Reuse, reduce, recycle: the repurposing of Anne Frank’s words in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer

Anne Frank’s diary, from its original conception to its modern multifaceted existence as an object of Jewish memory and transmission, has long been a site of writing, harmonizing and interpreting, all with various objectives and by various editors (including herself). Philip Roth, too, has participated in the tradition of transmitting and reimagining Anne Frank in the “Femme Fatale” section of his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer; Roth quotes Frank’s own words—as published in the 1952 English translation of her diary—rendering these words, unattributed, in italics. This paper explores the literary effects of this resurrection and the limits and implications of using Frank as a mechanism of exploring contemporary Jewish American life. Like reinventions that came before (and after) Roth’s, Frank, through constant borrowings, becomes a malleable symbol belonging to Jewish society and representative of the tragic Jewish past, the ever-slipping-away Jewish present, and the uncertainty of a Jewish future.