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to Bergen-Belsen, where she died miserably of typhus and malnutrition, would have led her to regret writing the single sentimental line by which she is most remembered, even by admirers who have never read the diary.” Cynthia Ozick, writing in The New Yorker a decade later, was so critical of the “funny, hopeful, happy” Anne created by the stage play—and by the elimination of almost all Jewish references in favor of “universal” ones—that she suggested it might have been better for the diary to have been burned. Among other things, she noted, the “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced … infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” diary gave aid and comfort to the Germans by softening the story and avoiding any reference to the Holocaust—a view that had been earlier expressed by Bruno Bettelheim in the pages of Harper’s.40 In the classroom, according to recent pedagogical studies, this has been somewhat borne out, as eighth-graders have tended to read the diary as “hopeful,” even a tale of adolescent romance, resisting the unwelcome information about the family’s fate and Anne’s death at Bergen-Belsen. At least one student said that piece of knowledge had contributed to “ruining” the story.41

This complicated, imbricated, and passionate set of histories surrounding the diary of Anne Frank poses an especially interesting problem for the overarching question about what is, or isn’t, literature. Many of those most perturbed by the softening of the story and the omission of specific mentions of Jewish identity and the Holocaust are writing from the perspective of historical accuracy and responsibility. Meyer Levin felt personally aggrieved, not only as an author but as a Jew; Bettelheim deplored the effect the altered diary had on readers, especially children, who were led to think that Anne survived the war. Ozick felt strongly that sentimental versions erased both death and Jewishness.

Audiences and readers, whether they are self-exculpating midcentury Germans, as in Adorno’s anecdote, or twenty-first-century schoolchildren, respond to the dramatic, streamlined, “universalized” arc of a narrative culled from the work of the young girl Levin called a born writer—a story shaped (or “distorted”) for the times, the book market, and the magnified focus of stage and screen. Those who praise the text do so on grounds they often call explicitly “literary”42—as Meyer Levin did in that first review in The New York Times. And Ozick’s litany of things the diary had become were all, starting with “bowdlerized,” descriptions of editorial, aesthetic, and commercial interventions.43

Whether Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl or any of its spinoffs (the Broadway play, the Hollywood film) is literature may not be quite the right question.44 When considered in a literary context, it has generated a certain set of responses: the diary is sometimes dismissed or critiqued as naive or sentimental, sometimes lauded as universal and profound. Viewed as cultural history or as historical record, the “same” diary has produced both anger and sorrow, together with a desire, personal and professional, to correct the record, or at least to tell the rest of the story—the part deemed missing from the text as it has been read (or underread) for literary purposes. The frame, the context, will determine how the text is read, assessed, regarded, appropriated, and understood.

What is to be said, then, about the diary of a young girl, preserved against the odds while its author and her family perished? Without the translations into play and film, would the diary, however edited, have attained legendary status? If the process of universalization had not involved, as so many critics complained, the eclipse or erasure of both the specifically Jewish and the catastrophically genocidal frames of the story, would there still have been resistance to the process of making Anne Frank into a timeless and universal heroine?

Words like timeless and universal are always