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March 5, 1999/17 Adar 5759, Vol. 51, No. 23
Publishers compete over Anne Frank biographies
DOUGLAS DAVIS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LONDON - Three of Britain's most prestigious publishing houses are engaged in a big-money tussle over what each claims to be the "definitive" biography of Anne Frank.
The rival biographies will be published later this month to mark the 70th anniversary of the birth of Frank, one of the most enduring and powerful symbols of the Holocaust. Each claims to have received the personal endorsement of the Frank family and to have had privileged access to previously unpublished documents.
Friends, family and Holocaust scholars are divided over the relative merits of the three biographies - Viking's "Roses from the Earth," by Carol Ann Lee; Bloomsbury's "Anne Frank: The Biography," by Melissa Muller; and Macmillan's "The Story of Anne Frank," by Mirjam Pressler.
Lee and Muller each claim to reveal fresh information about the identity of the person who betrayed the Frank family, but some who have read the books say neither author has, in fact, produced any new evidence.
Frank was 13 when she went into hiding in her native Amsterdam. She was not yet 16 when she and her family, along with another family who shared their hiding place, were arrested by the Nazis.
Frank was put on the last train from Amsterdam to Auschwitz. She died of typhus, among the last victims of the Holocaust, after being moved to Bergen-Belsen. Her diary, written while in hiding in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944, was not found by the Nazis who arrested her and is now considered to be the most widely read document about the Holocaust.
Whatever the merits of the books, the publishing fest marks a recognition by the literary industry of the lasting appeal of Anne Frank's tragic life story - and of its commercial potential.
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