Review of the Diary of a Young Girl

abril 16, 2022 Postar um comentário

June 15, 1952: 'The Diary of a Young Girl' by Anne Frank

ANNE FRANK'S diary is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label ''classic,'' and however no lesser designation serves. For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, grade the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over from insight and enjoyment.

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The diary is a classic on some other level, too. It happened that during the ii years that marker the virtually extraordinary changes in a girl's life, Anne Frank lived in amazing circumstances: she was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms behind her begetter's place of business organization in Amsterdam. Thus, the diary tells the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of existence taken by the Nazis. It is, in reality, the kind of document that John Hersey invented for ''The Wall.''

At that place is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors. Reality can prove surprisingly different from invented reality, and Anne Frank'due south diary just bubbles with amusement, love, discovery. It has its share of disgust, its moments of hatred, only it is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature. These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human being character and growth, anywhere.

Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment -- Anne Frank'south phonation becomes the voice of half-dozen million vanished Jewish souls. It is hard to say in which respect the volume is more ''important,'' just i forgets the double significance of this document in experiencing it as an intimate whole, for one feels the presence of this kid-becoming-woman as warmly as though she was snuggled on a most-by sofa.

Her father had already brought the family out of Germany in 1933. In June, 1942, a few weeks after the diary begins, the SS sends a phone call-up for Anne's sis, Margot, and the family unit goes into hiding. ''I began to pack some of our most vital property into a school satchel . . . this diary, and so pilus curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a rummage, old letters.'' The Van Daans, with their 16-twelvemonth-old son Peter, join the Franks. Later, because ''Daddy says we must save another person if we can,'' an elderly dentist named Dussel is squeezed into the Secret Annex. He gets Anne's bed; she sleeps on a settee lengthened past chairs.

A built-in writer, Anne zestfully portrays the Annex inhabitants, with all their flaws and virtues. The common life outcome which Mr. Hersey sought to propose in ''The Wall'' here flowers with utter spontaneity. Only Anne Frank'southward diary probes far deeper than ''The Wall'' into the core of homo relations, and succeeds improve than ''The Wall'' in bringing u.s.a. an understanding of life under threat.

And this quality brings it home to whatever family in the earth today. Just every bit the Franks lived in momentary fear of the Gestapo's knock on their hidden door, so every family today lives in fear of the knock of war. Anne's diary is a great affirmative respond to the life-question of today, for she shows how ordinary people, within this ordeal, consistently hold to the greater human values.

Two years passed in disciplined activities. The subconscious ones kept decorated with smuggled correspondence courses in speed autograph, in Latin, in nursing; Dussel fifty-fifty attempted dental operations, hilariously described by Anne. She herself studied mythology, ballet, ''family trees,'' while keeping up her schoolwork. She records the family unit disputes -- Mrs. Van Daan violently resisting the sale of her fur coat, only to see it smoked up in blackness market tobacco! And the comic moments, equally when her father lies on the floor trying to overhear an important business concern briefing downstairs; Anne flattens herself beside him, lending a abrupt ear. But business is so tedious, she falls asleep.

Nigh wondrous of all is her love affair. Similar a flower nether a stone fulfilling itself, she came to her get-go honey in her allotted fourth dimension. ''I requite myself completely. But one affair, He may touch on my face up, but no more.'' All is told, from her potato-fetching devices for going up to Peter'southward attic lair, to the first misplaced kiss, on her ear. And the parents worrying well-nigh the youngsters trysting up at that place in the sunset, sitting by the window over the canal. And her fears that her older sis is lone and jealous, leading to an amazing exchanges of letters betwixt the two girls, in those subconscious rooms. Finally, at that place is even the tender disillusionment with Peter, as Anne reaches toward maturity, and a character understanding replaces the showtime tug of dear. In all this there are perceptions in depth, striving toward mother, father, sister, containing love-anguish of the purest universality.

It is this unfolding psychological drama of a girl'south growth, mingled with the concrete danger of the group, that frees Anne'south book from the horizontal effect of virtually diaries. Hers rises continuously, with the tension of a well-synthetic novel.

The girl's terminal entries rather miraculously contain a climactic summation, a maturing self-analysis: ''If I'yard quite serious, everyone thinks it's a comedy, then I have to go out of it past turning into a joke,'' she remarks with typical adolescent self-consciousness. ''Finally, I twist my eye around again, so that the bad is on the exterior and the skilful is on the inside. . . . I am guided past the pure Anne within, but outside I'm nix just a frolicsome picayune caprine animal who'south cleaved loose.''

This frolicsome little caprine animal could write, ''It's twice as hard for us immature ones to hold our ground, and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ethics are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side, and practice non know whether to believe in truth and right and God.

''It's really a wonder that I oasis't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to acquit out. Yet I go on them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are actually good at heart. I merely can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of defoliation, misery, and expiry. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-budgeted thunder, which will destroy usa also, I can feel the sufferings of millions and all the same, if I expect upwards into the heavens, I think that it volition all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. . . .

''I want to continue living fifty-fifty after my decease,'' Anne wrote. ''I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.'' Hers was probably 1 of the bodies seen in the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, for in Baronial, 1944, the knock came on that subconscious door in Amsterdam. After the people had been taken abroad, Dutch friends found Anne'southward diary in the debris, and saved it.

In that location is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. Only through her diary Anne goes on living. From Kingdom of the netherlands to French republic, to Italy, Spain. The Germans too have published her book. And now she comes to America. Surely she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young daughter brings back a poignant please in the infinite human spirit.