Harper, 2009
Recently, I met Poonam Ahluwalia, founder of the Youth Employment Summit (YES), an organization that believes young people can help eradicate poverty.
I asked her, “How does this work?”
Ahluwalia responded, “Why don’t you see for yourself?”
I headed to the Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, to meet youth leaders who partner with government officials to create jobs. For the long plane ride, I took Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.
Frank’s diary is one of the most important journals of our time. Yet this young writer’s talent remains unacknowledged. Is it because she was young and adults can’t believe she could deliver such work? This new biography examines the development of Frank’s writing during the two years she remained hidden in the secret annex with her family.
During the spring of 1944, as the war’s end neared, Frank heard, on the radio, the Dutch minister call for journals written during the war. Thus, she began rewriting her diary to prepare for possible publication. In these revisions, Prose finds the character of the Frank’s family grows richer. Her sister Margot is “darling,” but “lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep conversations.” The descriptions of terrifying moments, such as a fear of being discovered after a noise on the steps, are drawn in greater detail. In Frank’s revisions we see that she writes more for the reader.
While the thirteen-year-old Frank may have started writing her diary to combat isolation, loneliness, and despair, the more she writes, the more perspective she gives to human imperfection, including her own. She fights increasingly for more time to sit at her desk and shows clear markings of an emerging writer.
Prose advances a more truthful perception of Frank—the writer—through her revisions. This should be enough for one biography, but there is more. Prose transforms this biography into an excellent instructional guide for memoirists.
In Egypt, I was surrounded by talented youth leaders engaging other youth in building a sustainable future. The power in resiliency shines through their actions, as Prose observes, “in the latest place where children are the victims of their elders.” On the plane ride home, it occurred to me, there is so much more I have to learn about youth and their perseverance.
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J. Luise is the founding partner of Wiv, Inc, a company that strengthens the creative thinking processes in work teams. She earned an MFA at Goucher College in Creative Nonfiction Writing and she teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.