A woman's voice

...and the silences I remember

Why I began my memoir with a reference to Virginia Woolf in her garden is still not entirely clear to me. My choosing her quote had to do with her referring in a happy way to her husband, which fit with my marriage theme, and I think I came upon the quote when I was thinking about starting to write, but surely I could have found other women writers who talked eloquently about gardening and marriage. Why Virginia Woolf? Why her voice? Her words, I think, just seemed apt in the way that only Virginia Woolf’s words can sound apt.

But my second mentioning of a woman writer is not puzzling to me at all.

It was Anne Frank, and on page 31, my reference starts as follows:

“When did Anne Frank enter my life? When did I begin to feel that she had inserted herself into my life narrative in a way that I could not ignore? It was some time after I came to know that she, being Jewish, and my father being Jewish, we surely shared many Ashkenazi genes. It was when the children were still young and my father’s cover was blown. When my sister Mary began dating a Jewish medical student.”

Since I began writing my memoir more than a decade ago, I was maybe a little ahead of the curve in wanting to weave the person of Anne Frank as a writer into my work. More recently, several books, exhibitions, plays and musicals have been written about Anne Frank. I knew I had heard of them in passing, and checked with ChatGPT to see what it could offer. The analysis it provided was fascinating in the way it connected some of the work, especially The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin (2025) to my own efforts to remember her as a writer. Another book was also mentioned: When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffmann (2024). There is also a traveling exhibition, which includes a reproduction of her room in Amsterdam, and a Dutch production called Anne and a controversial hip-hop satire called Slam Frank.

What makes Anne Frank so “of the moment”? Perhaps her life feels sadly contemporary, given how much suffering there is in the world now, and much of it so easily accessible to our awareness?

For me, the interest is more personal and has to do with the silences in my family — the not saying, the not seeing, the not hearing, the not speaking — that formed an important part of my childhood gestalt. Perhaps because my own Jewish history was completely lost to me — my father’s life in a Jewish family was never mentioned and, growing up, we did not know any of our many Jewish relatives, including my grandparents — I became interested in Anne’s lost life. Not the life she lived and wrote about, but the life she did not get to live. The concentration camp where she did not have her writing materials. (That seems like suffering beyond belief to me, but the world is so lucky that her notebook was left behind.) The extraordinary body of literature she did not get an opportunity to write — books, plays, essays, magazine features in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New Yorker.The prizes she did not get to win. The husband she never had. Would it have been her boyfriend, Peter? The children and grandchildren she did not get to adore. Her life in America. I imagined her coming to the U.S., living in Connecticut, being a part of the New York publishing world.

At the moment this will appear, I will be in Frankfurt, Germany, where I have been many times (my son and his family live there) and will be attending my grandson’s high school graduation. Anne once lived in Frankfurt and her mother had roots going back generations there.

Most people associate Anne Frank more with Amsterdam, where her father had thought they would be safer. They would have come to the U.S. if they could have, but their timing was not good, and all their efforts failed. Perhaps Anne Frank’s current popularity also has to do with the issue of immigration and how so many lives are being affected by what might be thought of as poor timing even now.

There is some discontinuity, it seems, in my associating Anne Frank with the silences in my early life, given that her enduring meaningfulness to so many people around the world has to do with her voice, the voice she found so early in her life. I will be listening for it…

More to come upon my return…