I was astonished a few years later to learn later that Yolen, the author of the Caldecott-winning Owl Moon as well as numerous other books for children, had also written The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), a very powerful Holocaust novel for middle-grade readers that won the National Jewish Book Award. When the book opens, Hannah, the book’s protagonist, is a rebellious American preteen who doesn’t want to go to a Passover seder hosted by her survivor relatives. Her grandfather frightens her by yelling at the TV whenever footage of the camps appears; once, when she used a ballpoint pen to ink a copy of his tattoo on her arm, he screamed at her in Yiddish.

Share

At the seder, Hannah opens the door to welcome the prophet Elijah—a key moment in the ritual—and finds herself transported to Poland in 1942. She’s now Chaya, the niece of Gitl and Shmuel, siblings who have taken her in after the death of her parents. At first, Hannah/Chaya thinks she’s stumbled onto a movie set or become the victim of an elaborate prank. But when guests arive for Shmuel’s wedding to Fayge, a rabbi’s daughter from a nearby village, Nazis are waiting at the synagogue to transport them all for “resettlement.” To Hannah’s frustration, no one will listen to her warnings, not even the rabbi:

“The men down there,” she cried out desperately, “they’re not wedding guests. They’re Nazis. Nazis! Do you understand? They kill people. They killed—kill—will kill Jews. . . . Six million of them! I know. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. We have to turn the wagons around. We have to run!”

Reb Boruch shook his head. “There are not six million Jews in all of Poland, my child.”

Yolen renders Hannah’s plight in language and imagery that make sense to younger readers: the boxcar in which she’s packed reminds her of the subway during rush hour. But the author does not condescend by evading the awful details. The stench of vomit and excrement in the train car grows thick; a child dies in its mother’s arms. When the train finally stops, after four days, Hannah is so thirsty that “she could feel her tongue as big as a sausage between her teeth.” Her head is shaved; she receives a tattoo. A girl introduces her to the camp rules, the first of which is “One does not ask why.” When she is finally restored to her real life in America, she returns with a new appreciation for her relatives’ stories.

At a convention for librarians soon after its publication, The Devil’s Arithmetic was attacked by an editor at a children’s-book journal who asked why readers should waste time on Yolen’s fiction when true chronicles, like Anne Frank’s diary, were available. To resort to fantasy, he said, trivialized the Holocaust. The science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card defended Yolen, arguing that her book might actually be more powerful for its audience than Anne’s diary—both because Yolen’s protagonist is a typical American preteen and because the diary ends “where the true horror begins.” The Devil’s Arithmetic allows readers to imagine themselves in Hannah/Chaya’s place, Card wrote, in “the most terrible part of the most terrible crime mankind is capable of.”

Yolen, too, in an article describing her rationale, emphasized the importance of personal identification. “Thrust a young reader back into the heart and mind of someone his or her own age. . . . Let that protagonist ask the questions our young people all want to ask. . . . The answers they get from the folk in the story will astound them, shake them into new awarenesses, really let them remember and be part of history.” When children are toddlers, they can identify with dinosaurs; as they grow older and more sophisticated, we can ask more of them.

Subscribe now

Part of the difficulty of writing about the Holocaust for children is the irreconcilable tension between the subject and our assumptions about children’s literature. To write about the Holocaust realistically, in all its horror, violates the tacit promise of writing for young readers: not to disturb them too deeply. At the same time, a story that won’t keep young readers up at night contradicts the historical reality. Yolen’s fantastical framing device is an ingenious solution to the problem. Not only does it prevent the atrocities of life in an extermination camp from overwhelming her young readers, it also speaks to the painful paradox all of us in the post-Holocaust world feel: how to be an adequate witness to something we ourselves didn’t experience. If we can’t time-travel ourselves, reading is the next best option—and the only possible consolation.

I wrote about Yolen’s Holocaust writing, which also includes two other young adult novels, for The New Yorker back in 2018. In the piece, I tried to parse what separates the best Holocaust children’s writing from more cavalier specimens like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a deliberately unrealistic work that coyly declines to elaborate on its fictional methods. “Not only are her Holocaust books extensively researched, and their departures from historical fact scrupulously noted, but her fantasy framing devices also reflect a kind of imaginative humility about the difficulty of ‘truly understanding,’” I wrote then.

But looking back at the piece now, what haunts me most is the conversation in which Hannah tries to warn the rabbi about what is going to happen to his community:

“No, Rabbi, six million in Poland and Germany and Holland and France and . . .”

“My child, such a number.” He shook his head and smiled, but the corners of his mouth turned down instead of up. “And as for running—where would we run to? God is everywhere. There will always be Nazis among us.”

Yolen died last week at the age of 87. May her memory be for a blessing.

Have you read any of Yolen’s books? Which ones stayed with you most? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Where I’ll be

Online, July 25, 1-3 p.m.: I’m hosting a single-session workshop, “Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children.” It reframes motherhood as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle, as well as offering practical strategies for organizing time and work. We’ll look at passages on parenting and art from brilliant mother-writers like Shirley Jackson, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and discuss how to keep our work moving forward when life is unpredictable and exhausting. Sign up here.

In person: New York, July 26, 2 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with my friend Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the novel The Scrapbook, which deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust two generations later. Details here.

What I’m reading

Apropos the discussion of AI in my last newsletter, I devoured Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, which imagines a not-far-off future in which parents acquire AI robots as companions for their children. I was intrigued by the novel’s use of an AI as the narrator, but I came away with a sense of the book as a kind of paler echo of his Never Let Me Go—which, in fairness, is probably one of my top ten of the 21st century.

Share

Subscribe now

A few days ago, instead of opening that file again, I started a new Gemini chat. A friend recently started using the Google chatbot and has been raving about its usefulness in matters of daily life.

“I have an essay to write that is long overdue,” I typed. “It is based on interviews I conducted as well as secondary source research. Can you help me come up with a plan for finishing it?”

Subscribe now

As always, the chatbot responded first with support. “It is completely understandable to feel stuck, especially when a project is already late and the pressure is mounting,” it reassured me. “When a feature relies on both deep secondary research and hours of interview transcripts, the sheer volume of material can feel paralyzing.”

I felt … seen.

It continued, “The goal right now is to stop looking at the article as one massive mountain and break it down into high-velocity, manageable sprints.”

I know this, obviously. I have given the same advice to students countless times! But when I’m struggling myself—paralyzed, if you will—it’s hard to put the strategy into action. Perhaps this is especially because I work mostly at home, by myself. My pets do the best they can, but they can’t give me professional support.

As I watched, Gemini unspooled an eight-day plan for finishing my article. I would spend Day 1 and 2 doing a “triage” of all the material. First, it told me to write down in a few sentences the core question the piece is trying to answer (the “nut graph”). Then I would go through all the interview notes and transcripts, but rather than reread everything start to finish, I would scan for “golden quotes” that directly relate to my theme. Everything else could be considered secondary for now.

On Day 3, I would write a “scaffold” outline, setting out the major beats of the piece and then dropping all the quotes in where they belong.

Days 4 through 6 are the big writing days where I try to get the whole messy first draft down, leaving TKs when necessary (placeholder text where I need to look up a fact or check a quote). And on Days 7 and 8, I fix the TKs, polish the language, and finally read the entire thing aloud to check for awkward moments and pacing problems.

None of this advice was groundbreaking. I know how to write an article! But to be honest, part of what was holding me back was the low-level depression that can set in when I’m not making progress. In that mode, to see all the steps spelled out like this gave me an odd sense of relief. It felt as if someone was cheering me on—or maybe just holding my hand—while I got myself moving again.

Share

Until now, I’ve been loath to use AI for any work-related task, though I have tried asking it mundane questions about travel, dog training, household repairs, and the like. That reluctance is mainly due to ethical qualms. In addition to the primary concern about AI’s environmental consequences, nearly a dozen books that I either wrote myself or contributed material to are listed in the Anthropic lawsuit, which means they were scraped to educate an LLM without my consent. The thing sounds like a human because it has been trained on text by humans like me.

And my very first experiment with ChatGPT, in which I asked it to come up with restaurant suggestions in a Brooklyn neighborhood I don’t usually frequent and it produced two “hallucinations” in response—was sufficiently discouraging to keep me away for a while.

But in the professional circles where I spend time, I’ve seen the conversation shift over the past year or so from “AI is a monster that will destroy our livelihoods” to “AI is here to stay—how can we best harness its power?” A publication I regularly write for recently issued ethics guidelines for using AI during the reporting and writing process. (The essence: don’t use it to generate text or ask it to edit your writing, but some help with brainstorming or structure is permitted.) Last summer, I tried out a few AI apps for transcribing interviews and was pleasantly surprised by the speed and accuracy of the results.

Share

After my experiment using Gemini as a project manager, I posted on my Facebook page to ask for opinions on whether writers can ethically use AI. Some of the responses were vehement. “Please don’t feed the machine,” one person wrote, while another called me a traitor to humanity. Most were concerned primarily about the environmental costs, although others suggested that there can be no ethical way to use an LLM since the system they are built on is too deeply flawed. Why not look to a writing book for advice? one friend wondered.

But when it comes to technology, we are all ethically compromised. This debate was conducted, after all, on Facebook, which everyone who participated in it is still using, despite the damage it has done to humanity. We all make tradeoffs in our behavior based on our values and our circumstances. If you abstain from using AI but drive a car 50 miles a day or eat red meat, are you ultimately harming the environment more? Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most environmentally conscious writers I’ve ever encountered, recently discussed using A.I. for her research.1

Meanwhile, have you ever evaded a paywall? If so, you’re taking money out of the pockets of journalists like me and contributing to a social culture that doesn’t value paying for media, resulting in its devaluation. Part of the argument against AI is that its “thoughts” are simply a dressed-up aggregation of search engine results, without attribution. But we’ve been rewarding aggregation over argument for years now in the websites we choose to click on. Remember the days when only Buzzfeed and its ilk had “listicles”? Now they’re everywhere.

Still, I don’t plan to consult an AI chatbot as a regular part of my writing practice. In addition to all the reasons above, I fear growing psychologically dependent on it, like the New York Times writer who just used AI to help sell his house and wound up feeling that “it was now almost impossible … to make a decision without getting A.I.’s opinion.” But at the moment, I’m hopeful about the possibilities of using AI to support my work rather than replace it.

Are you in the “never A.I.” camp, or do you use it for help with writing, research, or other tasks? If so, what have you found most useful? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

I couldn’t resist telling Gemini I was writing about using it as a writing coach. “What other ways do you think you can be helpful to nonfiction writers like me?” I asked.

After the obligatory sycophancy (“That is incredibly exciting to hear—I’m honored to get a mention in your newsletter!”), this is what it suggested:

1. Interactive digital whiteboard: “You can dump a messy outline or a complex set of themes into our chat and ask me to analyze it from different perspectives.”

2. Devil’s advocate: “You can feed me a thesis statement or a specific historical interpretation and command me: Act as a skeptical reviewer or a specialist in [X subject]. Tear this argument apart. Where are the weak points? What assumptions am I making that require stronger documentary evidence?

3. Information synthesizer: “You can upload or paste dense historical texts or trial transcripts and use me to quickly locate specific needle-in-a-haystack details, summarize dense institutional histories, or cross-reference timeline events to ensure chronological consistency.”

4. Admin manager: “I can take over the administrative cognitive load. You can ask me to draft pitch letters to editors based on your notes,2 format your bibliography, craft engaging social media threads or newsletter teasers about your upcoming work, or break down your massive macro-deadlines into micro-tasks for the upcoming week.”

5. Sample text generator. [FOR THE RECORD: I WOULD NOT USE AI THIS WAY OR ADVISE ANYONE ELSE TO DO SO.] “I am completely immune to writer's block because I don't care about making mistakes,” Gemini writes. (Interesting phrasing: Isn’t it supposed to care about not making mistakes?) It continues, “If you are stuck on a transitional paragraph or a tricky introductory hook, you can tell me: I need to get from Point A to Point B. Give me five completely different, rapid-fire ways to transition this paragraph. They might not be your final prose, but breaking that initial friction gives your brain something concrete to react to, edit, and transform into your own voice.”

   I REPEAT: I HAVE NOT USED AND WOULD NOT USE AI TO GENERATE TEXT, WHICH SEEMS DIFFERENT IN NATURE FROM THE OTHER POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS.

Do any of these suggestions strike you as useful? What else would you consider asking A.I. to do?

Leave a comment

Where to find me

New York, July 26, 2 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with my friend Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the novel The Scrapbook, which deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust two generations later. Heather’s writing is definitely 100% human generated! Details here.

Online, July 25, 1-3 p.m.: I’m hosting a single-session workshop, “Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children.” It reframes motherhood as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle, as well as offering practical strategies for organizing time and work. We’ll look at passages on parenting and art from brilliant mother-writers like Shirley Jackson, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and discuss how to keep our work moving forward when life is unpredictable and exhausting. Sign up here.

What I’m reading

Thinner by Stephen King, in which a man falls victim to a curse that causes him to waste away. Also 100% human generated, since it was published in 1984. (Maybe someday books will bear a sticker like Ivory Soap: “99.4% human generated!”) This book has not aged well in terms of its stereotypes about “Gypsies,” a major plot point. In that respect at least, we’ve come a long way in the last 40 years. But I was intrigued that its horror consists in inverting the desire to be thin. A great number of people surely still believe that losing too much weight would be a good problem to have rather than a literal curse.

This sculpture, by Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Perkins&Will, is called “With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited.” It sits on the campus of Davidson College, a small, elite liberal arts school in central North Carolina, opposite one of the oldest buildings on campus—one built by enslaved people. That building now holds a small museum exploring the ways in which the college benefited from slave labor. On display are bricks in which the fingerprints of the enslaved people who created them are visible: deep, tactile holes. Exhibits seek to reconstruct the life stories of those people.

Over the past year, as part of a project exploring Mark Twain’s legacy in America today, I’ve traveled around the country visiting sites that commemorate Black history, such as the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama; the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; and the Niagara Falls Underground Railway Heritage Center. I began this journey shortly before the Trump administration ordered a review of exhibits discussing slavery at national parks and other institutions, including the Smithsonian, which it accused of trying to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

Subscribe now

During these travels, I’ve seen some powerful historical exhibits and works of public art, which I plan to share more about in my newsletter over the coming months. But nothing had the same effect on me as the sculpture at Davidson. I sat near it for the better part of an afternoon, looking at it from all angles, watching visitors pose for pictures next to it as the light softened and shadows deepened. At night, illuminated from below, it glows.

The sculpture stands in honor of not only the enslaved people who built those early buildings, but all the Black workers, “known and unknown,” who contributed to the life of the college from its founding in 1837 through the Jim Crow years: laundry workers, gardeners, groundspeople, cooks. As poet Clint Smith—a Davidson alum and the author of the remarkable book How the Word Is Passed—writes in a poem he read at the sculpture’s unveiling last fall:

With these hands they constructed buildings they were not allowed to enter,

they cooked food they were not allowed to eat,

they washed clothes they were not allowed to wear.

How did I get here from Mark Twain? you might be wondering. Over his lifetime, Twain underwent a remarkable personal journey. Born into a slave-owning family in Missouri, he eventually married Olivia Langdon, daughter of leading abolitionist Jervis Langdon, and committed himself to the fight for equality for Black people.

On a visit to Yale in 1885, soon after the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain met a young Black law student named Warner T. McGuinn who was struggling to support himself with part-time jobs. Twain was impressed with both his brilliance and his work ethic. “I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color,” he wrote to the dean of Yale Law School, offering to pay some of McGuinn’s fees. “We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs; & we should pay for it.” As Ron Chernow puts it in his recently published biography, “Twain had devised his own form of racial reparations.”

Share

On my own journeys around Trump’s America, I’ve been thinking about the forms reparations can take. Toward the end of their lives, my grandparents fought for and received financial compensation from the German government for their sufferings in the Holocaust. As I’ve written here before, I regard the Polish passports I acquired for myself and my children, giving us the right to live and work in the European Union, as restitution for the crimes committed against my family.

What is required to appropriately acknowledge our crimes against the Black people whose fingerprints are embedded in the bricks of our country’s buildings? Many years ago, the great German writer W.G. Sebald gave a speech in which he described literature as a way of honoring “the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done … an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts.” Places like the Legacy Museum (which goes far beyond the work of a typical museum) can serve this purpose. So can a sculpture like “With These Hands.”

Meanwhile, as Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, today is the 72nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. Yesterday in Alabama, thousands of Americans protested in Selma and Montgomery against the Court’s recent decision weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Has your community made efforts to reckon with the painful aspects of its history? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Where to find me

I’ve been doing a radio and podcast tour to promote the paperback launch of The Many Lives of Anne Frank. Some highlights: The Shelley Irwin Show, The Roundtable with Joe Donahue, The Lowdown with Ira Wood. More to come!

What I’m reading

Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas, a horror novel that doubles as a smart and funny parable of diet culture. A sweet young guy who has always struggled with his weight signs up for a trial of a new drug called Obexity, which offers miraculous weight loss—as long as he can tolerate some extremely disturbing side effects. I’m working on an essay that examines recent books about fatphobia and tries to answer the question of why thinness remains so persistent as an ideal. Stay tuned …

Subscribe now

One of the first things you’re told when arriving in Israel is to download the official Homefront Command app. When incoming missiles are detected, the app erupts with a “warning” alert: a uniquely jarring chug-a chug-a noise capable of waking the soundest sleeper. At that point, you have about five minutes to get to a bomb shelter.

Just over a minute before the attack, the air raid siren goes off. Wikipedia describes it as “a continuous ascending and descending tone,” but that doesn’t adequately convey the horror of its wail. If you’re outside, it seems to be coming from everywhere at once. Without words, it conveys an unmistakable message: Take shelter. Now.

(I recorded this about a week ago.)

Yesterday, the nineteenth day of the war, no one seemed to be in a particular hurry to respond to the first warning. Two construction workers continued to unload steel beams from a van. A young woman riding a bicycle pulled up to the nearest building, carefully secured her bike, and sauntered inside.

Subscribe now

Most of Tel Aviv’s characteristic low-rise apartment buildings, built in the 1950s, have bomb shelters in their basements. The front doors of the buildings are usually secured with electronic codes, but these days many of them are left propped open so that passersby will be able to quickly enter.

At the hair salon, employees were calmly ushering clients into the shelter in the adjacent building. The stylist welcomed me as if nothing were going on. “Something to drink?” he offered.

Apparently it’s possible to become accustomed to anything, even missiles falling out of the sky.

Share

This is my first war, but that’s not the case for almost everyone around me. It’s not even Israel’s first war with Iran: that happened last June, the conflict now known here as the Twelve Day War. New as it is to me, the current routine—restrictions on gatherings, educational activities, and commerce; radically reduced flights in and out; and, of course, the need to run to the shelter at any time of day or night—is familiar to many. A friend described it as “like Covid, but with missiles.”

On February 28, the first day of the current war, the sirens went off every few hours, around the clock. But since then, the pace has slowed to five or six a day, and somehow we’re living with it. I set out my clothes before getting in the shower, so that I’ll be able to get dressed as quickly as possible. When friends came over for dinner, we made a slow-cooking stew rather than a dish that would be ruined if we had to suddenly abandon it on the stove. I still go out to run, but I make sure to stay near buildings rather than roaming in the park.

Subscribe now

But I can’t go on like this indefinitely, and neither can my Israeli neighbors. I see it in their faces in the middle of the night: the elderly woman who shuffles to the shelter on her caregiver’s arm; the middle-aged couple doting on their little white dog; the parents who manage to carry their toddlers down two flights of stairs without waking them. We listen to the muffled booms of the Iron Dome intercepting the missiles. Sometimes we hear the louder boom that signals an impact.

We’re all holding it together, for now, thanks in large part to Israel’s astoundingly effective air defense system and ubiquitous missile shelters. We tell ourselves that as long as we make it to a shelter in time, we will be safe, even considering Iran’s increasing use of cluster bombs, which split into smaller projectiles that can cause damage over a wide area. On Tuesday night, one exploded a few kilometers away, killing an elderly couple who weren’t in a shelter and damaging a nearby train station.

After the all-clear pops up and we stumble back upstairs, I lie in bed thinking of the people of Tehran and the terror they must feel when bombs land without warning. This morning, I learned that four Palestinians in the West Bank, including a pregnant woman, were killed in the missile attack last night.

Share

I’m not here to pontificate about this war or any other. I consume a wide variety of news media, but I don’t pretend to understand all the complications of this conflict.

What I do understand, in a new and visceral way, is that it’s hard to think in geopolitical terms when your body is on the line. Maybe this, too, gets easier in time.

While I was writing this newsletter on Thursday morning, the alert sounded three times.

*
With any luck, I’ll manage to leave Israel in time for a very special event at Lofty Pigeon Books, my neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn! On March 25, at 6:30 p.m., to celebrate the paperback launch of The Many Lives of Anne Frank, I’ll be in conversation with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the echoes of Anne’s story in our present moment. There’s a lot to discuss! Register for free here.

I was thrilled to be in conversation with Rachel Kadish, a dear friend and extraordinary novelist, at the very special restaurant and event space Lehrhaus last month. Here we are in front of a big bookcase filled with works by Jewish writers.

I was supposed to be in Amsterdam last weekend for the publication of my book in Dutch, but alas, that event had to be postponed. Hopefully it will be rescheduled for later this spring. In the meantime, my Dutch readers can find the book here.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Another friend, who lives in Minneapolis, posted on Facebook an agonized meditation on how she now no longer knows whether she would be a “good German,” because she’s not sure she would be able to sacrifice her life during a protest.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day: the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It also happens to be my paperback publication date, but I’m not in the mood to celebrate, not while ICE agents are storming the streets of Minneapolis and shooting protesters with no provocation.

A year ago, when my book first came out, Donald Trump had just been re-elected. At the time, I thought the comparison of undocumented immigrants to Jews persecuted during the Holocaust was not wrong, exactly, but a little imprecise.

I see now that the imprecision doesn’t matter. We’re living in desperate times. We lack the vocabulary to convey the horror of seeing masked government agents on the streets of American cities gunning down peaceful protesters. People reach for the Holocaust as a comparison not to diminish Jewish suffering but because—even after all the other disasters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—it’s still the worst thing they can think of.

Make no mistake: we are all witnesses to these crimes. If you clicked play on a video, or read someone’s post detailing what they saw, or paused your scrolling to look at an image of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, you have borne witness.

Share

There’s a famous photograph taken in Amsterdam in June 1943, at the height of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, that has haunted me ever since I first saw it. The photographer, whose identity is unknown, is looking down from a second- or third-floor window at the street below, where a crowd of people are gathered in front of a tidy middle-class apartment building. Some are milling around; others are sitting and waiting. The luggage scattered around them makes it obvious that they are Jews rounded up for deportation.

On the windowsill, in the foreground of the picture, there are two teacups. Someone, about to make tea, paused to take this picture.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, we might think: This person’s neighbors are about to be deported and they’re in their cozy home drinking tea?!

But at the same time, the very act of taking such a picture could have gotten the photographer arrested or worse. As such, the photograph itself represents an act of resistance. When fascist thugs are terrorizing your neighborhood, you do what you can. As it happens, researchers were later able to identify some of the deported Jews by using this photo.

Keep filming. Keep watching. Keep witnessing.

Leave a comment

More than any other song I know, this one captures the feeling of the road trip, that quintessentially American journey: crisscrossing the country from one end to the other, walking or hitchhiking or taking a Greyhound bus while searching for America, and for yourself. I took a trip like that one summer, mostly on my own, driving from Boston to D.C. to Austin and beyond as far as Las Vegas, following dirt roads and sleeping at campsites and getting lost in the desert.

Subscribe now

Was I looking for America? Not deliberately, but that’s what I found: an America of deserts and diners, canyons and trailers, park rangers and waitresses and people in no particular hurry. I went back to New York and started my first real job in publishing, but in my mind I was still driving down those highways, wondering what might lie just off the next exit.

I’m looking for America again now, lying awake at night. As the Simon & Garfunkel couple hitchhike from Saginaw, scenes from Minneapolis play on repeat in my mind. They share a pack of cigarettes and something called “Mrs. Wagner pies,” they make up stories about the other passengers on the bus, and eventually the moon rises “over an open field,” perhaps the most beautiful image in any pop song, ever. I can see it, from the windows of their bus.

And I see Renee Good through the window of my computer screen. Like me, she’s middle-aged, with an SUV and a partner and a dog and kids who she wants to raise in a better world. For that she is shot in the face while exercising an inalienable American right, the right to get in your car and drive away.

Share

After his girlfriend falls asleep, Simon confessses that he’s lost: “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.” Haven’t we always been? The cars on the New Jersey Turnpike have all come to look for America. Perhaps they are just as lost as he is. Perhaps they will find themselves.

But I’m not sure I want to find myself in this America, where masked thugs roam the streets of Minneapolis, where a synagogue was set on fire in Mississippi, where a doctor in California is in danger for providing abortion pills to a woman in Louisiana. I can’t stop reading the stories, and there are more of them every day. The fortysomething mother from Boston, born in Peru and a U.S. resident since age nine, who was separated from her family at Logan Airport and detained for two weeks over a marijuana charge from more than twenty years ago. The children—including two who have cancer—detained for weeks, with and without their parents. The Massachusetts teen picked up after volleyball practice.

If you haven’t listened to “America” in a while, I recommend this version, which I heard for the first time a few months ago via Mark Oppenheimer’s Substack. It’s a duet by two Swedish sisters, their voices songbird sweet, performing the song for Simon at a concert in 2012. The camera comes to rest a few times on his face. At first he seems to be impassive, as if frozen in disbelief at the beauty of his own creation, but the end tears are clearly visible in his eyes. Perhaps he’s weeping for his own lost former self, the 27-year-old hippie who wrote that song in 1968, confessing his secrets to someone who can’t hear, or isn’t listening.

Or perhaps he is weeping, as I too weep, at the gulf between the promise of America then and what it has become.

Subscribe now

To combat that where-has-all-the-time-gone-and-what-do-I-have-to-show-for-it feeling, I’m trying what my friend Gretchen Rubin calls a “ta-da list.” Instead of creating a page full of impending tasks—all of which come with their own level of overwhelm and are certain to make you feel guilty in advance—the idea is to take stock of the things you have accomplished, big or small.

Share

Here’s mine for 2025:

1. Launching a book. The Many Lives of Anne Frank, which I started in 2019, came out in January 2025. I was hosted by some wonderful spaces—the Center for Jewish History, Greenlight Bookstore, the National Arts Club, the Toronto Holocaust Museum—and shared conversations with terrific writers who I’m lucky to call my friends, including Dani Shapiro, Meg Wolitzer, Jonathan Rosen, Frank Foer, Sarah Wildman, Leslie Jamison, and Judith Shulevitz.

2. Writing. I published some pieces I was proud of, including a guest essay in The New York Times about what Anne’s memory means today and an essay in Lit Hub about a surprising model Anne drew on in writing her diary.

3. Expanding my teaching. In addition to my regular work at Columbia, I taught guest workshops at the Hobart Festival of Women Writers (which I’ve longed to attend ever since first visiting Hobart more than a decade ago) and online for the Shipman Agency’s Work Room. More of this to come in 2026, including a new class I’m developing on how to use Scrivener—the best app for writers, in my opinion—to build a nonfiction project.

   Subscribe now

   Speaking of which …

4. Starting a new book. My original idea about how students and teachers are reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn today has transformed into something a little more amorphous and unwieldy about race relations in America, both in Mark Twain’s time and in ours, seen through the lens of literature. I hope to share more about this soon.

What are your ta-da’s from 2025? Let me know in the comments if you try this—and if it helps you fight those haven’t-accomplished-enough blues.

Leave a comment

Looking back / looking ahead

Grateful for: All the readers who welcomed The Many Lives of Anne Frank into the world. Special mentions to The New Yorker and Hadassah for including the book on their “Best of” lists for the year, as well as reviewers Alexander Nazaryan (L.A. Times) and John Warner (the Chicago Tribune’s “Biblioracle”) for their generous praise.

Looking forward to:

• The paperback launch of The Many Lives of Anne Frank! Event details to come, but it will be out in January 2026.

• My next half-marathon—in training now.

• My son’s college graduation (!).

• My new planner, from Haroo Planner, a woman-owned small business. Isn’t she lovely?

What are you looking forward to?

Leave a comment

May 2026 bring us all peace, healing, and fresh starts. I’ll leave you with this inspirational quote, seen at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History:

Subscribe now

I’ve visited Israel several times since the pro-democracy protests of summer 2023. Each time, the mood among most of the people I know here has ranged from bleak to despondent. In May 2024, when I first attended one of the weekly Saturday protests held on the plaza outside the Tel Aviv Art Museum—now known as “Hostages Square”—the public despair felt overwhelming. In speeches broadcast on huge screens and audible for blocks around, family members of the hostages begged Netanyahu to end the war and bring their loved ones home. Graffiti around the city called him a liar, a traitor, and worse.

Last Saturday night, as talk of the deal was in the air, I went to the weekly protest again, wondering if this one might be the last. One speaker estimated that 200,000 people were there; the newspaper Ha’aretz gave a more conservative count of “tens of thousands,” but regardless, the square was packed. By now, only 48 hostages out of the original 250 remain in Gaza; many are known to be dead. Speaker after speaker praised Trump for bringing the latest deal to the table and implored Netanyahu to comply with it.

This morning, as the rain petered out to a drizzle, the square filled up again. Journalists were interviewing anyone willing to speak into a microphone. One woman, wearing a paper replica of Trump’s head, was carrying a giant heart-shaped balloon. A reporter asked her what the meaning of it was. “To show all the love he gets from the people. He deserves all this love,” she replied.

“Not Netanyahu?” he prodded her.

“Netanyahu did everything he could to make this deal not happen,” she replied. “It’s amazing to see the relief in the eyes of everyone. It’s a historic day. Trump deserves the Nobel Prize.”

Listening in, I experienced the cognitive dissonance that I’ve felt more or less constantly since arriving in Israel for this latest visit. I’ve been mainly in Tel Aviv, which looks and feels much the same as always: filled with Israelis riding buses, sitting in cafes, going to the beach, and in general living their lives, even as the aftershocks of October 7 are everywhere. The protest signs and graffiti have only grown angrier: “10/7 BECAUSE OF YOU,” reads a poster bearing Netanyahu’s face. In a public bathroom, the usual admonition not to throw garbage in the toilet is plastered with hostage memorabilia: yellow stickers counting the number of days in captivity, a yellow ribbon printed with the message “Until the last hostage [comes home].” “Bring them home!” someone has written in English.

Meanwhile, a catastrophe is taking place in Gaza, only 40 miles to the south. As Ruth Margalit wrote recently in The New Yorker, it is impossible to enjoy the bounty of Tel Aviv without thinking of the Gazans, so near, who lack everything: food, clean water, medical care. At the same time, the distance—physical and psychic—between Israelis and Palestinians feels almost impossible to breach. Gaza may be only a short drive away, but when I put the name of a city into Google Maps, the app “can’t find a way there.” “Can you hear the war?” a friend in the U.S. asked. I can’t, of course—only in my head.

Share

Via the international media, one does hear voices from Gaza—some brave enough to publicly call for an alternative to Hamas. What do people in Gaza hear? At last Saturday’s protest, Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, screamed so piercingly into the microphone that for a moment I wondered if her voice might reach her son and his captors. Before delivering his speech to a nearly empty room at the United Nations, Netanyahu ordered loudspeakers to be set up in Gaza; he addressed neither Hamas nor the suffering civilians, as some imagined he might, but (rather belatedly) the hostages. Perhaps soon we will know how many were still alive to hear him.

As I watched the scene at Hostages Square this morning, Saul Steinberg’s iconic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” came to my mind. The image, which has been reproduced and imitated in countless ways since it first appeared on the cover of The New Yorker in the mid-1970s, shows a radically foreshortened landscape: the blocks around 9th Avenue are drawn in detail, while everything beyond the Hudson River barely registers. I always thought it poked fun at the typical New Yorker’s assumption that the city sits at the center of the world. But now I wonder if it’s a commentary on humankind in general: no matter where we are, we all see the world from our own compressed perspective.

Subscribe now

Last February, I wrote in this space about my horror at the ceremony in which Hamas handed over the bodies of dead Israeli hostages; I was particularly disturbed by the presence of Palestinian children there. A friend pushed back privately—and correctly—on a sentence in which I implied that young Palestinians’ hatred of Israel might be mainly caused by Hamas propaganda rather than Israeli violence and repression. As a Jew with friends and family in Israel, it’s hard to put myself in the place of those who celebrate the massacre of October 7 as legitimate resistance. And as an American who does not feel any love for our president (to say the least), it’s hard to put myself in the place of Israelis and others who see him as perhaps the only person who could have made this deal happen. But if we cannot hear voices that challenge us, then we will always be the New Yorker with blinders on, stuck with the view from 9th Avenue.

Rain was falling last February on the day of that horrific hostage release, falling on the living and the dead, on the crowds of Palestinians in Khan Younis watching the grim convoy bearing the coffins depart and the crowds of Israelis who lined the streets to watch it enter. Today, rain fell again, the first soaking rain of the season. It fell in Israel, and it fell in Gaza, and then the sky brightened.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

I have Kondo-ed my books.

Subscribe now

I’ve been writing book criticism for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years as a book critic means a lot of free books. In the post-Covid period, many publishers have shifted to e-galleys, a reprieve welcomed by both my sagging shelves and my husband, who for years has gamely tolerated the piles stacking up in virtually every corner of our house. Even so, the thump of a book being tossed on the porch is so familiar that our dog doesn’t even bark at it.

It’s a privilege and a pleasure to own so many books. My husband and I chose our house, an aging Victorian on the southern edge of Flatbush, mainly because of its ample space: for the children and pets we would raise there, yes, but also for my books.

But at the end of the summer, as we made the decision to downsize our possessions, I realized it was time to ask myself some hard questions about what purpose all those books were serving. And so I went through them, one by one.

Share

The bookshelves were a map of my taste and its development. The high school leftovers, some (Jude the Obscure) more cherished than others (The Fountainhead); the obsessions of my twenties and thirties (entire shelves devoted to W.G. Sebald, Primo Levi, Alice Munro, David Mitchell, and more); the books around which I built my own three manuscripts and the ones I used to teach a dozen years’ worth of university classes in journalism, criticism, and biography—these were the raw materials of my intellectual life. No wonder it felt so important to have them as close as possible to hand.

They were also a secret diary that only I could read, dotted with ephemera collected over the decades. In an edition of Ovid’s Erotic Poems, I discovered a note passed to my fifteen-year-old self by a shy, silent boy in my driver’s ed class, asking me to “excuse this primitive manner of introduction” and to drop by his house, if I had time. (Erotic poems? No wonder he was interested.) D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which I read once in college and never again, still held a Hanukkah card signed by my father and stepmother, now divorced for nearly two decades. A list of street addresses (!) of friends and family members to whom to send postcards (!!), found in a novel by Graham Greene, brought me back to a stay in Berlin that happened to coincide with one of my first pieces for The New Yorker: a review of a biography of Greene, well before I thought about writing biography myself. Berlin was under a heat wave and I was heavily pregnant with my first child, so I spent most of my time there floating in the lakes and reading Greene’s novels. A decade later, I stuck a letter from my middle child into a book of criticism by Stanley Edgar Hyman, read during a residency at Macdowell—precious time to focus on my Shirley Jackson biography while the kids were at sleepaway camp.

But this shelf-level perspective on my personal history also revealed how much I had tried to shape myself according to the tastes and expectations of others. Foremost among them was my charismatic, abusive former boss, who used to put notes, mostly on Post-Its and always signed “Love,” in the many books he left on my desk for my edification. To my surprise, I found myself putting most of them in the giveaway pile.

Subscribe now

Once I started, I couldn’t stop. An obscure Italian novel that I never managed to read, beloved by a literary critic whom I once idolized? In the pile. Several volumes—signed, naturally—by an older poet with whom I had a mercifully brief entanglement? Out. The chapbook of comically unreadable sonnets by a British exchange student I met in graduate school? (That one I kept, a souvenir of my years among the sad young literary men.) The first novel I ever reviewed for The New York Times also got to stay—but not the six previous ones by the same author that I diligently consumed in preparation.

Books seem so permanent, but they don’t last forever. I wanted to keep two mass-market paperbacks of Animal Farm and 1984—God knows, I might need them—but their pages were so musty, brown and crackling, that I put them in the giveaway pile. Same with the dual edition of Howards End and A Room with a View, purchased in tribute to Merchant Ivory—I read the books, but I loved the movies more—and another of Middlemarch, with a postcard from Costa Rica placed as a bookmark about two-thirds of the way through. The trip was in 2008, an attempt at a family vacation during the death throes of my first marriage. Apparently that was enough to put me off finishing Middlemarch. The book went in the free pile, with the postcard still in it.

Anne Helen Petersen and others have written about the phenomenon of the “portal”: a spiritual, emotional, or creative crossroads that women may reach in midlife.1 The term came back to me as I stood amid all those volumes offering mute testimony to the journey of my mind. Am I able, now, to let go of them because I am now 51, the author of three published books and dozens of essays, and finally beholden to no one’s ideas but my own? Or was the process of sorting the books—taking each one into my hands, paging through it, and making a decision about whether I still needed it or not—itself a necessary step in understanding which aspects of my history I am ready to leave behind?

Have you ever gotten rid of something that once was important to you—books, clothes, memorabilia, or something else? What prompted you to do it? How did it feel? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

What I’m reading

Maggie Millner’s essay in the Yale Review about Mary Oliver and shame has a fresh and very convincing take on Oliver’s best-known lines: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Late to the game, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Fleishman Is in Trouble gave me a lot to think about.

Where I’ll be

Two in-person events are coming up:

• November 2, New Haven, 7 p.m.: In conversation with Joshua Cohen on “Jews and Publishing Today,” as part of a conference sponsored by the Yale Program in Jewish Studies. Register here.

• November 3, Toronto, 7:30 p.m.: In conversation with Heather Reisman of Indigo Books and Music for opening night of Holocaust Education Week at the Toronto Holocaust Museum. Tickets here.

And one online:

• November 16, 12 p.m. EST, I’m offering a class called “Better Writing Through Criticism” via the Shipman Agency’s popular Work Room. It’s a craft seminar on using criticism as a technique for personal essays and other writing. Three scholarships are available. From the description:

How can thinking and writing critically about art and culture deepen our practice as creative writers? Join Ruth Franklin, a longtime book critic and teacher of nonfiction, to consider how works or art to which we are drawn—paintings, books, film, photographs—can give us new ideas for or perspectives on our own work. In this single-session class, we'll do a close read of a short lyric essay that blends criticism and memoir. We'll then practice some techniques to accomplish similar effects and discuss strategies for responding to the art we consume on a daily basis, from books and museum exhibitions to podcasts, television, and more.

As ever,

Ruth

That’s the first line of an essay I may never write, an essay about something so personal I’ve almost never even talked about writing it: my difficult relationship with my mother.

But last weekend, I wrote the first paragraph. Then I read it aloud to a room full of strangers.

Subscribe now

This took place at the Hobart Festival of Women’s Writers, held annually since 2012 in the Hobart “Book Village”: a tiny town in the north Catskills filled with secondhand bookshops. I’ve been visiting Hobart periodically over the past ten years, usually with one or two children in tow, to spend an afternoon browsing. Here’s our first haul, which included a first edition of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (for me) and What My Cat Taught Me About Life (for my kid).

On one of those trips, I saw an advertisement for the festival and put it on my mental bucket list for my next book. Last weekend, I finally had a chance to participate.

On a rainy Saturday morning, some twenty writers, published and aspiring, piled into one of the bookstores for a workshop called “Texts and Betrayal: Secrets and Boundaries.” The session was led by Irena Klepfisz, a poet, essayist, and child survivor of the Holocaust whose work I’ve long admired. After brief introductions, she led the group through a series of thought exercises. First, everyone brainstormed four topics we were afraid to write about. Then we imagined the consequences. Who would be upset? What would they say? How would we defend ourselves?

Subscribe now

Irena’s calm, warm energy was infectious. One by one, we began to open up. One woman confessed to censoring herself even in her own journal, for fear her children might find it later. In response, Irena shared her experience of discovering revelations after her own partner’s death: “hard, but not terrible,” as she put it.

Then she had us work through an imagined dialogue with someone who might be upset by our writing. What would they say? Who would they say it to? What would we say in response? “All writing is a betrayal,” Irena said. But if you don’t have the courage to speak your truth, you betray yourself.

Finally, she asked us to start writing the thing we feared and to share it, if we were able. Unbelievably, many of us did. One woman wrote about feeling like a third wheel in the presence of her husband and his secretary. Another wrote about an unexpected pregnancy; a third, about an abortion. I left amazed at the trust and support that could develop among a group of strangers in the space of only two hours.

The next day, another group gathered for a workshop I taught. The focus was meant to be on incorporating arts criticism into personal essays, but a number of the participants wanted to talk about getting and giving constructive feedback. We ended up doing both. I had asked the participants to bring—or search for—an image important to them for a writing exercise. Again, the results were fascinating and varied. One woman chose the famous photograph of workmen taking a break atop a skyscraper beam; we were all surprised to learn that the men are holding WPA flyers rather than lunches. Another chose a self-portrait in which she replaced her own nose with a tree.

Subscribe now

Driving home that afternoon, I felt elated. I’ve been teaching writing on the university level for more than a decade, but this experience was different. There was something deeply moving about the way this group of women joined together for the sole purpose of improving their craft in community. There were no grades, no fellowships, no competition—only support.

One participant in the memoir session worried that her children would throw out her writing after her death. “Who cares about Mom’s inner life?” she asked, only half joking. Well, I do. The single line about biography that has always resonated with me most comes from Virginia Woolf, who writes in A Room of One’s Own that she would rather read the “true history” of “the girl behind the counter” than yet another life of Napoleon or Keats. We all are the girl behind the counter, and the stories of our lives matter.

Inspired by this experience, I’d like to do some teaching and coaching apart from my academic work. Would you be interested in taking a seminar with me, either in person or online? If so, what would be your preferred topic? Send me an email or let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Where I’ll be

June 18, 6:30 p.m.: In conversation with Ross Benjamin at Big Red Books in Nyack, NY. RSVP here.

June 26, 2 p.m. (online): The Leo Baeck Institute Book Club.

From the Shirley Jackson files

Substacker Jan Harayda is leading a discussion on “The Lottery,” which is about to celebrate the seventy-seventh anniversary of its publication.

Jansplaining

22 ways of looking at 'The Lottery'

Jan on reading ‘The Lottery’ as a teenager…

Read more

a year ago · 23 likes · 29 comments · Jan Harayda

As ever,

Ruth

Subscribe now

The novel is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, whi…

Read more

“Our government must not be in the business of ruling ideas off-limits. This country’s rich intellectual tradition of free thought and debate is one of our most valuable assets. To squander it in the name of ideology—whether by removing books from college libraries or restricting grants to literary critics writing about racism—is a tragedy.”

A few years …

Read more

The doctor who treated me reassured me that I would be able to run again. I…

Read more

Read more

I also visited the Anne Frank exhibition at the Center for Jewish History (I highly recommend it) with Etan Nechin from Haaretz and spoke about Anne with Stav Ziv from the Forward, Miriam Frankel from the New York Sun, and Haydee Rodriguez from JMore. But my favorite bit of press might have been this one from the Baltimore Sun, which listed my event in their “Things to Do” column next to a Polar Bear Plunge taking place the same day. Hmm … be warm and cozy in a bookstore or wet and freezing in the Chesapeake Bay? Not a tough choice.

In those last two pictures above, I’m starting to look a little rundown. In fact, the launch schedule—11 events over 12 days—was tough. The combination of adrenaline, anxiety, and travel meant that I fell way behind on sleep and wound up getting sick. After the last event, I basically didn’t get out of bed for a day and a half. More than a week later, my voice still isn’t back to normal.

Subscribe now

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining! In the scheme of things, too many book events is a pretty nice problem to have.

But I was unprepared by how overwhelming having to be constantly “on” would be. I’m a major introvert who normally interacts mainly with my family members and a few close friends. I thrive off the company of others, but it needs to be in limited, controllable doses, and I need downtime afterwards. I underestimated the impact all this social activity would have on my body, in addition to my mind.

Do you also get overwhelmed by too much “on” time? What tricks have you found to help manage it? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

What I’m reading

I owe an apology to those of you who were excited about the Israeli/Palestinian authors book club. It turned out to be more than I could take on. And considering the times we’re living in, I’m not sure an online thread is the best place for discussion. I will continue reading these books myself and recommending them to my in-person book club, and I urge you to do the same.

That said, I’d like to gauge your interest in another idea. I’m currently researching a new project involving Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the way it’s used (and often not used) in classrooms. Along the way, I’ve become interested in the situation around banned books in this country more generally. In her excellent newsletter, Publishing Confidential, publicist Kathleen Schmidt recently posted a list from PEN America of the most frequently banned books for 2025. The top twelve—of which I’ve read only a couple—are:

• Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

• Looking for Alaska by John Green

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

• Sold by Patricia McCormick

• Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

• Crank by Ellen Hopkins

• Identical by Ellen Hopkins

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

• Tricks by Ellen Hopkins1

I’m assuming most of us have read The Kite Runner and The Handmaid’s Tale, but what about the others? Would you be interested in reading any of these as a group and discussing (in Substack Chat or another online format) why they’re banned? Let me know by email or in the comments.

Leave a comment

Where I’ll be

Here’s my current event schedule—in person and online—for the next month or so.

• February 20, 7 pm EST: “The Enduring Relevance of Anne Frank” with Doyle Stevick, sponsored by Hadassah magazine. Online only; register here.

• March 1, 1:30 pm EST: East Midwood Jewish Center, 1625 Ocean Ave, Brooklyn. In person; advance registration not required.

• March 4, 9 am EST: London Jewish Book Week, in conversation with David Herman. Online only; register here.

• March 19, 6:30 pm EST: National Arts Club with Meg Wolitzer. Free and open to the public; register here.

New events are being added all the time, so please check my website for the most up-to-date info. If you’re interested in booking me for an event at your local bookstore, synagogue, school, or anywhere else, please email ruthfranklinwriter@gmail.com. A book club guide will be available soon for free download from my website.

One final note on the paywall

As I announced last month, new posts will continue to be free; posts in the archive (older than one month) are now accessible to paying subscribers only. However, I’ve kept a few of the most popular posts open to all.

This post describes the book’s journey from idea to publication, including all the times I had to answer the question, “Why does the world need another book about Anne Frank?”

My answer is that the mountain of discourse devoted to Anne has obscured the reality of her life. The misconception about her diary is just the beginning. There’s also the false depiction of her father as her censor, which I discuss here:

Not to mention the use of Anne’s image and words in the service of a vast number of political causes, from apartheid in South Africa to anti-Israel propaganda:

And finally, my all-time most popular post:

Thank you again for your support. It truly means a great deal.

As ever,

Ruth

The Many Lives of Anne Frank is out in the world!

The official publication date is next Monday, January 27, but I’m hearing that some of you have already received your preorders. I love seeing your photos of the book on Instagram—please tag me!

The book has already received some wonderful press. In The Wall Street Journal, Megan Cox Gurdon says I have “done a wonderful thing” by allowing Anne’s voice to speak alongside mine and writes that “Readers who are familiar with Anne’s story … still have much to learn” from the book. In the Los Angeles Times, Alexander Nazaryan describes the book’s outlook as “humane” and “generous,” continuing, “Franklin writes with a rare combination of lightness and equanimity, with little sanctimony or finger-wagging” and “provides context that gives [Anne’s] story a new, edifying fullness…. It is unusual for a book to have a companion as faithful and elegant as the one Frank’s diary finds here.” I’m blushing! ☺️

A quick update on next week’s events:

• On January 27 at 3 p.m., I’m in conversation with historian Saskia Coenen Snyder of the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina. This one is online only via American Jewish University.

• On January 27 at 7 p.m., Chen Drachman, Dani Shapiro, and I will be joined at the Marlene Meyerson JCC on the Upper West Side by actress extraordinaire Tovah Feldshuh, who stars in the short film that Chen will be showing! Tovah has appeared in dozens of Broadway and Hollywood productions; her most recent project is the Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This. Tickets are here.

• On January 28 at 7 p.m., I’ll be in conversation with Jonathan Rosen at the Center for Jewish History in downtown Manhattan—tickets here. Their new Anne Frank exhibition has been deservedly getting a lot of press—I saw it today and highly recommend it.

• On January 29 at 7 p.m., I’m at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. with my former New Republic colleague Frank Foer, whose disturbing article for the Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” is a must-read.

• On February 1 at 6 p.m., I’ll be at Bird in Hand Bookstore in Baltimore. Hometown friends, please come out!

An adapted version of the book’s introduction is online at Hadassah magazine. And I wrote this essay for the Jewish Book Council about three dramatically different people all inspired by Anne Frank’s life: Yikealo Beyene, originally from Eritrea, who found her book in an Ethiopian refugee camp and translated it into his native Tigrinya; Jeff Mangum, the lead singer of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, who wrote one of the greatest albums of the last few decades after reading the Diary; and Roger Guenveur Smith, a Black theater artist, who performed a one-man show in the voice of Otto Frank. Longer versions of their stories are in the book.

*

Some of you were confused by my new subscription policy, so I’ll explain it again. All new editions of this newsletter will continue to be free. If you just want to receive my monthly (or so) emails, you don’t have to change a thing.

As of this coming Monday, the archives will be paywalled. To access any post older than the most recent one, you will need to be a subscriber. Regular subscribers ($6/month or $60/year) will receive full access to the archive. Founding subscribers ($180/year) are entitled to a book club visit or a private 30-minute Zoom conference with me to discuss anything related to writing.

And a huge thank you to everyone who has preordered! Thanks to you, The Many Lives of Anne Frank is a “#1 new release” on Amazon. Just a reminder: anyone who preorders (Amazon/Barnes and Noble/bookshop.org; for signed copies, Greenlight) is eligible to win a visit from me to your book club! Just email your receipt to ruthfranklinwriter@gmail.com. If you don’t belong to a book club, I’m happy to substitute a 30-minute Zoom writing consultation.

As ever,

Ruth

How are your New Year’s resolutions going?

If you’ve already forgotten about them, you’re not alone. Apparently so many people give up their resolutions by the second Friday in January that it’s known as “Quitter’s Day.”

Maybe this is why no one still seems to make old-fashioned New Year’s resolutions (lose weight, exercise more, stop biting…

Read more

Read more

I went to Poland for the first time in 1994. During the optimistic period after the Oslo Accords, I was part of a cohort of college journalists selected to visit Israel and the West Bank and meet with leading Israeli and Palestinian figures. (It was a different time.) The trip began with a few days spent visiting Auschwitz and the former Warsaw Ghetto.

Until then, I had thought of Poland mainly as a site of trauma. My mother’s parents had been driven out of the country when Hitler invaded. Later, together with hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews, they were deported on Stalin’s orders to a remote, freezing region of the Soviet Union. They spoke of their homeland as a place of pain and suffering.

But something happened to me in Poland that I still can’t explain. From the moment I set foot there, I felt at home. The street signs were impenetrable, filled with ł’s, ę’s, and other letters I couldn’t pronounce. Even in summer, the Warsaw cityscape looked bleak and gray. But internally I felt connected to this place in a way I had never experienced anywhere else.

The group’s itinerary marched on, but even while eating falafel in Bethlehem or visiting Orient House, the PLO headquarters in east Jerusalem (it was really a different time), I couldn’t stop thinking about Poland. When the fall semester started, I signed up for a Polish poetry class and found a study abroad program for spring. Less than six months after that fateful trip, I moved into a dorm room in Kraków.

Share

As I’ve written before, my time there wasn’t easy. I was ready to embrace Poland, but it wasn’t ready to embrace me. Jewish culture was limited to a “Schindler’s List” tour, an annual klezmer festival, and a couple of restaurants serving unrecognizable versions of traditional foods. My Polish grammar teacher insisted that the language spoken by Jews was called “Jewish” rather than Yiddish. I was thrilled to find a summer internship at the Warsaw bureau of the New York Times, but one of my assignments was investigating a report that a flea market vendor was selling “authentic soap” manufactured at the Stutthof concentration camp. It was with some relief that I returned to the United States.

But the feeling that in some elemental way I belonged in Poland never left me. And when I returned in 2019 to profile Olga Tokarczuk for The New Yorker, it intensified. More than twenty years after my first visit, the country had undergone a seismic cultural shift and manifested a new openness to Jewish culture. An exhibit of prints by Polish artists on display at the Warsaw airport titled “Polish Family Album” included a portrait of a black-hatted, long-bearded Jewish man. A magazine editor suggested we meet at a hip vegan restaurant called Tel Aviv. Polish intellectuals sported t-shirts with Yiddish lettering.

Subscribe now

Back home, I started looking into the process of Polish citizenship by descent. According to current Polish law, you can become a citizen if you have at least one direct ancestor who was born in Poland, lived there after 1920, and did not voluntarily give up their Polish citizenship. In fall 2020, I hired a Polish law firm to begin the process for myself and my eldest child. The process took longer than usual because of Covid delays and other complications, but last summer we finally received our passports. When I held mine in my hands, tears came to my eyes.

Of course, there were practical reasons for doing this. After 2016, I began to think seriously for the first time about leaving the United States. For many different reasons, I worry about the political climate here. It’s reassuring to have the option of living and working in the European Union if things take a drastic turn.

But Polish citizenship means more to me than a potential lifeline out of a nation in decline. It’s an act of restitution for the crime committed decades ago against my grandparents, who were robbed of everything they owned, forced into Stalin’s hands, and threatened with violence when they returned. It acknowledges that a historical injustice was perpetrated against my family. And it offers something valuable as reparation.

My citizenship certificate states that I hold Polish citizenship “from the date of birth.” On that long-ago trip, I was already a citizen of Poland, even though I didn’t know it yet. I could sense it in my bones.

Do you have dual citizenship? Have you thought about applying for citizenship by descent in Poland, Slovakia, or another Eastern European country? Tell us about it in the comments.

Leave a comment

What I’m listening to

I’m late to the party with this one, but I recently discovered the podcast “60 Songs That Explain the 90s” and have been loving host Rob Harvilla’s brilliant, insane, insanely brilliant commentary on everything from Mazzy Star’s “slowcore” to Cher’s use of autotune. A new season—“60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s”—just kicked off with an analysis of a rhetorical trope featured in The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” that had me literally laughing out loud while walking my dog. Rob: As a literary critic, I’m here if you need expert advice on anything else. Really! Call me.

What I’m writing

For the New York Times Book Review, I reviewed When We Flew Away, Alice Hoffman’s new novel about Anne Frank before the war—a fairy-tale-like account of an Anne who’s “spunky, dreamy and full of promise.”

As ever,

Ruth

You’ve never heard that bang in your house before. It’s coming from the kitchen. You go down there and there’s nothing in the kitchen. Even if you go back to sleep, it’s going to be on your mind the next day. And if it happens again—the more it happens, the more you’re going to want to know.

Dear friends,

Considering that this newsletter is called “Ghost …

Read more