Language:
English
Year of publication:
2001
Titel der Quelle:
Representations
Angaben zur Quelle:
76 (2001) 88-119
Keywords:
Roth, Philip.
;
Frank, Anne,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
Abstract:
Treats Philip Roth's novel "The Ghost Writer" (1979) as a parody of the 1950s cultural memory of Anne Frank and her diary as a "sacred book" in the popular American perception of the Holocaust. Roth targets the kitsch interpretations of the Broadway dramatization of the diary by Goodrich and Hackett, and the Hollywood film based on it. The falsification implicit in parody emphasizes the way cultural memory falsifies history and makes it extremely difficult to retrieve a historical Anne Frank apart from her image as created in the postwar period. At that time, Americans, including Jews, were basically more interested in hope than in tragedy, and in universalism rather than Jewish specificity, and were satisfied to see Anne Frank as an innocent rather than a representative of her people who died in a concentration camp. Anne's character in the novel survived the Holocaust and emigrated to America.
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