Nowhere Ho!

My review of Shalom Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, is up at the Rumpus.

On July 18, 1945, after his return to Amsterdam from Auschwitz, Otto Frank received an answer to his newspaper advertisement from two sisters who had seen his daughters die in Bergen-Belsen. The grief-stricken Otto couldn’t even inform his family for three days. However, he did recover his second daughter’s notebook, and as he read it he was astonished by “the depths of her thoughts and feelings,” in particular how she “had occupied her mind with the problem of Jewish suffering over the centuries.” In 1947, he excerpted the writing for publication, and the result, The Diary of a Young Girl, came to exemplify the Holocaust’s cruelty, and gave a human face to the tragedy of six million murdered people. The book has appeared in 60 languages and sold over 32 million copies. As the decades passed, the diary became standard reading for schoolchildren, and, like all successful and long-lived books, became a cliché.