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2 months ago | 
thehalfmarathoner.com | Terrell Johnson |Ruth Franklin
Lately, I’ve been reading an incredibly moving, thought-provoking new book by THM reader titled The Many Lives of Anne Frank, which tells the story of how the now-legendary diary she wrote while in hiding with her family in Amsterdam came to be, and its impact on the world ever since.
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2 months ago | 
lithub.com | Ruth Franklin
As a biographer, I try to use every means possible to see the world through my subject’s eyes. While writing Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, I read the books that were important to Jackson, listened to the music she liked, and purchased a vintage bottle of her favorite perfume. I even tried cooking some of her recipes, although my family was less than enthusiastic about her famous meatballs containing Italian dressing and pickle juice.
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2 months ago | 
forward.com | Ruth Franklin |Julia M. Klein
The Many Lives of Anne Frank By Ruth Franklin Yale University Press, 440 pages, $30The title of Ruth Franklin's The Many Lives of Anne Frank exudes a tragic and no doubt purposeful irony. A melding of biography, literary exegesis and cultural history, this volume in the Yale University Press's excellent Jewish Lives series ably chronicles the outsized impact of a girl who, as virtually the entire world knows, didn't survive into adulthood. The facts of Anne Frank's life are mostly familiar.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
hadassahmagazine.org | Ruth Franklin
Email Print More than any other work of literature, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl helped the world comprehend the tragedy of the Holocaust. But in recent years, Anne’s name seems to be invoked more often in reference to forms of prejudice other than antisemitism. “Anne Frank today is a Syrian girl,” a New York Times columnist wrote during the refugee crisis of 2016.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
jewishbookcouncil.org | Ruth Franklin
Skip to main content Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is the longest-running organization devoted exclusively to the support and celebration of Jewish literature. Get the latest reviews, news, and more in your inbox. Passport photographs of Anne Frank, 1939 A few years ago, Deutsche Bahn, the German national railroad, announced a new fleet of high-speed trains.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
jewishbookcouncil.org | Ruth Franklin
Skip to main content Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is the longest-running organization devoted exclusively to the support and celebration of Jewish literature. Get the latest reviews, news, and more in your inbox. This piece is part of our Witnessing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
harpers.org | Ruth Franklin |Yale Press
Discussed in this essay:Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $32. In 2001, the biographer Jean Strouse happened upon an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent that featured twelve portraits of the Wertheimers, a British family of German-Jewish descent.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Ruth Franklin
On September 18, 1946, ten tin boxes were discovered underneath the rubble of what had been the Warsaw Ghetto. They contained an extraordinary artifact of the Holocaust: a major portion of a grassroots archive documenting the persecution of Warsaw’s Jews.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
ruthfranklin.substack.com | Ruth Franklin
The voice on the phone was my father’s, but I had never heard him sound like this. “I need you to come over right away,” he said. “Your stepmother is leaving me for another man.”It was a scorching morning in July. I had been on my way to the pool to cool off my toddler and my heavily pregnant self. Instead, I left my child with my husband and the friends we had planned to spend the day with, hastily explaining what little I knew of the situation.
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May 5, 2024 | 
ruthfranklin.substack.com | Ruth Franklin
“If Anne Frank was a teenager today, would she be waving a Palestinian flag?” an acquaintance recently asked me. The question isn’t as counterintuitive as it might seem. When Anne’s diary was first published in the United States in 1952, Otto Frank, her father, advocated for its message to be understood in the broadest sense possible—not just as a story about the persecution of Jews, but as a cautionary tale about the consequences of persecution for anyone, anywhere.
