“WHEN WE FLEW AWAY/ ANNE FRANK BEFORE THE DIARY,” BY ALICE HOFFMAN

Ms. Hoffman is a prolific and wonderful novelist. I have read about twenty of her books and except for one everyone was exceptionally good and a few, such as “The Dovekeepers” and “The World That We Knew,” were simply great.

“When WE Flew Away/ A Novel of Anne Frank Before The Diary,” I would add, without hesitantly, to the simply great list. It is a fictional/ historical novel about the previous 3 years, when the Frank family was living in the Netherlands after escaping from Germany, before they were forced to go into hiding after the Germans had conquered the Netherlands and as part of “The Final Solution,” killed 75 percent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands.

The novel gives us a more complete picture of Anne between the ages of eleven and thirteen, and of her older sister, Margot, her father, mother, and grandmother.

Anne is portrayed as an active, curious, and intelligent young girl who loves to read, especially fairytales and as she reaches the age of thirteen she starts to think about love and intimacy

Throughout the book, the idea of “Remember us and Remember me,” is continually mentioned as her grandmother reminds her throughout the novel the one way to be always remembered is by writing…they can take everything from you except the written word.

Hemingway once famously wrote, “That the only thing a person takes with them when they die is what they left behind,” and in the case of Anne Frank she left behind a diary as important a piece of writing as the most famous novels, poems, short stories, etc.

Anne and her sister Margot were two of the millions of young Jewish children killed by the Nazis. Like so many other children, the promise of a full and promising life was cut short by a brutal and unforgiving regime whose soldiers showed no mercy and whose consciences were devoid of any morals.

Just recently Elon Musk, just before Holocaust Remembrance Day, told a group of far right Germans that they should get over “past guilt.”

Thanks to Anne Frank that is going to be a lot harder to do than the so-called genius thinks.

Yet the rise of anti-semitism in the United States and many other countries is unbelievably disturbing. It amazes me how the Jewish population of the world, that totals 0.002 percent of the entire population, could be responsible for so many dastardly crimes. And what is even more disturbing is that this hatred comes in no small part from Catholics and the tens of thousands of Christian Protestant denominations. You would think by now that they would have figured out that Jesus was Jewish.

Ms. Hoffman’s novel is a perfect compliment to the actual diary. Yes, the novel is fictional but it is so, so real in the depiction of a young, promising life robbed of its full potential.