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A review by noah_hurts
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
5.0
It's a weird time to be reading Anne Frank's diary.
Not least because I never read it as a kid in school despite reading The Devil's Arithmetic and Night. Not least because I've only recently started to give proper recognition to the Jewish identity from my father's side of the family that was largely ignored when I was younger (I baked my first challah this weekend and I'm very proud of myself). There was a white supremacist rally in the town I'm going to school in this weekend on Holocaust memorial day. It's a weird time to be reading Anne Frank's diary, full stop.
There's nothing that I can say about this that hasn't been said before, more elegantly and possibly by Eleanor Roosevelt. Anne was a writer well beyond her years. Over the course of her diary you get equal parts human proclamations of feelings, the evolution and aging of a teenage girl, and the mental hell that victims of the Holocaust were put through because of bigotry and hatred. There are very few books I've read that have even had the capacity to touch me the way this did, and it certainly left its mark. It's kind of astounding and a little disappointing that this wasn't required reading for me in school. I will also admit to being a little disappointed that I only figured out when I was half way through this that a longer unabridged version also exists, but having only paid a dollar for this version, whaddaya gonna do.
To everyone that didn't read this as a kid, or even to those that did, this ought to be required reading. It's a really odd time to be someone of Jewish descent in the United States (or anywhere, really) right now. I won't act as if its tantamount to the hatred that muslims and others have thrown at them on a daily basis in the US, nor will I act as if I have personally ever been the subject of any of it, but this book serves as a reminder that everything has consequences. Hatred has consequences. Standing idly by has consequences. There are passages of this diary that read almost uncomfortably presciently, as if in her desperation to live and see beyond her four walls Anne aged ten years and saw deep into the hearts of the people she lived with. She wanted to be remembered for her writing, and I'm just doing my part in making sure that her dream comes true.
"Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy? I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind w ill have to begin all over again."
Not least because I never read it as a kid in school despite reading The Devil's Arithmetic and Night. Not least because I've only recently started to give proper recognition to the Jewish identity from my father's side of the family that was largely ignored when I was younger (I baked my first challah this weekend and I'm very proud of myself). There was a white supremacist rally in the town I'm going to school in this weekend on Holocaust memorial day. It's a weird time to be reading Anne Frank's diary, full stop.
There's nothing that I can say about this that hasn't been said before, more elegantly and possibly by Eleanor Roosevelt. Anne was a writer well beyond her years. Over the course of her diary you get equal parts human proclamations of feelings, the evolution and aging of a teenage girl, and the mental hell that victims of the Holocaust were put through because of bigotry and hatred. There are very few books I've read that have even had the capacity to touch me the way this did, and it certainly left its mark. It's kind of astounding and a little disappointing that this wasn't required reading for me in school. I will also admit to being a little disappointed that I only figured out when I was half way through this that a longer unabridged version also exists, but having only paid a dollar for this version, whaddaya gonna do.
To everyone that didn't read this as a kid, or even to those that did, this ought to be required reading. It's a really odd time to be someone of Jewish descent in the United States (or anywhere, really) right now. I won't act as if its tantamount to the hatred that muslims and others have thrown at them on a daily basis in the US, nor will I act as if I have personally ever been the subject of any of it, but this book serves as a reminder that everything has consequences. Hatred has consequences. Standing idly by has consequences. There are passages of this diary that read almost uncomfortably presciently, as if in her desperation to live and see beyond her four walls Anne aged ten years and saw deep into the hearts of the people she lived with. She wanted to be remembered for her writing, and I'm just doing my part in making sure that her dream comes true.
"Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy? I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind w ill have to begin all over again."