I was ten years old when I saw the play
The Diary of Anne Frank on television. My mother explained beforehand that Anne had hidden from the Nazis with her family, but was discovered and sent to a concentration camp. I could tell by the way she said this that this was a sinister thing, but wondered what could be so dreadful about a camp where they made you think hard.
The play must have made a deep impression because for Christmas, my father gave me a copy of
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girland my mother gave my very first diary. Anne wrote her entries as personal letters addressed to "Dear Kitti"; I decided to address my diary to "Aurora", because when I was ten, I thought that was the most beautiful name in the world.
This past October, during our visit to Halifax to see elder daughter at her university, we dropped into the bookstore while waiting for her to emerge from her morning class. I saw
Anne Frank: the book, the life, the aftermath on the shelf and leafed through it, thinking:
Oh dear, yet another book about Anne Frank. (I've read a good portion of them.) I bought it, of course.
The book is not so much a series of chapters as a collection of essays. The earlier essays are concerned with Anne's place in history: her stature as a writer(was she an ordinary girl living under extraordinary circumstances, or an extraordinary girl living in increasingly unbearable times?); an examination of what actually happened before and after the Frank family's period of hiding, and how new revelations about the diary still receive heavy media attention. Later chapters examine the diary as a literary work, the initial struggle to publish it, and how it was edited -- surprisingly, largely by Anne herself, who planned to submit it for publication after the war. The book continues and concludes with the fierce feud over the dramatization, how the diary figures in Holocaust-denial literature, the outreach work of both the
Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, Switzerland and the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam, and the varying degrees of success with which the diary is studied in American schools.
Here's the thing: I resisted this book initially because I thought:
What more could I possibly learn? I had the same reaction before watching the documentary
Shoah. The answer was the same: when you're dealing with an enormity -- and genocide has to be the best example of enormity there is -- it's impossible to learn it all. For one thing, your brain tends to shut off in the face of the horror. Anne Frank and her diary are sort of an entry, providing something that is imaginable as a link (if we dare to look further) into the unimaginable.
Things I didn't know before reading this book:
1) Holland was second only to Poland in the percentage of its Jewish population slaughtered (more than three quarters), due in part to the accuracy and efficiency of Dutch records.
2) Not all of the entries in Anne's diary are addressed to the imaginary "Kitti"; this was a device Anne herself came up with as she re-wrote and edited much of her diary in preparation for eventual publication.
3) There are three versions of the diary: the "a" version is the original; the "b" version are Anne's revisions, and the "c" version is the one most of us have read, that which Otto Frank, Anne's father and the sole survivor, put together from versions "a" and "b".
4) The strange, strange story of the creation of the Broadway play and the bitter fights surrounding it.
Francine Prose is very critical of the play and even more critical of the 1959 film starring Millie Perkins. She acknowledges, though, that both brought more readers to the diary and for many, like me, a first introduction to the Holocaust.
I must admit, I have never cared for the film either. There have been some recent interpretations of the Anne Frank story on television that begin to do some justice to the story. For one thing, Anne's caustic views of the Van Daans,whose real names were Hermann and August Van Pels, and Dussel the dentist who was actually Eric Pfeffer, may not have been that fair. Certainly there are those who remembered and loved them who object to their portrayal, particularly in the play and the movie. Prose doesn't mention recent productions such as
The Attic (a rather good 1986 mini-series based on the memories of Miep Gies, one of the refugees' faithful supporters),
The Diary of Anne Frank (an English 2009 interpretation that clearly tries to portray the protagonists as they were, rather just how Anne depicted them), and my personal favourite
Anne Frank, from 2001 which tells the story from well before the family's retreat into hiding, then takes us unflinchingly to the transit camp at Westerbork, to Auschwitz, and to Bergen-Belsen where Anne finally died, mere weeks before the liberation of the camp.
Is it possible to enjoy a book that touches on the Holocaust? Perhaps not. However, this book is a palatable experience without being cloying or sentimental, and it is certainly fascinating reading.
...but I can't have em...
So I'd noticed there was a Tuesday matinée for nativity at the National Arts Centre this week, and the Resident Fan and I took gross advantage of younger daughter's student status and between that and my subscription discount, got three tickets for the price of one. In the front row.
With the enraged Herod sprawled dead beside the banquet table, we were back into the spirit slapstick and pantomime with the "Coyote Christmas, which I suspect was a separate play at some point. Three starving coyotes invaded the audience, looking for something to chomp. They debated over the five-year-old sitting next to the Resident Fan Boy (a modern kid who didn't seem the least bit frightened by the prospect of being eaten by coyotes), before figuring out the audience was comprised of humans and not sheep. So, as you can imagine, when the angel told them about the Lamb of God, they got the completely wrong idea. In the mayhem that followed, younger daughter, the RFB and I had to keep pulling our feet in to avoid tripping up the Holy Family in hot pursuit of three coyotes tossing Baby Jesus like a football.
I'm battling with my inner bitch today. This afternoon was the last of the online chats that form a part of the online course I've been taking in genealogy this month. There were four chats, one at the end of each week.
I don't like either show. They're talking a million miles a minute, overlapping each other, about things that usually hold little interest for me, unfortunately exactly like this month's chats.
When I attend the monthly meeting of the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa, I make my way into Library and Archives Canada on Wellington street by skirting around Lea Vivot's Secret Bench. It's meant to have a whiff of the Garden of Eden to it, but in the wintertime, it smacks more of The Little Match Girl. I gather there are copies of this bench all over the world: in Montréal, in Prague, in Florida. I wonder if I'm the only one to resist the urge to bring mittens and boots for this young pair (well, maybe not in Florida), who seem decidedly less carefree when the temperature dips below zero. Actually, I wonder how many have been unable to resist...
At the beginning of each day, the #9 bus, the first of ten buses I'll take throughout the day, carries us past the Cancer Survivors Monument just below the train station in Hades. If the morning is blithe and bonny, the dark figures appear to be out for a pleasant stroll. If the sky is grey, the journey looks more depressing, challenging and downright ominous.
Throughout the winter they appear to be struggling, first through the snow drifts of December, January and February, then through the filthy slush and ice of March and April.
However, this is just how it looked at 9am yesterday morning. According to the angle of the light, the weather, the season, it changes. It reflects the buildings surrounding it, the traffic lights and construction signs, the vehicles driving by and the passing pedestrians. It shines with the light of the Christmas decorations across the street, it shimmers in the heat. Snow covers some of the side surfaces, or rain drips down and runs in rivulets. In a strong wind, the vegetation on top revolves slowly.
The route to younger daughter's school is long and straight along Baseline Road. It gives ample opportunity to observe government office workers and students en route to local high schools and Algonquin College. Many of these are Muslim women, wearing a variety of hijab: chadors, the occasional niqāb and a dazzling array of different coloured head scarves in every colour and pattern you could imagine. On a bright morning, the sun catches sparkles, gold threads, and even rhinestones.
My husband's uncle liked me. That really meant something to me, because I was pretty darn sure that no one else in my husband's immediate family liked me. Except for the Resident Fan Boy who has always seemed reasonably fond of me.
Sixty-Five Roses: A Sister's Memoir by Heather Summerhayes Cariou
For pretty well as long as I can remember, one of the hallmarks of the beginning of the academic year is the rather hyper presence of brand new university students accosting passers-by for Shinearama as part of their freshman week. In the early days, they actually shined your shoes to raise money for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. I had a favourite pair's colour permanently changed due to an over-enthusiastic Shinearama participant wielding so-called neutral polish. Now, they just bounce up and down a lot and chant. I throw loonies in the collection box and get high-fives from students for the rest of the day when they spot my sticker. The Resident Fan Boy resists, but I toss in another toonie and firmly press the sticker to his chest: "You're doing it for my cousins," I tell him.
When I first encountered Dante's Divine Comedy, it wasn't through Alghieri's verse. It was via those amazing 19th century engravings by Gustave Doré. 
Of course, as revolting as it is, Hell is way more interesting. At least, Dante's version is.Anyone remember Rod Steiger's Night Gallery? One of my favourite stories in this TV anthology features a slightly miscast John Astin as a hippy who suddenly finds himself in a sort of Limbo waiting room when he gets bumped off in a motorcycle accident. Upon learning he's destined for damnation, he has visions of Doré's renditions of the Inferno, and although sobered by the prospect, you can tell he's intrigued. He gets sent to a rec room where he'd unable to turn off the ragtime music on the Victrola and a pleasant elderly couple relentlessly show him vacation slides. When he complains, the devil himself shows up to assure him that this is indeed his own special hell and that there's a room exactly like it "upstairs" where it's someone's idea of paradise. We leave John Astin sobbing: "Noooo.... Bummer! BUMMER!"
Elder daughter has been struggling with this week's essay, meditating on heaven, hell and purgatory while everyone else has somehow found the time to celebrate the end of mid-terms. Yep, I remember this. One guy was expressing his joy on his drum kit upstairs (no, no, no -- a real drum kit). I listened to him in the background while elder daughter slumped over her computer monitor and we discuss reciprocal love and lust and why Francesca and Paolo find themselves whirling in a fiendish wind in the upper levels of hell. At least they're in the upper reaches of the Inferno, one circle closer to purgatory and heaven than the gluttons who only love themselves.And at least they're together.
I have an Irish cape that buttons jauntily below my left clavicle. It was perfect for winters in Victoria which are cold, damp, and I guess, rather Irish. It also worked well for pregnancy, especially since mine were of the winter variety, leading to spring babies. During the decade I had children in tow needing clothes, snacks and amusement, I stopped wearing the cape because I couldn't get my pack-sack on over it. 
I think I must have been in Grade Six. I was standing at the edge of the schoolyard at View Royal Elementary in Victoria at the close of a school day, looking east toward the bridge that crossed an errant offshoot of Portage Inlet, where Helmcken Road ducked under the railway trestle and climbed the hill. 
November 11th, 2000: The Resident Fan Boy eagerly got us out of the house and down to the War Memorial for our very first Remembrance Day in Ottawa. On a finger-chilling morning, I calculated the costs of standing with two little girls, one with special needs, for two hours and vetoed the idea. Disappointed, the RFB retreated with us to Dunn's Deli a few blocks up Elgin Street as streams of poppy-wearing people flowed past us in the opposite direction. 
I was ten years old when I saw the play The Diary of Anne Frank on television. My mother explained beforehand that Anne had hidden from the Nazis with her family, but was discovered and sent to a concentration camp. I could tell by the way she said this that this was a sinister thing, but wondered what could be so dreadful about a camp where they made you think hard.
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