The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, Ellen Feldman

Following the theme of Beth's most recent post, I recently finished a novel relating to Nazi Germany.

The story is told from the perspective of Peter van Pels, the young boy who hid with the Frank family during World War II. Anne wrote in her diary that Peter told her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself entirely. Though Peter actually died in Mauthausen, in this novel, Feldman explores the possibility that he did survive. What if Peter, having been separated from Otto Frank at the concentration camp, lived the three additional days until the camp was liberated by allied forces? What if, alone in the world, he emigrated to the United States, where bearing an "American" surname he was able to shed off all traces of his Jewishness and his life before? What would've happened to him when Otto released Anne's diary to the world?

Though I can't say that The Diary of Anne Frank was one of my favorites as a child, it certainly had an impact on me, and the premise of this book was enough to draw me in. I wasn't too terribly impressed with it as a whole, but there are some sections which are so poignant that they more than made up for the rough patches. It raises some interesting questions -- Was the Nazi persecution one felt by all Jews, or just those who actually lived through it? By essentially "canonizing" Anne Frank, are we in a sense doing her a disservice? Do we fail to understand that, at age 13, Anne's view, though genuine, may not necessarily have been accurate? (There's a great part of the novel that deals with the "stealing bread" incident in Anne's diary). How long should we keep something on the forefront of our consciousness? How long are we even capable of doing so?

This novel isn't really a tear-jerker (you learn early on in the novel that Peter finds success and even happiness in America), but it's also not really an uplifting story either. I do find that it's genuine though. And when you're dealing with something as awful, as ugly, as the horrors of Nazism, I think that that's perhaps the best we can ask for.