Hello.
Summer of ‘23 is history. Leaves are falling. And you chose ‘books’ as the blog subjects you’d like to see.
Fine with me.
From the day I grasped that letters went together to make words, I was ready set go! with books. They took me everywhere I could imagine, in the company of people I made as real to me as any in my school, my church, or my house. Books were constant companions, therapeutic escape hatches, sources of knowledge and insight I was grateful to have - and sometimes wished I didn’t.
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK wasn’t the first book I ever read. I’d been doing that since I was six.
I borrowed a copy the week after my 10th birthday, when the “big gift” was a pink leather diary. Gilt letters on the cover identified it as “My Dear Diary.” It sported a pink leather tab ending in one half of a shiny brass lock just waiting for me to clasp it, before I turned the little brass key on its red ribbon to lock it.
One hundred and eleven volumes later, advancing carpal tunnel keeps entries less than daily, but lifetime habits die hard.
Anne Frank died young. Her story, told in her actual words, changed the way I viewed life. And death, too.
Her end had nothing at all in common with the heaven I was learning about in my church and its school. Discovered by the Gestapo after two years spent in hiding from with seven others, in a cramped attic over a warehouse, Anne died at 15, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in March of 1945.
She wrote the last lines in her diary the year before, on the first of August: “Little bundle of contradictions…the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and I keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world.”
I could and did accept the idea that the survival and subsequent history of her red and white gingham-covered diary was miraculous. Her failure to survive along with it was what turned me upside down and inside out.
I spent some time today with a 1967 edition of the diary first copyrighted by her sole-survivor father in 1952. The reading reinforced my belief Anne was a born writer - and knew she was. Astute observation and skillful scene-setting, every entry rich with description and detail - Anne Frank captured feelings, hidden and not so, her own and others, with an immediacy and honesty that transforms ordinary to unforgettable.
For decades, I began my entries with “Dear Anne.” It was impossible not to.
Closing question: If you’ve read the diary, what do you remember most about it?
Signing off…