New York Times: The Singular Tragedy of Anne Frank
Since Anne’s name and image are still so often invoked, we might think that means her story remains unforgotten. But in fact the opposite is true: The more she becomes a generic symbol of all historical tragedy, the less we remember who she was and what happened to her.
Harpers: A Sudden, Revealing Searchlight
On Jean Strouse and the art of biography.
New York Times: This Novel for Young Readers Imagines Anne Frank Before Her Diary
“When We Flew Away” envisions what Anne might have been like before the cataclysm that shut her away and made her into “the voice of the Holocaust.”
The New York Review: Writing Out of Annihilation
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.
The New Yorker: How Queer Is “Frankenstein”?
Re-imagining Mary Shelley’s life and loves alongside her most famous creation.
The New York Review: The Millions We Failed to Save
The recent documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust is a scathing, even bombastic indictment of US immigration policy over the past 160 years.
The New York Review: Beyond the Betrayal
Why are we so eager to assign a single person blame for revealing the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family?
The New Yorker: Literature’s Most Controversial Nobel Laureate
Peter Handke’s defenders argue that his views on Serbia are extraneous to his literary achievement, but a close reading of his output suggests otherwise. ** note also there’s a missing space
The New York Review: ‘The Lucky Ones’
Several groundbreaking new books chronicle the fate of the quarter-million or so Polish Jews who evaded Hitler only to wind up in the hands of Stalin.