literary and publishing circles, not only as dogged, humorless, cranky, opportunistic, and ridiculous, but as "Liar Mevin" and as the Professional Jew who had absurdly taken Anne Frank's father to court. Now, with the appearance of The Fanatic , the derision that had been heard mostly in conversation began to appear regularly in print. The reviews in the New York Times, Book Week, Newsweek , and the New York Review of Books were in fact nastier and more personal than any criticism Levin had ever received before. Of course, this shift in tone could be explained by saying that the disapproving reviewers honestly felt The Fanatic was a bad novel, or that Levin was inviting attack by publishing a self-justifying book portraying his enemies as cartoonish villains. Yet, for all of this, the ad hominem attacks, the flippancy and scorn—not only at Levin's refusal to relinquish his obsession, but also at his insistence on continuing to dramatize it in public (this time as fiction)—suggest responses in excess of what an author of Levin's accomplishment and reputation deserved. Despite the publicity (which often made him look foolish as well as foolhardy), Levin had been for more than thirty years a humane, dedicated, and serious writer; he had published eleven books and many hundreds of newspaper pieces; and The Fanatic , however one measures its flaws, was a deeply felt, carefully wrought work of substantial ambition.

Levin saw the negative reception of The Fanatic as further

evidence that his career was imperiled by influential people with an active animus against him. The New York Times Book Review , he felt, was still angry about his having extolled Diary of a Young Girl without declaring an interest in the book; the New York Review of Books was edited by Barbara Epstein (formerly Zimmerman), and David Segal worked in Manhattan publishing. Most of the periodicals that praised The Fanatic had no ax to grind and were more willing to consider the novel at face value and not to berate the author for his personal behavior. And the majority of them were published outside New York.

The problems that Levin had with the writing, publication, and reception of The Fanatic tell us almost as much as the book itself about the character of his obsession at this point in his life. The decision to attempt the novel in the first place attests to the centrality of his preoccupation and his desire to understand and exorcise it. The artistic difficulties he then had with balance and proportion (as the treatment of the Holocaust materials became secondary to the protracted narrative of the Broadway intrigue against him) suggest an essential fact about the fixation itself: that he appeared at times to be more wounded by, or at least more entangled with, the harm that had been done to his career than he was with the atrocities committed against the Jews, or with the misrepresentation of Anne Frank's words in the theater. As Levin's career evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, questions about what he was fighting for and against were asked more frequently, and issues of motivation became increasingly contested.

The idea of "the wound," basic to The Fanatic , from this point on also becomes a major theme in Levin's life and work, vital to an understanding of his beliefs and behavior. In the

novel, Leo speaks of Maury as "one of those who walk in the world a bit more tenderly than others, because of their inner mark, their ineradicable wound, a wound that can come only through the beloved" (421). Originally, the crime against the Jews and the rejection of his play were Maury's cause, and—as the author puts it—"what began as good will and heroism in the world, with love for a cause, ends in betrayal, in a personal wound, and festers, and becomes a malformation, a thing in itself, an obsession" (222).

Similarly, Levin in his own life perceived a connection between the wound inflicted on him by his opponents through his rejected play and the Nazi crime against the Jewish people. As Maury in the fiction and Levin in the world become enmeshed in their quests for justice, each turns into an injustice collector reluctant to be relieved of his cause. Indeed, neither can seem to let go of his obsession because it has become his cause. Questions about the process by which this happens, the roots of the obsession, and the reasons why Levin cannot relinquish it multiply and become increasingly vexed; they are explored at length in Chapter 5.

Important, too, is the fact that when the reviewers of The Fanatic blamed Levin for indulging his obsession and accused him of being unable to transform it into a successful novel, he immediately linked their reactions to the general conspiracy against him and expanded the list of his enemies to include the New York literary as well as the theater establishment. Although he was almost certainly wrong about collusion and scheming among the reviewers, he was responding to an injustice in the extremity of their responses. They condemned him for insisting on writing about a subject they found repellent

and for being unable to turn it into the kind of novel they admired. What they could not know, but might have intuited, is Levin's worthy effort in the novel to work through personal and artistic problems he was unable to solve—an effort open to criticism but not censure and contempt.

The writing of The Fanatic , then—which had been conceived in part to help Levin understand and perhaps free himself from the Anne Frank labyrinth—now seemed to have had the opposite effect, rekindling his anger and suspicion and intensifying his conviction that he was still being victimized. In the months after the novel's publication, though, he deliberately turned his attention to a number of quite different writing projects to distance himself from the dilemma he could not resolve.

The two longest of these projects were a novel, The Stronghold (1965), and a short historical survey for young readers, The Story of Israel (1966). Each of these books was an efficient production from the professional writer's desk, but neither opened a new path for future artistic exploration or provided enough distance from the Anne Frank imbroglio to give Levin anything more than temporary relief.

The Story of Israel was one of a series of basic texts on subjects of Jewish history and culture that Levin produced in the 1950s and early 1960s, some in collaboration with scholars, others by himself. Two of the earlier volumes—The Story of the Jewish Way of Life and God and the Story of Judaism —were designed to be used in synagogues and community centers, but The Story of Israel , published by G. P. Putnam, was aimed at a wider audience and was praised by the New York Times Book Review and other general-interest journals. Combining an

account of a family outing from his home at Kfar Shmaryahu, near Herzliyya, with colorful sketches of figures who shaped the country (Herzl, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, the agronomist Aaron Aaronson, and others), Levin provides a readable narrative history of the formation of the modern state of Israel from an emphatically Zionist point of view.

A more ambitious and interesting book, The Stronghold , Levin's eleventh novel, was based on an actual event the author had witnessed. In the closing days of World War II, the American army freed several French notables (two former premiers, Paul Reynaud and Édouard Daladier, and General Maxime Weygand) who were being held hostage in a fortified castle near Hitler's Berchtesgaden sanctuary in Bavaria. Around this real incident, Levin created a suspense novel that also featured an evolving debate on Europe's treatment of the Jews. The book opens before the liberation, when an Eichmann-like figure, Lieutenant Colonel Kraus of the SS, arrives at the castle with yet another captive former minister, Paul Vered (modeled in part on Léon Blum, twice premier of France in the 1930s), a Jew he had kept from being murdered at Buchenwald. Aware that the Allied victory is near, Kraus (looking for a way to save his skin) asks the prisoners (who also include a priest and a journalist) to testify in a letter that he treated them well. They eventually refuse, but in the process of deliberation they hear for the first time from Vered and others about the death camps and express a range of typical European gentile attitudes toward

Levin's basic design in The Stronghold —to make a celebrity suspense story function as a morality play about questions of guilt and responsibility—is promising; but in practice the two

elements do not mesh as well as they might. The action tale of besieged ministers and a vengeful SS man is well paced and engaging, but the characters remain for the most part spokesmen for Levin's summary ideas about anti-Semitism, and the debate itself fades from attention as the rescue plot speeds to its exciting conclusion.

After finishing The Stronghold and The Story of Israel , Levin began sustained work on a project entirely different from anything he had ever undertaken before: a ribald farce about two hipster protest poets, a Russian and an American, who are hounded by government authorities, flee their homelands, and—after day-and-night sex—meet, improbably, as truck drivers at a fertilizer plant in the Negev just before the Six-Day War. First conceived as a screenplay and then published as a novel in 1968, Gore and Igor was a radical departure (a humorous book about suppressed writers) that Levin hoped would allow him to get in touch with a previously unexplored side of his talent and take him as far away from genocide and discord as possible. But before he could get into the project in 1966, a chance event again aroused his feelings about the rejection of his play and led to still another widely publicized airing of the quarrel with Otto Frank's attorneys about dramatic rights.

Living in Israel at this time was the fifty-two-year-old Canadian-born theater and film director Peter Frye, who had recently staged works by Ibsen, Lessing, and other classic writers at Habimah, the Chamber Theatre, and Ohel, where he was now artistic manager. Levin, who had met Frye socially, liked his feistiness and independence: "a scrapper, he was always in a row, if not with the rabbinate, then with the critics, the government, or all three together" (The Obsession , 258). As they got

to know one another, Frye asked about the fight over the Diary and Levin gave him a copy of The Fanatic , which the director found an arresting personal and cultural record. In subsequent conversations, Levin led Frye to believe that although his play could not be performed in the United States, he still had the option to stage it in Israel, and he suggested they do a reading at his house to determine if the director might be interested in mounting a production. Tereska Torres, who knew that in 1959 her husband had signed away all his rights to the Anne Frank material, decided not to intervene, hoping that the performance of his play might free him from his obsession. In her memoir, she remembers thinking: "Peut-être le dibbouk qui l'habite quittera enfin Meyer le jour où les paroles d'Anne Frank seront dites sur la scène, exactement telles qu'elle les avait écrites dans le secret de l'Annexe (160).

Even with a cast of friends and acquaintances, most of whom had little acting experience, the reading at Levin's house absorbed everyone who heard it, and Frye offered to find a public platform for the play. In the weeks that followed, he used a Hebrew translation with his students at Tel Aviv University (where he taught drama) and wrote Levin (who was then in New York) that although the text was too long and needed considerable cutting and revising, it had great potential. The more "I work on it," he said, "the more firmly I am convinced that yours is the more important play. Notice, I don't say 'better' because 'better' is a subjective evaluation, a matter of taste, a matter of cultural development. For example, in terms of American show business theirs may be the 'better' play because it is easier, slicker, more sentimental" (2 May 1966, BU). In this and other letters, Frye continued to argue that "in

literary and cultural importance," Levin's work was more significant and less romanticized than the renowned Goodrich and Hackett version, and that he was dedicated to bringing it before the public.

On 9 June, Frye organized a reading at the university that attracted an audience of about three hundred. The presentation, he reported to Levin, was more than adequate: "People responded warmly to every nuance of the play . . . the kids were alright . . . but they will do better." And he continued:

I am doing this not for your sake. . . . it is difficult to say on paper why I am doing it—I don't want to sound like a philanthropist or like an Evangelist—the reasons for my stubbornness are much deeper than any personal interest or even loyalty to a friend. My loyalty is to the play; my loyalty is to the memory of Anne Frank. (10 June 1966, BU)

During the summer, Frye told Levin that he had gotten a commitment to stage the play from the Soldiers Theatre, a group just established by the Educational and Cultural section of the Israel Defense Forces. He had originally hoped to be able to do the production with top actors in the leading roles and soldiers in minor parts, but this was now not feasible. The actors would consist of young drama-program graduates, a few soldiers chosen by audition, and perhaps one or two older professionals; but people seemed to be inspired by the prospect of putting on the play on a portable stage in Tel Aviv and then touring military bases and civilian settlements around the country. As Tereska Torres recalls the events, Frye's ardor seduced everyone. All thoughts of obstacles vanished; the work could be done; Levin would be cured of his obsession; and even if

there were trouble, an Israeli army that could handle Nasser, Hussein, and Arafat would be able to deal with Kermit Bloom-garden's lawyers (Les maisons hantées de Meyer Levin , 160-61).

During the rehearsal period, with Levin now present, Frye played a vital role in reshaping the original script. He dramatically opened the production with all the actors huddled under black umbrellas singing "El Ma'alay Rachamim" (God Full of Compassion), a prayer traditionally intoned at a burial or memorial service. This brief requiem tableau introduced a powerful note of sorrow and mourning that persisted through the rest of the play. Frye also added other music, proposed Koophuis as narrator, cut chunks of inert dialogue, and compressed two late scenes to heighten the impact of the ending. In addition, by accentuating Levin's emphasis on Anne's and Peter's relationship to their own Jewishness, he enhanced the clash of values, not of personalities, and sharpened the audience's awareness of the fate of the Jews outside as well as inside the annex. Just as Garson Kanin had helped turn the Goodrich and Hackett script into a heart-rending showpiece, so Frye provided the theatrical savviness that gave Levin's drama a concision, urgency, and beauty that most earlier readers had been unable to perceive in the original draft. Knowing Levin's penchant for conflict, Frye (who wished to engage the audience, not to create scandal) also tried before the opening to keep the playwright from alerting the press or reminding people of the saga of rejection and prohibition.

But the general response to the staging in Tel Aviv and elsewhere made it impossible for Levin to remain silent. During rehearsals, he was thrilled by the promise of a fifteen-year-old dream coming true: the resourcefulness of Frye's direction and

the devotion of the cast made him feel that his work captured the strength and meaning of the Diary more successfully than the authorized version. Watching the drama come alive for the first time on a stage, he was convinced that people would now be able to see what he had been battling for all these years, and he became as indignant as ever about the treatment of his script in New York. On opening night, he sat transfixed in the last row of the auditorium, and at the final curtain he added his clapping and loud shouts of approval to the audience's applause. Afterward, stunned and exhausted by the experience, he announced to his wife that the Tel Aviv premiere was only a tryout for a professional show on Broadway; and she realized to her dismay that instead of curing his obsession, the Soldiers Theatre performance had intensified it further. When appreciative articles appeared in Israeli newspapers in the weeks after the opening, Levin felt that his vindication was complete and that a new chapter in the annals of his long struggle had just begun.

Heading his Jerusalem Post review "Franker Frank," Mendel Kohansky praised the show for its fidelity to the original book, for stressing the psychological element and the relationship between parents and children, and for allowing the authentic personality of the teenage diarist to shine through. "It is," he observed, "on the whole a more honest dramatization than the slickly professional one we have seen before [at Habimah], but a theatrically less exciting one, which is inevitable. The Diary is not intrinsically stage stuff; it can be made into conventional theatre only by sacrificing some of its honesty and simplicity—or by presenting it as a reading, which might have been the most satisfying form." Admitting that the performance dragged

in spots, and that the professional actors were less effective than the amateurs, Kohansky still singled out for strong commendation the adventurous simplicity of Levin's and Frye's work and the acting of newcomer Shoshana Rosen (13 November 1966, 13).

Dov Bar-Nit, writing in the leftist-labor paper Al Hamish-mar, also applauded Levin's play for the directness and honesty with which it depicted daily existence in the secret annex. "There is no moralizing," he said, "no terrors, persecutions, tortures, trials. . . . In two hours at the Soldiers Theatre we live the short life of Anne Frank, moving, exciting, authentic." Like several other commentators (Sara Frankel in Hayom , for instance), Bar-Nir expressed gratitude to Levin for bringing the Anne Frank story to a young Israeli audience, most of whom had been born after 1945 and knew little about the history of the Nazi era.

These complimentary articles and praise from playgoers made Levin feel that he had to proclaim his triumph and renew efforts to regain performance and perhaps even publishing rights to his own creative work. Although he had promised Peter Frye not to revive the old animosity, he now insisted that to keep silent was an act of moral cowardice—like appeasing Hitler in Munich—and he called a press conference of Israeli and foreign journalists to describe the contentious history; to repeat his charge that he was a victim of censorship by a Stalinist, anti-Zionist cabal; and to assert that the merit of his work had been at long last publicly confirmed.

Within days, newspapers in several countries had printed stories about the opening, the press conference, and the renewed controversy. The New York Times article, "Anne Frank

Play Staged in Israel," reported that Israeli critics had found Levin's rendering less theatrical but more honest than the Broadway play produced in 1955 by Kermit Bloomgarden. Noting that Dr. Emil Feuerstein, president of the Israeli Association of Drama Critics, found the Levin adaptation "infinitely superior to the Hackett version, which had put aiming for a hit above faithfulness to the source," the Times correspondent went on to announce Levin's intention to continue his fight to have Anne Frank shown in the United States and to establish it as a "permanent institution in the theatrical literature" around the world (27 November 1966).

On 6 December, attorneys from Paul, Weiss in New York cabled the Israel Defense Forces, demanding an immediate halt to the Soldiers Theatre production because it infringed Otto Frank's copyright and other property rights. According to the settlement of October 1959, they said, Levin had transferred all rights to his adaptation—including Israeli rights—to Frank. In response to this and other telegrams, Levin and his lawyer argued that the Israeli rights still belonged to him and that the Jewish people had an immutable prerogative to its own cultural material. Peter Frye and administrators also used various tactics to keep the show running, which they managed to do for more than fifty performances. By early January, however, after Paul, Weiss announced that they would institute legal action in Israel to protect Otto Frank's copyright, the army decided to withdraw the play. Ironically, the last performance took place on 18 January 1967 at Kibbutz Meshek Yagur, near Haifa, where Levin had lived and worked on his first extended visits to Palestine forty years earlier. David Zinder, who played Dussel, recalls that Levin was very unstable: "Somebody in the dress-

ing-room asked a question about why Otto Frank was behaving in this way and Meyer had an hysterical attack, screaming and uncontrolled, yelling—red in the face. The whole unhappy story pouring out" (letter, January 1994, TF).

During the weeks of renewed conflict, however, Levin received further support for his actions. The labor daily, Davar , ran an article congratulating the writer, expressing a preference for his work over Goodrich and Hackett's, and arguing that "The Diary of Anne Frank is not the personal property of the heirs and the legal action against Levin and his dramatization was unjustified, because the Soldiers Theatre chose the Jewish version which was more faithful to its source" (23 December 1966, 8). Levin also received many personal letters of support, among them a note from Yehiel Dinur, who—under the name of Ka-Tzetnik (from the German acronym KZ for Konzentra-tionslager )—had written some of the most searing, widely read stories of the death camps. Ka-Tzetnik, who had become an internationally known figure after testifying at the Eichmann trial, saw Levin's drama and wrote him: "I was distressed to learn that Anne Frank is again condemned to oblivion. When I saw your play at Soldiers Theatre in Tel Aviv I felt the magnetic pull between the audience and Anne Frank on stage. It is a shame that questions of a non-literary nature can sometimes come between an artist and his audience in expressing the human condition. You have my deepest sympathies" (18 January 1967, BU). Elie Wiesel wrote a similar letter of support a few weeks later.

After the exchange of telegrams with attorneys in New York, and the encouragement he was getting from people in Israel and elsewhere, Levin took the closing of the army production

as a new stimulus to increase his efforts to get public recognition for his play. Two months earlier (just after the premiere in Tel Aviv), he had received an inquiry from the lecture bureau of the National Jewish Welfare Board in New York about a U.S. tour of the Soldiers Theatre production. Although such an arrangement was impossible, he now felt the time was ripe to press his claims even more resolutely than he had done before.

Late in 1966 and through the early months of 1967, Levin wrote scores of letters to influential figures in American and Israeli legal, artistic, publishing, and philanthropic circles, urging them to back his cause. He asked Will Maslow of the American Jewish Congress (who had helped negotiate the 1959 settlement) to "consider the real issue" before he condemned him as "a contract breaker." The agreement, Levin insisted, did not stipulate that his creative work should be destroyed. He had as much right to keep the play alive "as any Jew had to keep himself alive when the Nazis tried to kill him. The Nazis too attempted 'legalism' in their suppression of life, and to me—as to Anne Frank—a work of art has the same right to life as a human being" (7 December 1966, BU). In an exchange with his friend Rabbi Jacob Weinstein of Chicago (who had written the anti-Bloomgarden article "The Betrayal of Anne Frank" in 1957), Levin admitted that the Soldiers Theatre performances violated earlier agreements, but he now felt that he had "to recognize a higher law in this respect," and he asked Weinstein to seek official authorization to perform the play and to urge others to do the same. Using similar arguments, Levin also wrote to editors and publishers (including Ken McCormick of Doubleday), proposing they issue a dual edition of his

text and the Goodrich and Hackett play, or an edition in English or Hebrew of his work alone; and he sent copies of the play to the producer Jean Dalrymple at City Center Drama Company, to the director Harold Clurman, and to other theater notables, asking them to consider putting it on.

Levin also tried to find ways to influence Otto Frank more directly. He contacted Walter Pick, husband of Hannah Pick-Goslar (the Lies Goosens of the Diary and one of the last people to see Anne Frank alive through the barbed wire of Bergen-Belsen), and asked him and his wife to intercede on his behalf. His play, he told Pick, was more faithful and more important for Jews and Israel than the Broadway version. Pick replied that while Levin's claim might be true, his wife was so tied by affection and history to Otto Frank (she had known him before the war, and he had helped her emigrate to Israel afterward) that she could not intervene. To her mind, no abstract speculation about Levin's obligation to fight for the prerogative of the Jewish people to its cultural material could change Frank's basic right to approve or disapprove of adaptations as he saw fit. Pick also spoke of Otto Frank as "a rare specimen of a good and sunny human being," expressing a wish that the seventy-seven-year-old man not be hounded for his honestly held opinions. Levin, irritated by Pick's reaction, wrote back that "the phrase 'to hound an old man for his honestly held opinions' is just another insult which I may add to those which this old man has had to absorb for his honestly held opinions" (7 and 9 December 1966, BU).

Several of the friends with whom Levin corresponded at this time replied with understanding, empathy, and concern but undertook to persuade him—despite his rage and disappoint-

ment—to abandon a fight he could not legally win and to focus his attention on his other writing. Among the most candid and forceful were Rabbi Weinstein and Rabbi Joachim Prinz. In late January 1967, Weinstein told Levin that the quarrel was "eating you like a cancer" and that "hate and self-pity" have deprived "your recent work of the creative fire" that characterized The Old Bunch, In Search , and Compulsion . He begged "an old dear friend" to turn his mind to other subjects (29 January 1967, BU). A few days later Rabbi Prinz, responding to an earlier entreaty, told Levin:

Legally you are completely wrong. The agreement is quite clear. You have abdicated your right to have your play performed in any form whatsoever. You accepted money from your opponents as a token of this agreement, and you have obligated yourself in such clear terms that there is no court in the world that would approve any action not in accordance with this agreement. This is the legal part of it. It is important, but it is not the only consideration.

My consideration is for you as a human being. You have permitted yourself to be maneuvered into an almost paranoid state of mind. It might be very well that my letter is not going to cure you from it. But I must make the attempt. It might very well be that you need some psychiatric help because you have made yourself sick. This kind of sickness in a man of your importance and talent is not merely a concern for Meyer Levin but for all of us. The more you concentrate on violating the agreement, the sicker you get. (31 January 1967, BU)

Levin's response to these and other such appeals was usually to admit his obsession but to argue vigorously that to be obsessed was not necessarily to be wrong, and to urge the cor-

respondent to accept his point of view. His play was unjustly proscribed for doctrinaire reasons; his reputation was severely damaged; and he would continue to make every effort to get the ban lifted and to have the work freely performed by anyone who wished to stage it. "It is with a great shock that I read your letter," he replied to Jacob Weinstein:

Though it is written with great warmth and sympathy, and though I am sure you remain my friend as I remain yours, I would have thought you would take a broader view of what happened. Your view amounts to saying that a contract is eternally binding, above justice and life itself, not subject to review or change when basic circumstances change. . . . The basic circumstance changed. The basic circumstance was the assumption that my play was no good, unactable. It has now been proven that it is not only actable and a very good play but probably a work of true permanent value. (3 February 1967, BU)

As the months passed, Levin recognized that his efforts to organize support for his cause were unavailing, and he decided—against the advice of his agent and others—to print five thousand copies of Anne Frank , privately at his own expense, which he would then distribute "for literary discussion" to libraries, individuals, theater groups, and community centers. To introduce the text, he wrote a fourteen-page "Preface to a Forbidden Play," offering his view of the dispute. This Preface, like so much of his writing on the Anne Frank affair, is a vigorous polemic mixing persuasive arguments about artistic freedom, the influence of commercial factors on Broadway, and the merit of his own play with unproven intrigue theories,

aggressive attacks on his enemies, and a partially distorted account of what occurred between 1952 and 1959. In some paragraphs, he provides a cogent critique of the flaws of the Goodrich and Hackett Diary and an explanation of what he aimed for in his own work, especially on the subject of universality versus Jewish particularism; but in other places, his need for self-justification leads him to misrepresent Otto Frank's actions and his own. (Levin claims erroneously, for instance, that Frank "authorized and approved his play," and that as author he offered to withdraw his original script to make way for a world-famous dramatist who never materialized. He also reports misleadingly that throughout the trial, he offered to drop his charges if his play were given noncommercial performance rights.)

For all its shrill rhetoric, exaggeration, and distortion, Levin's preface does present a powerful image of a writer obsessed with a perceived injustice, and it makes a forceful case that his drama be permitted noncommercial production:

I must repeat that I have never asked that this play be substituted for the other. I have simply insisted that those who wish, should be able to present it. . . . To the producer and authors of the other play I would say, You have had the greatest possible gratification in world-wide performances, in earnings, in prizes—isn't that enough? Can't you now allow the public the right to see a different version if they want to? (p. xiii)

Levin's adversaries, however, had for many years been dismissive of his appeals. Not only did they have the law on their side (Levin had freely and with the advice of counsel signed the

agreements and accepted money for the rights to his play), but they also maintained that his claims were baseless, his charges of political machinations preposterous, and his obstructive actions over fifteen years personally damaging to them and others. Therefore they felt entirely justified in not yielding on the matter of performance. Besides, if they did yield and permitted his work to be staged, they were convinced he would begin other protests and litigation. As Levin sent out thousands of copies of Anne Frank to libraries, groups, and individuals—and as requests for permission to perform the play significantly increased—the attorneys at Paul, Weiss considered various options with Frank, Bloomgarden, and the Hacketts. Close to eighty, and busy with other legal entanglements related to his daughter's world-famous book, Otto Frank had no desire to get involved again in a lawsuit with Levin, which he felt would lead to more recriminations and attacks. Since the private distribution of the printed play did not appear to endanger anyone's fundamental rights, the decision was made to ignore Levin and to have Paul, Weiss answer all applications for performance rights to his play with a five-page form letter of refusal describing the background of the dispute and the various contracts and agreements signed by the parties involved. The letter ends:

Notwithstanding these agreements, and in violation of them, Mr. Levin has continued to claim the right to produce and to have the version of The Diary which he wrote produced. He has continued to publish and distribute copies of it. He has continued to circularize Rabbis and other groups and persons on the Anne Frank subject. He has continued to stimulate public and private controversy about The Diary and

his part in relation to it. And he has continued to not only discuss whether or not the stage adaptation of The Diary which he wrote should or should not have been produced, but to stimulate repeated requests from various people for the right to produce it. In 1966, Mr. Levin violated his commitments wholesale by stimulating a production by the Soldiers Theatre in Israel. . . .

In these circumstances, it simply is not possible to grant your request: there are too many individuals with interests in the dramatic rights who would find such a performance objectionable. Moreover, in light of the relationship between Mr. Frank and Mr. Levin, Mr. Frank is simply not inclined to authorize productions which will just give rise to a renewal of the ancient and unpleasant controversy. (BU)

Despite the futility of his efforts to gain permission to have his play performed, Levin continued to distribute copies and to plead his cause. He also engaged in confessional, self-justifying correspondence with friends. One of the most fascinating of these exchanges took place in November 1968 with Martha Gellhorn, the reporter, novelist, and former wife of Ernest Hemingway, whom he had met when they both covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Levin had sent Gellhorn a copy of his privately printed play, and on 13 November she acknowledged it with what she later called "awful frankness":

You'll never forgive me for telling you truthfully that you have wasted your nerves, gaiety, energy, and surely your wife, on nonsense: it simply isn't a very good play, Meyer; not that the one shown on the stage was very good either, though they are astoundingly similar. That the author of Compulsion could have written this play is in itself odd: like two different people,

and the author of Compulsion is a tremendous writer. Whereas the author of Anne Frank is a good honest man, who has made a pedestrian play and stuffed such boring speeches into the mouth of a 13-year-old that one can't quite believe what one reads.

Gellhorn concludes by telling Levin how disturbed she is to see how "you have cooped [yourself] up . . . in your own mind, obsessed with this second-rate work, doomed yourself to a self-made prison; been your own devil" (BU).

Levin, who admired Gellhorn and responded to her criticism with respect, set out four days later "to explain . . . old Meyer Levin's obsession":

I have tried with two analysts and am on the third so probably incurable. But when you daintily remind me it is not a very good play or mediocre and much like the other you touch on several dubious points. First, the question of whether it was or was not a good play was the heart of the disturbance for a few years because the only way one could find out was on the stage. In the Israel performance I at last found out. With a lousy cast, except for the two principal kids, the thing played beautifully and after seeing it about fifty times I was convinced. It is a good play. Kind of in the Chekhov manner as I had hoped . . . that is how it comes out on the stage. As to the other play being something like it, of course it is, they swiped it from me. They copied the whole staging, the structure, etc. only left out the Jewish heart.

At this point in his letter to Gellhorn, Levin offers his habitual argument about political plotting, accusing Hellman, Bloomgarden, and the Hacketts but also going on to include a

sharp attack on "my own people, my own Jews, the same lousy community to which I directed my entire writing career," for turning away and not helping him.

Why? Because Otto Frank was a remote cousin of the Strauses of Macy's, and because his lawyer, Rifkind and Co., was president of the American Jewish Committee. In other words, the Jewish establishment refuses to support a Jewish writer and a Jewish cultural cause because the other side has family connections. It is all slightly redolent of the worst of the Jewish Community Committees set up by the Nazis to make lists and assign priorities and preside over the liquidation. (BU)

In Moscow, he goes on, they would have put the "nutty Levin" in a writers' lunatic asylum, but in America he is "branded as paranoic and lectures are canceled." Acknowledging that he is in the clutch of a mania from which he cannot extricate himself, Levin closes by admitting some of the dismal consequences of his obsession and offering one interpretation of its meaning:

It has about killed my marriage to the charming Tereska because we cannot talk about this subject as it makes her shudder and so I can hardly talk about anything at all since this subject stands in front of me most of the time.

In a peculiar way, this is my masochistic mechanism for identifying with the Holocaust. I know it. I see myself as a Jew who created something that was then handed over to a couple of non-Jewish front people, and the more I protest the more I am vilified.

In her response on 23 November, Gellhorn stands her ground:

Your letter made me sad; you are like an alcoholic who cherishes, excuses, justifies, and denies his addiction. I am, you will be maddened to hear, sorry for you; but a damn sight sorrier for Tereska and the children. Since an obsession may be painful to the one obsessed but can be nothing except a deadly murderous sickening bore to those who have to live near it. And you used to be quite a funny guy; such a waste, to degenerate into this.

Then Gellhorn goes on to tell Levin that in her view he is not fighting artistic censorship: "It's the censorship of you —you've isolated yourself in a cage of self-concern. . . . You even resent the fury people feel about sending Russian writers to prison—who sent you to prison, chum—because what is driving you is not a universal ill or injustice, it's you not getting a square deal." And she closes with a poignant postscript: "I remember you in a jeep in the snow in Luxembourg and—perhaps shamefully surely selfishly—it is one of my gayest memories. Find your way back to being a brave, disinterested man."

Gellhorn's mix of blunt realism and compassion is also evident in letters she was writing to Tereska Torres at the same time. Explaining how distraught she was after spending four months looking after her ninety-year-old mother in St. Louis, Gellhorn shares her most recent letter to Levin with his wife, her friend, and concludes: "I can't take him on; I am not a doctor. . . I've done my best, such as it is." But even as she talks of withdrawing, Gellhorn continues to be concerned and tries to be helpful. She offers the name of a doctor in Israel, discusses medication, shares her thoughts about Levin's personality and problems, praises Torres's loyalty, and sympathizes with what she has had to put up with: "He's got the busy-ness and the

blazing comfort of being ego-mad with his own trouble; you only have the grisly role of watching this needless and ugly ruin." And, in talking about medication, she recalls going through a similar experience with Hemingway:

I agree with you about medication; and there is indeed the chance that various medications, acting like shock treatment, do and can shake loose obsessions. I know nothing about Ernest in his last years, have only heard; it seems clear he was quite insane. But I noticed this long before; terrible suspicions of people (mad and ugly) and a sense of persecution—he who was the favorite of the Gods—and total unreliability in emotion; his greatest friend this week, too great a friend, was suddenly denounced as a swine and enemy the next week. I thought it was just a filthy nature—and there is that too—but also clearly clinical madness.

I think Meyer's nature is basically sweet, or so it seems to me. You have been loyal and enduring, beyond belief. But I'd think a certain loneliness must set in for absolutely nothing bores people so much as the obsessions of others. I wonder how Meyer managed to clear his mind enough to write that gay book about Gore and Igor. A romp. Cheered me to think he'd cheered up. (18 November, no year, TT)

Gellhorn's candid, tough-minded reactions to Levin's play and predicament carry the refreshing authority of common sense; her image of him as a kind of ideological alcoholic and her remarks about egotism and self-concern are keen and painfully pertinent. But at the same time, her dismissal of both plays as worthless and of the entire affair as "nonsense" suggests a high-mindedness of her own; she seems unable to credit the weight of the issues Levin has been struggling with, or the mis-

ery of his having lost what he helped to create and worked on so ardently (and it is not even clear she has read Anne Frank's Diary ). Even allowing for his typical hyperbole, Levin's answers have a valuable candor of their own; his comment about masochistic identification with the suffering of the European Jews offers an insight that is of permanent relevance to an understanding of his condition.

Gellhorn's last comment on Gore and Igor serves as a reminder that Levin, at the same time he relentlessly pursued the justification of his own position and tried to get his play performed, was also writing fiction that suggested both a desire and an ability to escape for a time from the restrictions of what Gellhorn calls "a cage of self-concern." Gore and Igor —the extravagant spoof about peaceniks, folksinger-protest poets, and sexual hijinks in the 1960s—now seems self-indulgent, heavy-handed, and a lot less funny than it must have been at the time, but for Levin it provided a gratifying, if only temporary, sense of release. Reviewing the novel in 1968, Wallace Markfield expressed understandable delight at having come unexpectedly on "zippy, zany farce" and "irreverent kibitzing of Israel" from "this tough old Zionist troubleshooter," at finding "broad, bawdy hints of black humor in a writer who has been put down as a gritty naturalist, a kind of Jewish James T. Farrell" (Life , 16 February, 6). Most other reviewers, though, found the shaggy poet story merely silly, the frankness smut, not wit. Some objected that the novel was an exploitation rather than a satiric commentary of the unbuttoned behavior of sixties radicals. Gore and Igor had only modest sales, and Levin did not try to work again in a comic vein which is, in retrospect, a pity, since it might have led him to see (and to

use) what many onlookers saw: the elements of slapstick farce (as well as seriousness and suffering) in his sixteen-year-old feud with Otto Frank. In The Obsession , six years later, a sharp perception of comic travesty does occasionally break through, and it is one of the things that makes that original book so memorable.

After the writing of Gore and Igor , however, Levin turned his creative energies to still another markedly different undertaking: a massive, old-fashioned historical novel about a pioneer Jewish family that fled pogroms in Russia to settle in Turkish-ruled Palestine at the beginning of the Second Aliyah (the wave of immigration that brought some forty thousand Jews to the territory between 1904 and 1914). Levin had been thinking about this project for most of his life, and it had deep meaning for him. Inspired by the activist family of Yitzhak Chizik, one of his roommates in Chicago in the late 1920s, The Settlers was written (as the dedication to Chizik declares) "in promise, and in remembrance." Both the ambition and the design of the book were large. Working on the manuscript steadily between 1967 and 1971, Levin set out to portray the dreams and struggles of the fictional Chaimovitch family (parents and nine children) through one of the most tumultuous periods of modern history: the early Zionist efforts to reestablish Jewish roots in Palestine, the rise of Arab nationalism, the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the events that led to the Balfour Declaration, the British defeat of the Turks, and a new alignment of power in the Middle East. The Settlers would be The Old Bunch writ large: the chronicle of young Jews in Chicago would now be followed by a saga of Jews in the modern world. Not only would the domestic and

international be blended, but the book would also have an expanding allegorical implication. The Chaimovitches (whose name is derived from the Hebrew for "life") settle at Mishkan Yaacov ("the dwelling place of Jacob"), on the banks of the Jordan in the Galilee. The father is named Yankel (a Yiddish diminutive for Jacob), and the strivings of his sons and daughters are often reminiscent of those of the children of the biblical patriarch. By telling the Chaimovitch story against the background of world events from 1907 to 1920, Levin hoped to celebrate the power and actualization of the Zionist dream as well as the aspirations of the Jews throughout history. After twenty-five years of preoccupation with Jewish victimization, he would now offer (in what could well be his last major effort) a heartening story about Jews having prevailed.

Not that the anger over the Anne Frank affair had been stilled. While reading proofs of The Settlers , the sixty-six-year-old Levin felt the "ancient devilment" spring out at him again (Obsession , 11). He started making plans for new protests, appeals to writers' groups, and even legal action, stimulated in part by regular requests from people wanting to stage the play. Since The Settlers looked as if it might be a big hit, however, he was worried that a flare-up of the old dispute could threaten the book's reception. In hopes of controlling his desire to incite trouble, he once again sought psychiatric help. Meanwhile, prepublication anticipation for The Settlers was indeed high. Simon and Schuster saw that the book might become Levin's first national bestseller since Compulsion fifteen years earlier. Instead of a historical thriller based on a spectacular murder case, he had now given them a densely inhabited panoramic novel that embodied many of his most passionate concerns

about the continuity of the Jews—a work that might tap the market for earnest, colorful, narrative-driven chronicles popularized by such writers as James Michener, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, and Chaim Potok. The publisher's first advertising heralded the novel as an engrossing, inspirational saga, a broad family story about triumph over adversity, enriched by heroic figures and happenings from life (the deeds of the one-armed soldier Joseph Trumpeldor and the fiery Zionist revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, who formed the Zion Mule Corps at Gallipoli; the escapades of the Nili underground intelligence group, and the liberation of Jerusalem). A striking, two-page spread in the New York Times Book Review set quotes from Norman Mailer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Morton, Gerald Green, and Gerold Frank alongside a boxed endorsement from Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel. Mailer called Levin "one of the two or three best living American writers working in the naturalistic tradition"; The Settlers was "his magnum opus." Meir claimed that the novelist's intimacy with the subject and his sympathetic understanding of his many characters made The Settlers "a remarkably impressive recreation of one of the great chapters in modern and Jewish history" (23 April 1972).

Within a few months of its publication, the novel sold close to fifty thousand copies, appeared on several bestseller lists, brought lots of fan mail, and earned $350,000 for paperback rights. Nevertheless, Levin saw a sinister pattern in the way the book was written about around the country. Acclaimed as an absorbing story of breadth and power by reviewers in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, it was perfunctorily discussed and grudgingly praised by Granville Hicks in the

back pages of the New York Times Book Review and ignored by Newsweek, Life, Time , the New Yorker, Saturday Review, Harper's , the Atlantic , and other national journals. New York radio and television talk-show hosts, who customarily interviewed Levin when a work of his was about to appear, also disregarded him. Although his publishers, family, and friends tried to convince him that the reception of The Settlers was in fact excellent and that there was no dark plot against it, he took the lackluster piece by Hicks and the silence of the mostly New York-based national journals as the latest example of the anti-Israel metropolitan intelligentsia working to harm his career by misrepresenting or ignoring him. Although some of the critics who did review the book complained of tedious writing, one-dimensional characters, and popular history with a Hollywood flavor prevailing over art, it was the absence of reviews in New York that distressed and provoked Levin most of all.

On 12 October 1972, five months after The Settlers was published and had established itself as a success, Levin took out a half-page ad in the daily New York Times , headed CAN A LITERARY MAFIA AFFECT YOUR CHOICE OF BOOKS ? Noting that critics across the country had called The Settlers his best novel, he went on to protest again that because of his having dared to fight against the prohibition of his Anne Frank play, the New York literary establishment continued to conspire against him by refusing to acknowledge and discuss his work in public and denigrating it in private. The existence of such a scheme was confirmed by those close to him even as they denied it: "My publisher takes the position that there is no such mafia, but that for me to fight it will prove disastrous!" Admitting that The Settlers had been a top bestseller in Chicago and Los Ange-

les, and number seven nationally, and had been chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club as a featured fiction alternate, Levin explained that nonetheless his hatred of censorship and his desire for the widest possible audience led him to pay for this pronouncement and urge people to read his book.

A month later, after getting letters of support, he placed a second advertisement in the Times , this one titled WHAT IS "TOO JEWISH "? Here he elaborated on his indictment that the silent treatment accorded The Settlers "culminated a campaign of literary disparagement and character assassination" that had begun twenty years before, when his dramatization of Anne Frank's Diary was stifled for being "too Jewish." Concluding that "even my ad about the silent treatment got the silent treatment," he ended with a warning about "mind-manipulation through purposeful omissions and silences" and told readers where they could get copies of his original notice and his new novel (15 November 1972).

For many people at the time, Levin's behavior only reinforced the view that he was often a ludicrous figure, out of touch with the reality of his own literary status and with the way literary reputations were customarily made. For them, he was an independent, frequently published, widely read novelist (his books had sold several million copies in hard and soft covers in many languages); and his insistence on broadcasting shrill claims of Stalinist, anti-Zionist repression and on comparing his situation to the plight of Jewish writers in Russia only revealed the depth of his vanity and delusion. For Levin himself, however, the self-inflicted opening of the old wound led to thoughts of writing about it again, but in another form: a work that would disclose his side of the story in detail, without recourse to masks and fictions.

When Levin began The Obsession in 1971, he was sixty-five, and he had come to believe that the twenty-year fixation with The Diary of a Young Girl was the defining fact of his later life, "the inevitable expression of all I ever was, all I ever did, as a writer and as a Jew" (7). This memoir (perhaps his last major book) would be a confessional summing-up, an effort to vent his still-pent-up feelings, to examine their roots, consequences, and implications, to unmask his enemies, and to offer a cautionary moral tale about ideological manipulation in midcentury American society. The book would stand as his Anatomy of Obsession , a flagrantly candid, hopefully instructive exposure of himself and his adversaries that might recall his play from banishment and free him from the Anne Frank ordeal.

As a representation of what it is actually like for a very talented, prolific writer to be enmeshed for years in a compulsive preoccupation, the memoir is a bold and unforgettably affecting piece of work. When it was published, Jerome Greenfield fairly praised its "unique power" and said that not since Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up "had an established American author exposed his milieu and himself in public so nakedly" (American Zionist , March-April 1974, 38). The very design of the book is obsessional, and it inevitably prompts the same extreme range of responses from readers that Levin himself often elicited from the people he knew and met. He opens with an extraordinary, almost outlandish, but undeniably riveting description of his experience as a kind of epic descent:

In the middle of life I fell into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me, these twenty years. I've used the word "fall." It implies something accidental, a stumbling, but we also use the word in speaking of "falling in

love," in which there is a sense of elevation, and where a fatedness is implied, a feeling of being inevitably bound in through all the mysterious components of character to this expression of the life process, whether in the end beautifully gratifying, or predominantly painful. In my "fall," too, there lurks the powerful sense of the inevitable. Through the years of this grim affair it has always seemed that the process had to come, that it was the inevitable expression of all I ever was, all I ever did, as a writer and as a Jew; that it was in itself virtually artistic in its construction, its hidden elements, its gradual summoning up and revelation of character both in myself and others, and in its exposition of social forces. (7)

The language here—with its evocation of the opening of The Divine Comedy and its reflection on the word "fall"—is clearly drawn from Dante, the Bible, and Paradise Lost (was the Fall calamitous or fortunate?). The intention is immediately to enhance the twenty-year-old trauma by placing it in the context of renowned epic stories that are among the emblematic narratives of our history and culture. The tone and attitude—poised, distanced, striving for objectivity and fullness—is clearly meant to imply that the author has reached a point at which he can finally put the tumult of the recent past into perspective and consider it from above the fray. To say that the affair was itself "virtually artistic in its construction" is to suggest a control that comes from understanding, perhaps even mastery. This formulation is also a deft, insinuating way of bringing Levin's travail into parallel relationship with that of Anne Frank, for her story (with its unities of time and place, its foreordained doom, its theme of the fine soul wasted, and its status as a symbolic narrative of a people) has intriguing connections with Greek tragedy.

What the writer hopes to do, he tells us (continuing his use of mythological imagery), is "to unravel the three-threaded intertwinings of fate, manipulation, and one's own will," so as to understand "what happened to me."

"Exactly how did it, how could it have come about?" we demand. Was all this from within myself? one asks, or from outside? Was there some hidden secret force working on me so that no matter what I did through the normal ways of society I could not prevail?—Ah! paranoia!—But if I trace back and find that there really was such a force?—Witches! Demons! The conspiratorial view of history! (8)

Notable here is the rapid giving way of studied distance in the opening paragraph to a more intimate, emotional point of view; blunt phrases, question marks, dashes, and exclamation points introduce the startling specter of paranoia and conspiratorial views of history that will be at the center of the zigzagging narrative from now on. The unexpected shift in tone and perspective continues as Levin casually tells us that he has con-suited four psychoanalysts and therapists on many occasions in the past decades, and it soon becomes clear that it is psychoanalysis, not mythology or classical literature, that will provide a vital frame for the confessional memoir.

As the urgent narrative proceeds, we learn a good deal more about Levin's experiences with the four analysts. The first, identified as Dr. A, was a woman in Israel who treated him at intervals there and in New York for twenty-five years. Most important, he had consulted her in 1951 at the time of the suicide of Mable, his first wife; since his involvement with the Anne Frank Diary began around then, they later talked a great deal about the possibility that his obsession was a guilty, self-

punishing response to Mable's death. Levin stubbornly insisted that he had no more personal reaction to Anne than he did to any other victim; he was merely a writer fighting against artistic suppression, as all writers must. In the middle 1950s, Dr. A. told him that she feared he was in danger of succumbing to a ruinous paranoia, and when he kept resisting her diagnosis, she suggested he consult someone else, perhaps a man. Levin, who blamed her for "failing with Mable" ("everyone failed with Mable"), agreed and consulted a Dr. Sulzberger.

As Levin tells it, Sulzberger, who was a maverick member of the German-Jewish newspaper family that owned the New York Times , treated him in 1957, at the time of his troubles with the dramatization of Compulsion and the beginning of the trial against Frank, Crawford, and Bloomgarden. Levin and Sulzberger focused on Levin's street terrors from childhood and spoke mostly about different ways of responding to persecution. Although Levin admired the doctor's knowledge of literary and theatrical matters, he felt their discussions were superficial and soon ended the treatment, remembering Sulzberger fondly for urging him to "fight with joy . . . enjoy the fight." "He thought," Levin wryly observes, that "he could turn me into an Irishman."

Around 1970, when he was having trouble writing The Settlers , Levin went to the third analyst, an elderly Polish Jew named Bychovsky. As he describes it:

So . . . once more the rehearsal of early years, marriage and divorce, the suicide. The absorption in things Jewish, perhaps overcompensation for that first marriage to a gentile? And the second marriage to the daughter of a converted Jew, herself

baptized at birth. Rebellion, guilt, and hence my obstinacy over the Jewish content of the Diary? And so the whole Anne Frank story all over again in all its wanderings. (301)

According to Levin, Bychovsky eventually told him that all artists are "somewhat" paranoid but that his essential problems were quite a different thing from paranoia. "The enemies you tell of are undoubtedly real. The question is, are they worth all the trouble you give yourself over them?" (16). Bychovsky pre- scribed Ritalin, which Levin felt helped him get on with and finish his saga novel.

Shortly afterward, Levin went to the fourth analyst (a woman identified as Dr. Erika) with one immediate objective: he wished to be able to control his actions when The Settlers was published, so as not to jeopardize its reception. With her he explored his motives for wanting to renew the Anne Frank campaign at the time of the publication of what could be his major novel: Was it "the old masochism, the self-destructive mechanism?" During the course of treatment they talked again about his early life and relationship with his family: "My father, the little tailor, my mother with her hysteria, my sisters, and how Bess got herself a nice young Jewish doctor, and how her Meyer and I became close friends" (21).

In a session with Dr. Erika an event occurred that Levin in the memoir uses to create considerable emotional effect and dramatic suspense. On the second page of the book, he describes how a short time before he began writing, he was telling his fourth analyst about an incident involving his sister Bess on the very day that her husband died suddenly of a heart attack in Chicago, which was also the last day of the Levin-

Frank trial in New York. He had told this story many times before, but when he tried to utter the key words to Dr. Erika, he choked, broke down in sobs, and could not get them out. Placed at the very start of the narrative, the report is deliberately truncated, and the unspoken words become a clue to an important mystery that is not in fact cleared up until 192 pages later. (In this history it will be considered shortly.)

The brief but suggestive vignettes of many sessions with four different analysts, woven into Levin's narrative without regard to chronology or consistency, are essential to the book's impact and meaning. On the most basic level, they often establish sympathy for the teller. After all, he tried so often and so hard to get help with his affliction—a trouble that is the outcome of his idealistic concern for getting the story of the European Jews faithfully told and for protecting the integrity of Anne Frank's words. In addition to creating sympathy for himself, Levin, in quick scenes from the psychiatric inner sanctum, dramatizes (with great novelistic flair) some of his most intimate and intense feelings and gives the reader tantalizing glimpses of four analysts and the analysand trying to understand the roots and meaning of his fever. We see them, ever so fleetingly, discussing Levin's parents, his emotionally privileged childhood, his early ambivalence toward Judaism, his marriages, first to a gentile and then to the young Jewish daughter of an influential sculptor friend who had converted to Catholicism, his insecurities as a man and writer, his entering the concentration camps, his subsequent identification with the fate of the Jews, and much else.

The psychoanalytical vignettes let the memoirist reveal himself as seen by others and at the same time show him grappling

with theories and suppositions about his extravagant conduct. In the episodes that view the writer through the eyes of others, The Obsession takes on the qualities of a richly comic novel, a miniature Portnoy's Complaint —boisterous , prodigal, uncomfortably and insinuatingly funny. His antagonists are imagined on the Westchester estate of Nathan Straus, tearing to shreds the "Russian-Jewish nobody," the "scheming, greedy incompetent writer," who had gotten his "hooks on poor Otto in Europe." The Broadway crowd scoffs at "that boob Levin," who naively signed away his rights when he was told it would be in the best interests of Anne if a world-famous playwright did the dramatization of the Diary . Some people mock him as a red-baiting McCarthyite spotting Communists under every bed: "Call the asylum. A crazy Jewish writer is making false accusations" (87). Others dismiss his disappointment as crudely commercial: "Come on, Levin, aren't you really sore because you had your hands on a 'property' that was worth millions, and let it be taken away from you" (37). Still others, more benign, say the Diary is doing so much good, "Why tarnish the image? Perhaps Levin wasn't handled right from the start, but why let that interfere with a play that is loved all over the world . . . a play that has done wonders against anti-Semitism? He lost out that's all. Well, he's being paid" (203). Many friends avoid him; others look on at parties with wonderment and compassion as the irrepressibly aggrieved Levin pours out the story for the thousandth time, desperately pulling papers from his pockets with "proof" of his wildest assertions. And even his doctors occasionally chide him for his excess: "So I had been to the justice figures. Run to papa. Run to mama. Run to the rabbi" (138).

In the other scenes from the psychiatric sessions, we see Levin responding to speculations about shame, father fixations, Jewish righteousness, Jewish self-hatred, and conjectures about his need for punishment (as a failed husband, for the suicide of Mable and the troubles in his marriage to Tereska, or as a survivor who guiltily identifies with the murdered Jews of Europe). We see him questioning why he clings to his sickness, why he seems to look for excuses to prolong the nasty confrontation with his enemies. For all the wild comedy of some of the psychiatric vignettes, the sight of Levin struggling with the most profound issues raised by his character and conduct is both disturbing and surprisingly invigorating; he can be a clownish figure, but he is also at times a courageous old battier: Levin agonistes, affirming above all his commitment to justice and to the continuity of the Jews, in spite of the high personal cost.

As the narrative of The Obsession unfolds, Levin comes to reject psychoanalysis even as he submits himself to it ("Self-entrapment?" "No, too pat, not everything is masochism"); and near the end of the book, he asks:

What is really known of the mysterious process of analysis? Some detective-story-like cases we know, cases in which the clue came in a word, a dream, an incident recovered from prememory, and a trauma was dissolved away. And yes, I did know a few persons who had been helped by analysis. I had in the past in some way myself been helped by Dr. A, mostly in the early sessions in Jerusalem. Now I was stuck. . . . (288)

Levin's rejection of psychoanalysis can be seen of course as yet another confirmation of the commanding power of his

obsession, but it is also accompanied by a more serious and consequential refusal—a refusal of analysis in the broader meaning of the word. Throughout the memoir, he remains unwavering in his belief that his Anne Frank was rejected and suppressed for political reasons by Stalinists and anti-Zionists, and he is unable to allow the possibility that his opponents had motives other than the ones he accuses them of having (whether commercial, aesthetic, or something else). To substantiate a political plot, he offers hearsay and suspicions but no documentation that can count as hard, conclusive evidence. Late in the memoir, he reports a 1972 conversation with Francis Price, in which the former Doubleday editor claimed to have heard Otto Frank admit that he was told Levin's play could not be done because it was "too Jewish." But the alleged conversation between Price and Frank (reported twenty years afterwards) is shrouded in mystery and difficult to evaluate. Even if it did take place, it cannot be taken as confirmation of a widespread intrigue.

Levin's extended description of the conduct of Frank, Craw-ford, Bloomgarden, and the lawyers at Paul, Weiss, moreover, is often marked by inaccuracies, distortions, and self-justifying rearrangements of what actually happened between 1950 and 1970. Because he reads the past through the lens of a later-arrived-at conspiracy theory, Levin provides an account that is mistaken in many of its details and unconvincing in its overall emphasis and final judgment. Take, for instance, his opening description of the source of his troubles:

The case in court had arisen from my difficulties over The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Continuing from my

war correspondent experiences my intense absorption with the Holocaust, I had helped Otto Frank to secure publication for the Diary in English, and had dramatized it. Mr. Frank had come to New York, to see to the authenticity of the staging, but at that point the prominent playwright Lillian Hellman and her producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, had persuaded him, he told me, that as a novelist I was no dramatist, that my work was unstageworthy, that it had to be discarded and another version written.

From the start I had strongly suspected that some doctrinaire formulation rather than pure dramatic judgment had caused Miss Hellman's attack on my play, and after the substitute work written under her tutelage was produced, I became convinced that I had been barred because I and my work were in her political view "too Jewish." (8-9)

In fact, Levin did not "help secure" the publication of the Diary (although he was instrumental in its great success). Otto Frank did not come to New York "to see to the authenticity of the staging"; he had been invited by Doubleday in June 1952 to help resolve the dispute between the firm and Levin on the choice of the adapter. When Frank finally did arrive in September, Doubleday was long out of the picture, but he was still waiting for Cheryl Crawford to decide whether or not Levin would be the playwright. It was far too early to discuss questions of staging, which in fact Frank was to have nothing to do with in any case. Hellman and Bloomgarden did not persuade Frank to reject Levin's script; Crawford did. At that point, Hellman had advised Crawford but was intensely preoccupied with her own affairs: the fallout from her recent testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, troubles with

the Internal Revenue Service, and a commitment to direct a revival of The Children's Hour . Bloomgarden was not yet involved. Levin did not at that time express any suspicion that "some doctrinaire formulation" caused Hellman to attack his play; in fact, it is unlikely that he knew she had discussed his script with Crawford until several years later. His specific accusations about ideology, de-Judaizing, and sinister manipulations were not made for at least three years after the refusal of his script.

Other errors occur elsewhere in the memoir. Levin writes that the crucial Goodrich and Hackett article, "Diary of the Diary " (which led him to solidify his suspicions about Hell-man), was published at the time of the Broadway opening of the play, when it actually appeared twelve months later. Reporting on other happenings at the time of the opening, Levin contends that he had not then considered and did not take legal action. But he had begun talking with attorneys nearly two years earlier and actually started litigation in December 1954, ten months before The Diary of Anne Frank opened at the Cort Theatre. Some of these errors may seem minor, but taken together (and with other inaccuracies) they make up a significant pattern of misrepresentation and seriously damage his case.

In the last analysis, then, Levin's memoir, written de profundis , can be said to succeed brilliantly as an anatomy of the dynamics of obsession, but to fail as an exposé and a cure. Levin does not prove his charge of conspiracy, nor does he rid himself of his compulsive preoccupation. In fact, he ends by reaffirming his disturbance as an expression of aspects of his best self: a lifelong passion for justice and a love of the pure in heart. The incident about his sister Bess that had been mysteri-

ously held for revelation at the close is now carefully positioned to support and celebrate this view. The words the sobbing Levin could not say to Dr. Erika had been spoken by his sister Bess Steinberg. On the last day of the Levin-Frank trial in New York, a message arrived that Meyer Steinberg had died of a heart attack in Chicago, but given the climactic moment in court, Levin had to delay leaving and missed the funeral. Soon after he arrived, however, standing in the Steinbergs' kitchen, he received a phone call from his lawyer reporting the jury's verdict in his favor. At that moment, his sister said: "I know it was my Meyer that did it. He went straight to heaven and asked for justice for you."

Levin reflects on this incident in the last pages of The Obsession :

It was for the pure in heart that I had wept. For those like my brother-in-law Meyer Steinberg, the good little doctor, for their departure, for the horror of their absence in the world. I had wept because of Bess's belief, and her Meyer's belief in me, and in justice from God, in that world where one encounters only betrayals and hostility from so many, even from those who should be most understanding. And so I was choked with my grief for such love, the rare love of the pure in heart that still manifests itself at times in our besmirched and murderous world of man.

Was it because Anne Frank, too, had symbolized for me the pure in heart? (311-12)

Levin then ends The Obsession with an account of his own visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and his perception that even there the meaning of her life and diary was falsified by the compulsion to universalize and deny the particular

fate of the Jews—a disillusionment he uses to warn readers again of the perils of political manipulation and to reaffirm his commitment to fight against it:

Thus there developed my justice obsession. The obsessive aspect is perhaps now more manageable, but I would not want to lose its concomitant, the search for justice. Yes, I cling to it. . . . (316)

Despite the rhetorical excess and moralizing, the aspects of Levin's best self (his passion for justice and the continuity of Jewish life) do come through in these closing pages; but so do the qualities for which he was so often criticized and belittled: his relentless, often unsubstantiated attacks on those with whom he disagreed; his embittered self-righteousness and self-justification; and, of course, his obsessiveness (now viewed by him as a virtue). The vivid complexity of the demon-ridden self-portrait that Levin paints in The Obsession was the subject of many of the reviews in the weeks after the publication of the book; but so were the singularity, extravagance, and dubiousness of his charges of conspiracy. In a meticulous, widely discussed piece for the New York Times Book Review , Victor S. Navasky (lawyer, author, and later editor of the Nation ) begins by trying to sort out the historical facts and define the obsession in what he calls this "disturbing, strangely involving book." He first lays out the way Levin saw himself as a triple victim of the upper-class German-Jewish Establishment, of Stalinism (which in 1952 was engaged in an annihilation campaign against Jewish writers), and of reverse-McCarthyism; and then he frames the basic questions raised by Levin's compelling narrative: "Am I victim or am I crazy? And whichever I am, is it right to sup-

press a play which . . . was called 'infinitely superior to the Hackett version'. . . . and anyway, doesn't art have its own moral imperatives which supervene contracts, legal agreements, technicalities negotiated under stress, especially when that art encapsulates the mystery of the Holocaust?"

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, Navasky continues, "one will not find them in a book whose power comes precisely from the fact that Levin sees the world from the cave of his preoccupations, call them what you will, and what he is describing are shadows on his wall." Nonetheless, Navasky goes on to ask a series of questions aimed at probing Levin's account of his victimization, and he concludes by expressing doubts about the existence of a conspiracy: "Not even the weighted evidence Levin has provided . . . convinces me that if the producers thought they could either make money or get strong notices that they would not have gone ahead with it." Nor, according to Navasky, does Levin (in spite of his superb discussion of the atmosphere of the McCarthy period) satisfactorily document his contention that Hellman opposed his play for ideological rather than dramaturgical reasons (3 February 1974, 5-6).

Navasky's review provoked many letters, two of which the Times Book Review printed: one from Levin, the other from Kermit Bloomgarden. Levin challenges Navasky on several points, notably the matter of documentation, repeating the account of his conversation with Francis Price in which Otto Frank is quoted as admitting he was told by the producer that the play could not be staged because it was too Jewish. Strongly protesting Navasky's efforts "to whitewash the Hellman contingent while expressing sympathy for my ordeal," Levin ends

by insisting that he wrote The Obsession , not because of the Anne Frank affair alone, but because it is "an amazing example of hidden censorship and may serve as a warning. All I ask is that it be read." In his letter Bloomgarden expresses gratitude to Navasky for seeing "through many of Mr. Levin's deceptions" but insists they are greater than the reviewer could possibly know. He offers his own account of the history of the rejection of Levin's play and goes on to call the writer's belief that there is a political plot against him "total, ugly nonsense. No politics were ever involved. Nor did any of us ever think of the play or ourselves as 'too Jewish' or not Jewish enough." At the close, Bloomgarden calls Levin's "obsession" a cloak for "vindictive falsehoods and old-fashioned red-baiting under a pious claim of noble motives," and he expresses shock that Simon and Schuster would publish a book whose contents they knew were based on a contractual violation and whose attacks "on innocent people they could have checked" (3 March 1974).

The severe hostility expressed here continued as long as all the parties to the controversy lived. In the last seven years of his life, Levin wrote two long novels, The Harvest (a 1978 sequel to The Settlers ) and The Architect (based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright and published just after Levin died in 1981); but he also kept up his protest activities to the very end. He urged friends to form a group called the Committee for Historical Honesty to raise money to help publicize his cause. He continued to petition various professional and Jewish organizations (PEN, ACLU, ADL, AJC, etc.). He spoke often with lawyers (including Leonard Schroeter, Edward Katz, Arnold Forster, and Shale D. Stiller) to find out whether he had any legal avenues to explore, mainly on the grounds that he was deceived

when he signed the settlement agreement in 1959. He tried also to gather testimony from members of his Committee of Three to confirm his belief that they had never met. Attorneys, however, told him that his having signed the settlement agreement in full consultation with his lawyer made going to court risky and most likely futile. Schroeter, a friend who admired Levin's courage and accomplishments, also reminded him of the emotional and fiscal costs of litigation. Shale Stiller advised him not to attack the 1959 assignment of rights but rather to try to persuade Paul, Weiss to allow his play to be done because participants in the quarrel were dead or old, and he was not looking for financial reward. Otto Frank died in 1980, but in the same year Levin raised the possibility of pursuing a class-action suit for the Jewish people's right to a faithful dramatic version of Anne Frank's book; and he continued to encourage community groups to request permission to put on his play as a test case. Most approaches to Frank's attorneys, however, were met by letters rehearsing the history and asserting that Levin's claims had no validity, that he violated written agreements, and that the present copyright situation was too complicated to think about granting production rights. To some inquirers, Paul, Weiss also wrote that Levin engaged in outrageously confrontational behavior and venomously accused Otto Frank and others of being anti-Semites, Communists, and literary murderers. On occasion, some of the attorneys also tried to convince Levin's supporters to be patient and wait a little longer. When the participants in the controversy were dead, they said, there was likely to be little opposition to the performance of the disputed play—an attempt at consolation that only further infuriated the writer.

In 1979 (the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Anne Frank and the year of revivals of the Goodrich and Hackett Diary ), Levin mounted his last major protest effort, circulating many hundreds of copies of "The Suppression of Anne Frank," a document he called an ethical will. He asked recipients to create a chain letter by sending it on to friends and associates. In 1980, after reading The Ghost Writer , Philip Roth's brilliant fantasy on the Anne Frank story, Levin told friends that he resisted such "intellectualized toying with the material," although he admitted that the basic invention of an Anne Frank alive in the Berkshires should be taken as the fictional Nathan Zuckerman's, not Roth's. In April of 1981, a few months before he died, he read about a current scandal involving an unearned Pulitzer Prize and wrote to Richard T. Baker, the administrator of the program, asking him to reconsider the 1956 award to Goodrich and Hackett. Baker answered that there was no likelihood whatsoever of any reconsideration of the award, since The Diary of Anne Frank was a legitimate entry of a very moving play. "Your quarrel," he told Levin, "is with the authors and producers, not with us" (28 April 1981, BU). In the last weeks of his life, Levin also wrote about the Pulitzer award to Martin Peretz at the New Republic , Benjamin Bradlee at the Washington Post , and other people in journalism and publishing.

In these efforts, Levin was met by occasional approval but mostly by silence, apathy, resistance, or at best sympathetic efforts to get him to give up what almost everyone else felt was by then a lost cause. From time to time, someone tried to support his crusade in print. In 1976, Benno Weiser Varon, a diplomat and journalist, created a stir with a long polemical

essay, "The Haunting of Meyer Levin" (Midstream , August-September, 7-23). Varon, who received most of his information and his basic interpretation of the case from Levin, denounced Lillian Hellman, the New York Marxist intellectual clique around Partisan Review , and the Epstein empire at the New York Review of Books for the neglect and denigration of Levin's major writings on Jewish life. The article generated a lot of mail both pro and con Levin, but it offered no new evidence or corroboration of its familiar claims. In August 1980, to celebrate Levin's upcoming seventy-fifth birthday, the Jewish Week-American Examiner ran an article by Philip Hochstein on the controversy, under the heading "De-Judaizing Holocaust Is Major Issue," and they reprinted "The Suppression of Anne Frank." Again, the details and the main thrust came from the accounts Levin had been offering for more than twenty years.

Levin's last protests and the efforts and articles supporting him had little appreciable effect on what he most wanted to accomplish: to get the prohibition lifted on his play and to convince people that there had been an outrage perpetrated on him and on the Jewish people. When he died in July 1981, most obituaries described his many accomplishments as a novelist and journalist over half-a-century and paid tribute to his passionate dedication to writing positively about Jewish life. Nearly every one mentioned the long, bitter conflict over the dramatization of Anne Frank's Diary , a battle he was considered to have lost.