The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary

by Ralph Melnick

As one of the first American journalists to enter the newly liberated concentration camps in the closing days of the Holocaust, Meyer Levin wished the world to know of the horror he had found. Seizing upon Anne Franks Diary as a poignant voice to tell the tale, he helped to arrange for its American publication and secured from Anne’s father the right to adapt it for the theater. But Levin’s overtly "Jewish" treatment was rejected in favor of a play with a universal message, conceived by Lillian Hellman and others in her circle. Anne’s thoughts about her Jewishness were distorted, omitted, and reworded in this new version, and Levin was convinced that a conspiracy existed to delete the Jewish elements from the diary. He spent the rest of his life protesting this suppression of Anne’s legacy and fighting for the right to produce his own play. Now Ralph Melnick draws on material never used before—including papers of Lillian Hellman, Otto Frank, and other key players—and substantiates Levin’s claims.

Melnick unravels the story step by step, establishing the bias of the opposition to Levin. He also describes the wider cultural struggle of the 1950s of which this episode was only a small part. Documenting the conspiracy against Levin and, therefore, ultimately against Anne Frank’s work, he shows that something meaningful was at stake in this struggle over the "Jewishness" of the destruction of the Jews.

Genres: Holocaust, History

290 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 1997

Reviews

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many people have read Anne Frank's diary, but I would hazard a guess that comparatively few people are aware of the lawsuit surrounding the play that was based on it. Stolen Legacy was written in response to a book by Lawrence Graves that apparently portrayed the writer Meyer Levin as crazy and obsessed, and tries to debunk that version of history.

Levin seems to have written a lot of interesting things. It's his non-fiction writings that I'm mainly thinking of — if I can find them, I may post some of the more interesting quotes. (I'd like to see them in context first.) Levin seems to have been somewhat forgotten — of course, I would say the same thing about his second wife Tereska Torres, who was a member of the Free French Army in the second World War, and apparently only got more interesting from there. (Torres is credited with inadvertently creating lesbian pulp as a genre in America.)

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book discusses the contention surrounding presentations of Anne Frank's diary, utilising new material and a fresh perspective.