42
Alison Luterman
students were young, questioning women, partway through the process of
coming out. When I filled my paper plate with rice and beans and salad and sat
down, someone was asking J. how she could maintain a separatist head in a coed environment. J. replied with a sigh that of course men were in the world,
and unfortunately there were many of them going to college with us, but we
could choose to ignore them as much as possible. Don't make eye contact,
don't speak to them, she advised. I felt a chill go up my spine. Another, more
politically savvy person might have taken a moment to notice that this was not
a safe environment in which to voice differing opinions, but I was never one
to wait for the right situation when the wrong one was presenting itself so
irresistbly
"But how can you pretend they don't exist?" I asked. "I mean, what about
brothers and fathers, what about your cousins-what about male friends?"
J. looked at me like I was an infected pimple on the gorgeous butt of
radical feminism. A bunch of women shifted over to the other side of the room.
I noticed that there was a lot of space around where I was sitting.
I don't remember any of her tirade after that, except for the punchline:
"Look what happens when straight women invade our lesbian space. See how
all our valuable lesbian energy always gets caught up in poindess discussions
about men." A few other young women looked as if they thought the way I
did, but none were brave or stupid enough to say so.
Then I remember they took off their shirts and started to massage each
other. I wondered if they were trying to shock me. I didn't think women's
breasts were shocking, I thought they were beautifuL But I had no more
courage in me to say that. I stayed a few minutes longer, to prove to them that
they hadn't gotten to me at all, we had just had a civilized, theoretical, political
discussion, and then as soon as I decendy could I snuck back down to Helen's
kitchen and burst into tears.
Now I am thirty-seven. I have been married and am separated from my
husband. I hang out in a Jewish bisexual community in San Francisco where
we chant bruchas before we make love with each other and everyone knows
my business. It feels like coming full-circle twenty years, back to high school,
except now we have mOre words to say who we are and what we want.
Bisexual is an unsatistying word to me, but it's the one we have now. To
me, it means almost the same as Jew; something about being on the margins,
the edges, the in-between space. I am used to hungering afrer and rejecting
safety, used to traveling back and forth between worlds. It seems like my whole
life has been about translation, one world to another: sex and poetry, black,
white, Jew, Gentile, the language of touch, of friendship and community, the
rough, sweet, salty, tender language of survivaL
Anne Frank: The Secret Annex and The Closet
Allen Ellenzweig
I
n the summer of 1993 I made a
pilgrimage to the "Secret Annex" at 263 Prinsengracht. This is the major
tourist attraction in Amsterdam known throughout the world as the Anne
Frank House. People moved slowly from room to room. I could barely
remember the feelings I'd had on my first visit to the Annex almost a quartercentury earlier. An unexpected thought struck me: the "Secret Annex" as the
gay comic Frank Maya used to quip, would make a very fine apartment in New
York City With the right designer, you could fashion a real showplace. I looked
around and hoped my shameful irreverence did not show On my face. Had I
not come here to breathe the air not only of eight dead souls-the Franks and
their companions in misery-but of a whole world of European Jewry? It had
after all been my experience, both On my first trip to Europe almost twentyfive years before and on every one since, that I am most indelibly an American
Jew when I am wandering the streets of some capital city in Europe. This was
no place to practice Camp wit.
I was a callow boy of nearly nineteen in 1969, the Summer of the Stonewall
Riots-the homosexual storming of the Bastille--an event which I do not
believe made even a dent in my consciousness at the time. I had completed my
first year of college but had no mare felt myself a member of the Hunter
College student body than I felt myself a member of the human race. All
around was political dissension, demagoguery, a country On the brink-it
seemed-of civil war.
I set out for the Old World with the innocence of a Henry James heroine,
hopmg, It would seem, to be transformed into one by Edith Wharton.
• •
Amsterdam was the second stop on my itinerary Its reputation as both the
Sex and drug mecca of Europe did nor immediately impress me. Instead, what
I knew of Amsterdam Was that I could visit the "Secret Annex" where Anne
Frank hid from the Nazis while writing her famous diary. I had not reread the
diary m preparation for this pilgrimage. Reading the diary often COmes as an
onerous task to young people. As a book on a junior high school reading list
This essay is excerpted from a chapter of a work-in-progress titled Chosen People: TIle
Holocaust and the Gay Imagination.
43
44
The Secret Annex and the Closet
Allen Ellenzweig
it may be presented as a rite-of-passage narrative---along with such staples of
young adult literature as David Copperfield, Ethan Frome, and The Catcher in the
Rye. Thus, the diary is "universalized." On its initial American publication, for
example, in her brief supporting introduction Eleanor Roosevelt managed
with all her kind words never once to use the word "Jewish." Rather, she
concentrated on telling us how much Anne is like every other young girl, thus
not appearing to plead a special case: "Anne wrote and thought much of the
time about things which very sensitive and talented adolescents without the
threat of death will write---her relations with her parents, her developing selfawareness, the problems of growing up ... her diary tells us much about
ourselves and about our own children." In the period in question it might have
seemed perfecrly natural in recommending her diary to the "general" reading
public for Mrs. Roosevelt not to mention something so vital as Anne Frank's
being a Jew-as if that were somehow beside the point.
We know now that it was not even Mrs. Roosevelt who wrote those
words. A Doubleday editor penned the short introduction and Mrs. Roosevelt
signed on. But a moderating view of Anne Frank's Jewishness was well within
her father's own perspective. In a letter to Otto Frank, the Doubleday editor,
Barbara Zimmerman, put the case that a non-Jewish dramatic adaptor of the
diary would not fall into the trap, which a Jewish writer might, "of limiting the
play to simply Jewish experience. The wonderful thing about Anne's book is
that it is really universal ... ,"
From the diary's introduction on, then, and most especially in its later
dramatizations, stage center became the tale of a young girl discovering herself
in the frame of familial tensions-tensions heightened, to be sure, by the war
outside her window and the hardships of life in hiding. But still, a drama about
growing up, defining oneself, questioning one's ideals and ethical principles,
discovering one's sexuality, while the Oedipal family dynamic and the offstage
abominations serve as springs that launch these questing forces. If you will, a
Bildungsroman written under inordinate stress. Indeed, the American version of
the diary is called Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, a benign title which
suggests a universalist ethos that might assure the widest possible readership.
It is Anne's innocence itself that recommends her as "adolescent" literature.
How charmed we are when she declares, "... it seems to me that neither Inor for that matter anyone else---will be interested in the unbosomings of a
thirteen-year-old schoolgirL Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but
more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in
my heart." As time has passed and other documents have come forward,
however, it grows all too clear that the diaries of another Dutch Jew, Etty
Hillesum, published in English in 1983 as An Interrupted Life, would not likely
45
have managed in the immediate postwar decade to attract the popular
followmg of an Anne Frank. In her first entry in March of 1941, the twentyseven-year-old Etty writes:
The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so sharp and my feelings
so deep, but writing about them comes hard. The main difficulty I think .
fh
S
'
,1S
a s.ense 0 S arne. 0 many inhibitions, so much fear ofletting go, of allowing
thin~ to pour out of me, an~ yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give
my !tfe a reasonable. and satIsfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating
scream t~at al~ays socks bashfully in your throat when you make love. I am
accomphshed m bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be
counted. amon~ the better l?vers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection,
~n~ yet It remams a mere tufle, set apart from what is truly essential and deep
mSlde me something is still locked away.
'
Etty is not a young girl untried in the ways of the world. And while she like
Anne, wonders ~~w itwill be possible to use her diary to free from deep within
what Anne calls all kinds of things buried in my heart:' Etty at least has adult
sexual experience to call upon as a parallel for the emotional liberation she
seeks. Where Anne in her early entries-before the family goes into hiding-IS frankly boy-crazy, and coquettishly describes her flirtations, we immediately
face m Etty a woman of some considerable sexual self-possession. Not a fitting
martyr. No, Anne appeals to so many because she is beyond the judgment of
adult behaVIor. She IS forever frozen in eternal youth, forever "becoming" a
:;oung woma~. And so she may be read uncritically, thoughtlessly, and
umversalized as If she were a character in an allegory instead of the all-tooreal young gIrl whose gingerly descriptions of masturbarion, along with some
of the sharper comme.nts made against her mother, and an explicit description
of th,e female gemtalia, were understandably edited by her father from the
diary s ongmal published versions.
Alas, to some Jewish women "Anne Frank" in any incarnation has become
a burden, the perfect Jewish girl whose martyrdom is too impossible for them
to hve up to. Worse, whose belief that "people are really good at heart"
expresses an unbearable naivete given the fate Anne herself would ultimately
meet. Yet she remains for many young Jewish women a barometer of good
behaVIor, more real in her mischievo\1sness than Daniel Deronda's too virtuous
and self-sacrificing Mirah, and far better than Shylock's Jessica, whose shame of
Shylock IS succinctly expressed as discomfort with his Jewishness: "But though
I am daughter to his blood,!I am not to his manners." Anne, alas, loved her
father, Otto Frank, her "Pim."
•
•
46
The Secret Annex and the Closet
Allen Ellenzweig
My trip to the Anne Frank House in 1969 was deliberate but in no specific
sense pedagogical. The diary simply held a special place in my memory; It was
the first reading I had done that introduced me, in however small a way, to the
desperate fate met by European Jewry only a few years before my birth. I had
not come to the book as a school assignment; I had known about It from about
the age of nine when my father took my older sister and me into the city to
see the movie version directed by George Stevens.
One particular scene struck me with great force. Anne dreams of her best
friend Lies, whom she has left behind in the Amsterdam outSide thelt h1dmg
place, being herded like a zombie along with masses of other people.
Something in the soundtrack heightens the tension of the scene;Anne awakens
screaming from her nightmare. Despite not entirely understandmg the Import
of this sequence, I nevertheless understood that the people on screen were
hated and suffering for being Jews. I knew that I was a Jew, that my family
members were Jews, and that therefore the action of the story deeply
implicated me in a way I could not quite grasp. Yet the sense of menace and
impending horror was not simply happening somewhere out there m a foreign
land or in a time past, but was felt like a present truth.
Something of this truth had already been communicated to me. When I
was just five years old, we lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood which
has since become quite fashionable but was less so at the tlme we hved there.
One day, my father told me that my sister had been chased and taunted on her
way home from school because she was Jewish. I could not possibly have
understood why this happened, for barely in kindergarten I would not have
grasped the vulnerable social distinction of being a Jew. Still, to hear such a
story immediately put me on notice that I too could be subject to harsh
treatment, verbally abused, and a target for physical assault.
This sense of my vulnerability intensified when I looked out the window
one day to watch neighborhood boys playing in the street. My mother made
it clear that I was not to join them, that those boys were rough. She did not
have to say to me that they were not Jewish, for it went unspoken but assumed
that rough boys could not be Jews.
For the children of Holocaust survivors (I am not one), the sense of
physical insecurity may be a permanent feature of their upbringing. For Anne
Kochman, a Jewish lesbian whose father was briefly put in a concentratlon
camp following Kristallnacht, it has been" deeply ingrained that the outside IS
very dangerous. The lock on the door was very important. Keys were very
important and answering the phone, never letting anyone have information
that they shouldn't have ... the world was very dangerous."
Yet even without my having so stark an experience of anti-Semitism's
47
effects, the world outside was represented by my parents as a world of dangers,
and those dangers were conflated to include both those of the anti-Semitic
Gentile world and those of the rough-housing "masculine" one. Of course I
did not have the vocabulary or the experience for understanding subtle gender
d1stmctlOns and sexual attractions when I was a child.Yet to see myself as a Jew
m a world full of gOytm was already to perceive myself in a defensive posture
With regard to the world beyond my window where sturdy boys played rough
but comradely, yet m either case to my exclusion.
We moved from Park Slope to Sheepshead Bay sometime in the middle of
my career in a public school kindergarten, but not before I passed my first halfyear among Christian classmates busily making Christmas trees out of colored
paper one December day.
I was already experiencing a double alienation: my outsider's role as a Jew
ran parallel to that of my role as a gay child, a child who does not conform to
social expectations of masculinity. This does not mean that the experience of
bemg a Jew m a Gentile world is identical to being a homosexual in the
heterosexual one, but I can say for myself, and I am supported by the testimony
of other lesbian and gay Jews, that many of us experience our homosexual
ldent1t1es through the prior or simultaneous sense of being Jews in Christian
Amenca. In his essay "Confessions of a 'Feygele-Boichik:" Burt E. Schuman
pictures the paths to his Jewishness and gayness as "u.s. 1 and Interstate 95 in
New England~at times converging, at times diverging and at times running
parallel ... It IS difficult to be sure which sensations came first-the sight of
shabbos candles on my grandmother's kitchen table or my brother's bare
chest . .. ."
From my own experience as a boy soon to discover himself gay, I learned
to hide, to closet myself, to hold myself apart from an outside world which is
rough-to use my mother's term-a world in which Gentile boys, good
Germans all, could bully you into a concentration camp and taunt you while
gassmg you In a shower.
If these terms seem hyperbolic, we have to remember the often stark
emotional colors in which children experience the world. In discussing these
matters, Richard Haymes, a friend of mine who is also a gay Jew, speaks
dramatlcally of how as a youngster he understood the parallel between his two
Identities. "I knew that you could be'killed for either one.You could be killed
for being a Jew, or you could be killed for being gay."
What a gay adolescent might therefore learn from reading Anne Frank or
Iir~m seeIng
. TIte D'wry cif Anne Frank--separate experiences to be sure--is the
fnghtful punishment a majority population can inflict upon a minority one in
Its nudst. Arnie Kantrowitz, one of the most humane and humorous chroniclers
48
The Secret Annex and the Closet
Allen Ellenzweig
of gay and gay-Jewish life, speaks of the central element of "fear of discovery"
that permeates our understanding of both Anne Frank's "Secret Annex" and the
gay closet. He sees in both experiences, the Jew in hiding and the gay in hiding,
a common "terror."
It is worth remembering that Weimar Berlin had the most developed of all
prewar gay communities; thus, it was perhaps inevitable that Nazi ideology, of
mandated Aryan procreation and masculinism, found in homosexuality, as It
had in its fixed perception of the Jewish "race," another opportune target of
social deviance. As we learn from Richard Plant's study of the period, The Pink
7riangle, the Nazis enforced and expanded sanctions for homosexual behavior
which initially emanated from the notorious Paragraph 175, Germany's antihomosexual penal code of1871. Student fascists destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's
Institute of Sexual Research in one of the Nazis' earliest displays (1933) of
cultural destruction; Hirschfeld, a renowned sexologist and activist against
Paragraph 175, was himself a socialist, homosexual, and Jew, and therefore, in
Nazi eyes, a triple threat. The Reich expanded its anti-gay program first by
restricting gay life-closing bars, censoring gay publications-and then by
increasing penalties for same-sex activities until, in 1941, the death penalty was
prescribed for any German engaging in sexual activity with another man.
Ultimately, the Reich succeeded, by ferreting out information from
subscription lists and eager informers, and by expanding the discretionary
powers of Nazi judges, in sending thousands of gay men to concentration
camps where they were put to slave labor and used, as the non-Jewish gay
survivor Pierre Seel recounts, for "medical" experiments. But while the
numbers who ultimately died in the lager may not be said to constitute a
genocide, our awareness of this history must give pause: for the SS or the local
police to "discover" that onc was gay was of alarming personal consequence
after the heyday of Weimar libertinism.
Today, then, as we pass through a period in which ethnic, religious, gender,
and sexual COlnmunities vie for victim status, engaging in the truly distasteful
spectacle of comparing oppressions, we need to approach issues of prejudice,
persecution, genocide, and "mere" discrimination with finer tuning. It cannot
be sufficient, as an essay in the Jewish-lesbian anthology The Tribe of Dina
argues, that "The Holocaust has ... become a measure of oppression: 'if we're
not being marched to the showers, how bad can it be? So we should shut up
about it.'" The pain of a community under siege may be greater or lesser from
an historical perspective. But individuals in their struggle for dignity, selfesteem, mental health, and physical and economic security cannot always call
upon historical comparisons for easy succor. Or rather, if they do, such
comparisons may bring cold comfort.
49
So what gay men and lesbians face when they are in the closet is not
equivalent to what Jews in hiding faced under the Nazis, not even equivalent
to what gays living in the sphere of Nazi persecution faced. Yet Anne Frank's
experience in hiding can have particular resonance for homosexuals, especially
for queer youth, because young lesbians and gays live in that constant "fear of
discovery" whose consequences, though unknown, feel both dreadful and
terrifying-and the more dreadful and terrifying perhaps because they are
unknown. The threatened loss of family love and support, the possibility of
sOClal shammg, the potential ridicule from and eventual ostracism by one's
peers, and even the prospect of breaking all family ties are not to be thought
nunor psychological disruptions in the life of gay and lesbian teenagers. A
recent report on youth suicide conducted during the Reagan administration,
and squelched from full public airing by President Bush's Health and Human
Services
~ecretary
Louis Sullivan in response to pressure from Congressional
conservatIves, found that gay and lesbian youth are two to three times more
likely to attempt suicide than other young people and that gayIlesbian youth
may compnse up to thmy percent of completed youth suicides each year.
Indeed, the report placed suicide as the leading cause of death among young
gays and lesbIans. In New York City, the Board of Education's "Rainbow
Curriculum" was abandoned because a small part of its reading list would have
pernutted students to become acquainted with such alternative family units as
same-sex heads of households (Heather Has Two Mommies). Congress has passed
a bill whereby even mere "tolerance" of homosexuality may not be taught in
schools. Th,s, at a tIme when hate crimes of all kinds have greatly escalated.
In other words, queer children are expendable. This does not have the
chilling quality of the SS at the door; it is quiet murder of a more passive sort.
•
If the emphasis in teaching about the Holocaust is too much on its final
stages, we may miss the opportunity to alert young people to the disturbing
truth: that the Holocaust did not begin with the ovens, with the showers, with
trucks spraying Zyklon-B; it began with discrimination, in the moment a
gov~,rnme~,t expressed a ~opular will toward treating a particular population as
the other. In an early entry of her diary (June 20, 1942), Anne Frank offers a
stunning account of what it had been like to be part of such a group:
In 1938 after the pogroms, my two uncles (my mother's brothers) escaped to
the U.S.A. ... Mter May 1940 good times rapidly fled; first the war, then the
caplt~atlon. followed by the arrival of the Germans which is when the
sUf!"enngs of us Jews really began. Anti-Jewish decrees followed each other in
qUIck succession. Jews must wear a yellow star, Jews must hand in their
50
Allen Ellenzweig
bicycles, Jews are banned from trams and are forbidden to drive. Jews are
only allowed to do their shopping between three and five o'clock and then
only in shops which bear the placard "Jewish shop." Jews must be indoors by
eight o'clock and cannot even sit in their own gardens after that hour, Jews
are forbidden to visit theaters, cinemas, and other places of entertainment.
Swinuning baths, tennis courts, hockey fields, and other sport grounds are all
prohibited to them. Jews may not visit Christians. Jews must go to Jewish
schools, and many more restrictions of a similar kind ....
... In 1934 I went to school at the Montessori Kindergarten and
continued there. It was at the end of the school year, I was in form 6B, when
I had to say good-bye to Mrs. K. We both wept, it was very sad. In 1941 I
went, with my sister Margot, to the Jewish Secondary School, she into the
fourth form and I into the first ... So far everything is all right with the four
of us and here I come to the present day.
It is astonishing to realize that this precis of her life under the Nazi occupation
was written just a couple of weeks before the family would be forced into
hiding, but more important is its wealth of detail. Anne writes almost matterof-factly of the 1938 "pogroms"-no doubt the multiple atrocities of
K.ristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Jewish shops and synagogues
were vandalized with impunity-and with equal equanimity Anne mentions
two uncles on her mother's side who have escaped to America. One longs to
know why the Franks themselves have not managed to make the same journey
(especially if we know of Otto Frank's youthful trip to America with his
university friend, Nathan Straus, heir to R.H. Macy's), but no sooner do we ask
this of the text than Anne is on to a litany of the indignities imposed upon
Dutch Jews.
Of course, Germany's Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 have already
stripped German Jews of their citizenship since only those of "German or
kindred blood" may be citizens of the Reich. German Jews were thus no
longer entitled to civil and political rights. Anne's lengthy list of prohibitions
the Jews suffer under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands forces us to
consider just what we as citizens of a free democracy understand by terms like
"civil liberties" or "civil rights," for it is here that contemporary democratic
humanism either stands or falls. And it is here too that the enemies of gay men
and lesbians take their stand, for by their framing the queer struggle for justice
as a case of gays and lesbians demanding "special rights;' they may well force
the courts to decide to what extent America is to tolerate us-or to sanction
intolerance of us. The outcome of the gay and lesbian struggle for equal
protection under the law-protection, for example, against arbitrary job
dismissal because one is gay, or being thrown out of an apartment because one
is lesbian, or protection against the loss of parental rights judged solely on the
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The Secret Annex and the Closet
52
53
Allen EUenzweig
basis of sexual orientation-is not a marginal question, but deals with central
issues of American justice and equality.
.
And every public fight over gay and lesbian rights, whether gays m the
military or campaigns to secure domestic partnership benefits, or the current
fight over same-sex marriage, is a battle that cuts two ways m the rrunds and
hearts of queer boys and girls. On the one hand, such pubhclty may provIde
assurances that homosexuals are everywhere, that there are gay men and
lesbians willing to stand up and fight for their place in the body politic. Yet to
see and hear the outrageous remarks of those opposed to our full mtegratlOn
into the polity-who call us diseased, sick, perverted, immoral, disgustmg, an
offense to God unnatural-is also to advertise to the closeted gay and lesbIan
adolescent that 'perhaps, after all, there is more safety and security in silence. For
even children living relatively close to gay urban centers may feel, m the face
of such alarming vocal opposition, that to come out IS to nsk ummagmable
wrath at home, at school, at social events, or merely walking in the street.
For example, in a 1990-91 study by Seattle's Commission for LesbIans and
Gays quoted in Kurt Chandler's book Passages of Pride: Lesbian and Gay Youth
Com~ of Age, nearly seventy-five percent of almost 1,300 lesbians and gays
surveyed reported having been physically or verbally abused. S,Xty percent
claimed to have been verbally abused by a stranger, twenty percent by an
acquaintance, and sixteen percent by a member of their own family. Physical
attacks were reported by sixteen percent overall.
. .
Chandler reports that in a national survey of six urban centers, vIctIm
service agencies in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and New
York documented" cases ranging from harassment to vandalism to assault to
bomb threats to kidnapping to murder." One lesbian reported having been
queer-bashed in Seattle while walking with her girlfriend. A group offrat boys
with a baseball bat "whacked me a good one and broke two ribs. And they
broke her nose ... It was really traumatic. I was fifteen."
•
In the aftermath of the war and with the early success of the first European
publication of his daughter'S diary, Mr. Frank hoped to see Anne reach a wide
audience to "sound a healing note;' and he was confirmed m h,s beliefs by the
response'of many Christian readers. Large numbers of non-Jews "testified that
his daughter'S rare book was an inspiring celebratlOn of hfe m the face of
hostile forces. Few correspondents or friends spoke of the speClfic cnme of
Germans murdering Jews or of the more general human capacity for abusing
people of different beliefs and appearances" (See L. Graver). Were we to be
uncharitable, however, we might say that many of those same people were
unwilling to face the extent to which their own silence helped perpetrate the
cnmes that were committed against the Jews of Europe and imposed upon
Anne Frank the very martyrdom they were so quick to find inspiring.
At a distance of fifty years from the end of the war, it is now impossible to
recreate the mlXture of moral exhaustion and desperate hope that must have
been felt by those who survived to see the Allied victory Yet the diary was not
Immediately received as a light emanating out of darkness. Its complicated early
b~rth suggests that m the first decade following the war there were many who
did not WIsh to be reminded of a popularly supported dictatorship whose
poliCles ultImately led to genocide.
The diary reads as a coming-of-age in extremis, but a coming-of-age full of
uncommon self-mocking wit and elan, as well as one throbbing with the
melodramatIc Sturm und Drang of adolescence. This is what enabled Anne's
diary to appeal finally to a remarkably wide public, each reader also taking from
Annahes Frank the comfort that at least this quick mind this effervescent
sprite, did not die in vain. It is these buoyant qualities of s~irit and language
that gIve the dIary ItS transcendent quality, enabling many who might
otherwIse have looked away to believe they had faced the beast by reading
Anne Frank's book. For many, The Diary of a Young Girl may be the only
Holocaust lIterature they have read.
In this way, everyone appropriates Anne. From the beginning of her
appearance as a. public .writer, however, she was blessed for her unique voice
but largely demed JewIsh particularity. And what was also subsumed by her
lCOmC status as the chIld of the Holocaust, which is to say the Innocent, was
her partlculanty as a girl experiencing sexual awareness, struggling with an
mc'p,ent ferrumsm-all the while unable to give these feelings voice to parents
whose presence was Immediately proximate. HKitty," the name to whom she
addressed her diary entries, was after all her best friend, and it was to her Anne
confided, however much she shared her feelings with her sister Margot with
whom there was some rivalry, or with Peter van Daan, for whom sh~ had
mtense feelings over a short span of time, but in whom she also lost
confidence--in part because he was too willing to deny his Jewish heritage.
So that even wlthm the confines of her hiding place, Anne Frank herself
was hIding her own heart's secrets, so much so that Otto Frank felt on reading
her dIary that he had perhaps never really known his own daughter. Hidden
secrets of the heart are the common experience of adolescence, but such secrets
are far more dearly held by those gay and lesbian youth who fear not the mere
embarrassment of discovery, but its potentially disastrous consequences. At least
Anne and Margot and Peter grew up into their minority Jewish status with
JewIsh parents as models to follow or rebel against; queer children grow up to
The Secret Annex and the Closet
54
55
Allen Ellenzweig
discover they are strangers within their own homes, exiled by their sexuality.
Gay and lesbian histoty, culture, and rituals are unknown in their households;
as they discover themselves to be sexually different from their brothers and
sisters and from their classmates, queer boys and girls find themselves adrift in
a seascape without markers.
Reflecting at one point about her own sexual maturation, Anne writes on
January 6, 1944:
Sometimes when I lie in bed at night I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts
and listen to the quiet, steady beating of my heart. Unconsciously, I had these
feelings even before I came here. Once when I was spending the night at
blossoming homosexualitv. For it
. glves
. that child
..
joyous, honorable.
penrusslOll to see it as natural,
Anne confided this to "Kit "Yi
1
her
wisdom who saw his daughter'stydi·' ears ahter'li
father, Otto Frank, a man of
aryasa ea ngdocu e t '
.
lor tolerance and nonsect . .
C
h'
m n ,an mstructlve plea
arIamsm lor t e unl
1 . .1
respect toward others allowed th' '
versa pnnClp es of enlightened
by the world. Otto F;a k
15 passage, potentially provocative, to be read
n saw no overwhelmmg sh
. A
'
high regard and erotic affection for another irl arne In nne s
of
the lonely struggle of co .
g . For many a youngster facmg
mmg out ,Anne
herem
b e s an exceptional
confidante.
eco
c
admissio~
Jacque's, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she'd
always hidden from me and which I'd never seen. I asked her whether, as
proof of our friendship, we could touch each other's breasts. Jacque refused.
WORKS CITED
I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Evety time I see a female
Berenbaum, Michael, Ph.D. The World Must Know'
.
In the United States Holocaust Me
. 1 M ' The HIStory of the Holocaust as Told
mona
useum (Beste T
rown and Company, 1993).
n, oronto, London: Little,
nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes
I find them so exquisite I have
to
struggle to hold back my tears. If only I
had a girlfriend!
From my first reading, I always remembered the essentials of the above passage,
which even appeared in the earliest Doubleday edition, although with one
small elision-the sentence about Anne desiring to kiss Jacque, and doing soand I remember as a youngster finding great comfort in this passage. What
Anne writes here is a quite pure expression of female homoeroticism in which
desire is wed to the urge for action. It is also not only about same-sex desire
prompted by a particular person, Jacque, but about the way in which a young
girl appreciates the ideal beauty of her own sex "such as the Venus in [her] art
history book."
Although Otto Frank eliminated a number of passages from the diary's
earliest publications (and different language versions were edited to fit different
cultural sensibilities), this particular passage stood almost intact, at least in the
American edition of the early 1950s. It spoke deeply to me as an adolescent
reader. It made normative what might in another book have seemed perverse;
it granted glory to a love of one's own sex embodied in an ideal figure; it
expressed as natural the curiosity about one's own and another's body, even if
that other is of the same sex; and it rendered imaginable specifically adolescent
same-sex desire, the desire simply to touch and be touched.
We need not make a claim for this as evidence of a lesbian Anne Frank.
There are many more passages attesting to her interest in boys. In any case, we
can never know the woman she would have grown into. That said, this passage
must cut to the quick that adolescent struggling in secret with his or her own
B
Chandler, Kurt. Passages of Pride: Lesbian and G
. Toronto: Times Books, 1995).
ay Youth Gome of Age (New York,
Ellot, George. Daniel Deronda (ori 'nall
bli h
by Barbara Hardy (Penguin E';;;r hiP: s ed 1876), edited with an Introduction
Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The ;l~ar 10 r:ry~eprint, ~ 967).
Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday YI9~2) oung Girl, Introduction by Eleanor
Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Dia
by Susan Massotty, Frank,
Doubleday, 1995).
if
O~oo ~ Yo'
ou~g
. an
.
GlYl: TIle n.d!nitive Edition, translated
Pressler, MItJam, eds. (New York:
Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank' The C' .
..
Netherlands State Institute for W D '
. ntlCal EdJ/ton, prepared by the
r
Stroom, Gerrold cds (New Yo ak Docubmledutation, Bamouw, David and Van Der
G"
,.
r: ou e ay 1989)
les, Miep (with Alison Leslie Gold). Anne Fran '
.
Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family (New yk ~e~embered: He Story of the Woman
Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession LVitlt A
F
or. Imon and Schuster, c. 1987).
. University ofCalifomia Press, 1995),ne rank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley:
Hillesum, Etty. An Interrupted Life' He Diaries if
.
from the Dutch by Arno Pome:ans (N
Y Ok Etty H,liesum 1941-43, translated
Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie and Kle fisz ew ~r: Pantheon Books, 1983).
anti-Semitism and Jewish ident!:v) ,; Ire;'t. ~KGerangilln Struggle (handbook on
Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women!s An~~ I aye(Mantro~ltz and Klepfisz, eds" The
1986).
. 0 ogy
ontpeher, VT: Sinister Wisdom
Lindwer, Willy. He Last Seven Months of A
'
P Meersschaert (New York: Pantheon, 19~~)Prank, translated from Dutch by Alison
lant, Richard. He Pink Triangle: The Naz'
.
New Republic Books/Henry H I d C' War AgO/nst Homosexuals (New York:
0
Raphael, Lev. Journeys & A mva
. I.
s. 0 nt aBn.
erno6 ompany,
Gay an dJ1986).
. h (B oston, London: Faber
and Faber, 1996),
eWJS
56
Winter/Spring
Allen Ellenzweig
Schuman, Burt E. "Confessions of a 'Feygele-Boichik, ,,' in Balka, Andy and Rose,
Christie, eds., Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish (Boston: Beacon
Saturday Morning Cowboy
Press, 1989).
Seel, Pierre I. Pierre Seel) Deported Homosexual: A Memoir oJNazi Terror, translated from
the French by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
Shakespeare, William. 11" Merchant of Venice, Mowat, Barbara A. and Werstine, Paul,
eds. (New York: Washington Square Press, New Folger's Edition, 1992).
Van det Roi, Ruud and Verhoeven, Rian. Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary, A
Photographic Remembrance, translated by Tony Langham and Plym Peters, with an
Introduction by Anna Quindlen (New York: Viking, 1993).
Having done my hitch, bravely soldiered
the manly burden of barmitzvoh, I wanted
nothmg more to do with early morning
serVIces worse than a school day. Too bad for me
SadIe had set his temple on the lot next to ours·
for when they needed a tenth man Rabb·
'
alki
'
1 came
w
ng up the black strip of our driveway
humming, "The Tennessee Waltz." For reas~ns
he could not explain or understand, the God
ofJacob and Isaac had personally asked for me.
*Quotes from Richard Haymes, Arnie Kantrowitz, and Anne Kochman are taken
from interviews conducted with the subjects during the summer of 1994.
FILMS AND VIDEOS
Anne Frank Remembered, 1995, wtitten, produced, and directed by Jon Blair, in cooperation with the Anne Frank House and in associaton with the BBe and the Disney
Channel, 122 minutes. Videorecording (documentary feature film).
The Attic:11u Hiding of Anne Frank, 1988, directed by John Erman, a production of
Telecom Entertainment, Inc. in association with Yorkshire Television. Telefilm.
The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959, directed by George Stevens, based on the Broadway
play by Frances Goodtich and Albert Hackett, produced by Twentieth Century
Fox, 170 minutes. Feature
rum.
The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by Botis Sagal, based on the Broadway play by
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, 104 minutes. Teleftlm.
The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, c. 1988, Audio-Visual-Arts Production, a Willy
Lindwer production, ca. 73 minutes. Documentary film.
"Mottel," he would say, using the Yiddish name
that flustered and angered me "With th· G d h
th '
'1
.
IS
0
ere,
ere s no p eas~, exc~se, but I'm too busy watching
som: cowboy p,cture. He tells you pick up the ark,
don t answer back like a wiseguy 'tomorro
b
but toda . .
, w , may e
y, It Just so happens, I woke up with a backache ....'"
Lulled by those tremulous voices that never rose
above a whisper, I watched the hooked letters gallop
backward, then imagined myself stepping down out of
the saloon mto a dustblown street. High time we found out
who had the faster gun: this cardsharping Rabbi
or me. I slowly took a breath: "Your move, padre."
Suddenly the ceiling seemed to crack beneath
Its flesh of paint, but it was only the Torah being
tousted from Its hiding place. Then how they jerked
and trembled-as if some horritying discharge
I tried
looki
bof current.
Yi h . When it passed close,
n
g away,
ut u die, who still called me the litrle pische
and even in his best clothes smelled of horse r
cuffed
.
manure,
me twIce on the back of the head and gestured
.
I too must kiss the hem of my tallis and touch it
to the rough,jewel-studded cloth-but inward}
. g
grolamn
that at least another hour remained be£ore I'd bYe set
oose.
57