The Diary of a Young Girl in 2015 Reading Challenge [Closed]

Oct 14, 2017 Stacey D. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Sassy. Angry. Honest. Smart beyond her years. Filled with wisdom beyond the times. A budding teen with passionate likes (Pim, her cats, royal history, Greek and Roman mythology) and dislikes (her mother, Mrs. van Dann, politics, the war) I found my re-reading of Anne Frank's diary, 75 years after she wrote it, eye-opening and startling.

After having raised a teen, I understand. Anne's insights about her young life, including her unspeakably brief adolescence lived under a microscope -- her sexua Sassy. Angry. Honest. Smart beyond her years. Filled with wisdom beyond the times. A budding teen with passionate likes (Pim, her cats, royal history, Greek and Roman mythology) and dislikes (her mother, Mrs. van Dann, politics, the war) I found my re-reading of Anne Frank's diary, 75 years after she wrote it, eye-opening and startling.

After having raised a teen, I understand. Anne's insights about her young life, including her unspeakably brief adolescence lived under a microscope -- her sexuality, her brutally hurtful, yet honest, beliefs about her parents, sister and the other four disagreeable strangers around her whom she was forced to live with in the Secret Annex for over two years (!) truly riveting and revolting. All of it is really no different than the teen angst experienced by teens of every generation about their families and those around them, as they explore the first stirrings of adulthood and independence.

Imagine being 13 and deprived of food, light and fresh air (amongst many other forbidden creature comforts everyone takes for granted) and held prisoner in a few rooms, where you cannot even see the light of day, let alone go outside. For over two years. You have no privacy, must whisper to speak, can't use the toilet nor have a proper bath, and are forced to share a room with a 54-year-old man, who is both vexatious and snores to high heaven. Smelly. Stuffy. Sheer fucking hell. And what's worse, continuously living under the threat of being discovered and arrested (and worse) by the Nazis. It could have been anyone anywhere during those times. You. Me. And what's truly frightening, is that could happen again. Today.

The version I read, updated to include previously controversial diary entries, was split into three parts, which really emphasized Anne's metamorphosis into a highly self-aware woman. In 1942 when her family first goes into hiding, Anne is 13 and optimistic, feisty, self-centered, yet yearning for the war to end so she can get back to school and rejoin her peers. The second part of the diary which takes place over 1943, we find a more depressed, yet a more sensitive Anne. She talks more about the dark side of life and takes valerian drops to help battle her sadness. When she loses a treasured pen in the Secret Annex, she hopes for its' cremation, adding ominously, "just as I would like to be someday".

In the final segment of her diary, Anne falls in love with Peter van Daan, which turns out to be a rather ambivalent love. She astutely realizes that he's not really right for her, but is right for right now. Whether out of sheer loneliness or perhaps, instinctively knowing this would be her last and only chance to experience romantic love while on this earth, is really not the point. Their relationship is chaste and lovely and through Peter's limited, but clinical knowledge, she learns about male sexuality. She also talks about female genitalia and her own burgeoning sexuality - something she could never do with neither her parents nor any other adults. On a side note, when I learned that some undereducated, intolerant mothers of adolescents had asked that the book be banned in their US school district as recently as 2013 because of the "explicit sexual nature" of some of its contents, I was incensed. But really, what should I expect? That is part of the rampant hypocrisy that currently rules our country in this so-called white, Christian valued, male-dominated view of everything. Female sexuality. Jews. The Holocaust. Feminism. Hmm. I wonder what these people really want to shut down here.

"I want to go on living even after my death!", she emphatically pleas in April 1944, speaking about her writing and her life's aspirations. This sent shudders down my spine. How could she have known.

It is sad and unfortunate and everything else that's wrong with this world that this brilliant talent, this beautiful spirit who might have been a wonderful writer and who might have gone on to do incredible things was a life cut short so early on. Who knows what gifts she could have brought to the world? What great things might she have done with her life?

As I neared the end of Anne's diary, one of my all-time favorite quotes touched my heart yet again. "It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."

Anne's story is so tragic, so haunting, yet so uplifting to the indominable spirit. It makes you want to go on and be a better person. Even throughout her confinement, she continues to better herself through education, learning more about the world, sharing her insightfully sensitive personal philosophies on feminism, on being a Jew, on being a person in the world. It is something to never forget.

We must never forget. ...more

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