THE STOLEN LEGACY OF ANNE FRANK.<i> By Ralph Melnick</i> .<i> Yale University Press: 304 pp., $27.50</i>

I

There is something particularly compelling about the pathos of Anne Frank. Her “Diary of a Young Girl,” first published in Dutch 50 years ago, has been translated into 54 languages and has been read by more than 24 million people around the world. Millions more have experienced her life through the somewhat anodyne Goodrich-Hackett Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play of the 1950s and the 1959 George Stevens screen adaptation of that play.

At the more banal end of this curious obsession with an extraordinary young girl are the young American and Japanese tourists who accosted a friend of mine who lived next to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. They were convinced that she was the embodiment of the long-dead diarist. Now I believe that the story of Anne’s life should come with a warning: “Undue concentration on the life and death of the author of this book has been known to cause obsessive behavior and other life-threatening illnesses.”

I was probably guilty of the symptoms when, having been offered the opportunity to become Anne’s first biographer on film, I thought I was being thwarted by an apparently obstructive agent representing one of the many rights holders who control the property known as “Anne Frank.” Determined that her story be told and be told by me before it was too late and all the remaining eyewitnesses had died, I made my film anyway, securing the rights only a few weeks before its official opening. If anyone else had embarked on this course of potential financial suicide, I would have said that he or she were crazy. But, as I said, Anne Frank has that effect on people.

As the most tragic and severe example of the “illness,” there is the story of the late Meyer Levin, whose 30-year dispute with Anne’s father, Otto, is the subject of Ralph Melnick’s book. This is an excruciating account of the desperate, proprietary instincts her life caused in its first documentarians. Levin attained critical acclaim for his 1937 novel, “The Old Bunch,” the story of a group of young Chicago Jews. His best-selling 1957 book, “Compulsion,” about the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder in Chicago, was his last creative offering free from his obsession with his treatment by Anne’s father and literary executor and from his quest to have his unauthorized dramatization of Anne’s diary performed in public.

It seems unlikely that Levin was aware of Rudyard Kipling’s aphorism, “The curse of all Art is that the devotee or disciple is always more certain than the Priest,” but if ever there was a more graphic illustration, it was he. To Levin, Anne’s diary was Art, and if Otto Frank were the Priest, then Levin was a devotee of the utmost zeal. He believed that Anne’s book could not be treated as a literary property in the legal sense. As a unique cultural object of Jewish history, as a “work of art,” it belonged to the Jewish people and to humankind as a whole. To Levin, the normal issues of copyright, exclusivity and the defense of author’s rights did not apply to this work.

In the preface to his self-published play, he wrote that his experience with Anne’s diary raised to the fore questions “central in art, politics, propaganda. . . . The right of a deceased author to be faithfully interpreted. The right of a people to use its own cultural material. The distortion of literature for ideological and commercial motives. The expression of slickness and artisanship over art. The right of a work of proven merit to have a life.”

Over the years Levin accumulated some notable sympathizers for his position, among them Elie Wiesel, who wrote to Levin: “I fail to understand the behavior of Anne’s father. That he should speak of ‘rights’ and ‘agreements’ and ‘trials’ is beyond me.” One can only wonder whether Wiesel, who charges in excess of $20,000 plus first-class air fares for the privilege of listening to his post-Holocaust thoughts and memories, would be prepared to give up the considerable revenue he earns, if the same free-for-all were to be applied to his life as he and Levin were advocating for Anne’s life.

To Levin, it was self-evident that he, not Anne’s father, was the true interpreter of Anne’s legacy and that the official version generated by screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who were supported throughout the ordeal by their friend, playwright Lillian Hellman) was not only an artistic travesty but a travesty of justice for Anne and all the Jewish dead. As he conducted his campaign for 30 years in letters, articles and pamphlets and through the courts, Levin exceeded the boundaries of sense and decency, accusing Otto Frank of murdering his “work of art,” a murder, according to Levin, tantamount to the murder of Otto’s daughter Anne.

Further, Levin claimed that the executors of Anne Frank were committing the most foul deed of suppression that she herself, as a “freedom-loving author,” would never have countenanced. What was worse, a number of known Communists, Communist sympathizers and members of known Communist front organizations had participated in this criminal attack on freedom of thought and word.

Levin ultimately would destroy his health, his marriage and his craft with this obsession. He even wrote a nonfiction book and a novel based on the subject in an effort to cure himself, all to no avail. In and of itself, this story, as told by Melnick, would have been tragic enough as a dramatic illustration of one man’s power to destroy everything he held dear. But it is in other areas that the battle between Levin and Frank holds more enduring significance. For Levin’s tale involves a heady mix of Broadway power brokers, one of the biggest publishing companies in the world, famous legal firms and American views of the Holocaust and the Cold War in the immediate aftermath of Joseph McCarthy. And at the heart of it all of course was the ultimate totem of Nazi genocide, Anne herself.

II

Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from typhus, a miserable and lonely death, naked, lice-ridden and shorn of the dark hair on which she had lavished so much care and attention in hiding. According to eyewitnesses, with her sister Margot dead at her side, and believing both her parents to have been gassed at Auschwitz, she gave up hope. The precocious girl whose talk of nature, love, adolescence and ideals formed the basis of the diary played no part of the Anne Frank of Bergen-Belsen in those dark days and nights of February 1945. Hers was almost certainly one of the bodies that the British quite literally bulldozed into mass graves when they liberated the camp just a few weeks later.

Accompanying those British soldiers was Meyer Levin, an American reporter in his late 30s. Levin, a Zionist Jew, a strong-minded progressive and fervent anti-Communist, was a self-appointed war reporter who had taken upon himself the task of reporting to the citizens of North America the fate of Europe’s Jews. As might be imagined, he was appalled by what he saw and changed by it forever. And, as he wrote many years later, “I realized I would never be able to write the story of the Jews of Europe. The tragic epic cannot be written by a stranger to the experience. . . . Some day a teller would arise from amongst themselves.”

When Levin read Anne’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” shortly after it was first published in French in 1950, he believed he had found that teller. Thus began his lifelong obsession. He contacted Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the eight Jews in hiding who had formed the cast of Anne’s narrative, and he offered to assist Frank in finding an American publisher for the diary. At the same time, he mentioned that he believed the book could provide the basis for “a very touching play or film” and asked permission to explore this with his contacts when he returned to New York later that year.

The problem with Levin was that he was a man who found it difficult distinguishing personal and professional relationships. His first offer to Frank was generous and genuine, and even though Levin was not instrumental in finding the book’s American publisher, Frank agreed to let him work as his unofficial agent in New York. Later, when the New York Times asked Levin to review the American version of the diary, Levin failed to tell the newspaper of his own vested interest in the book’s popularity. He had of course hoped its wide acceptance would launch his own endeavor to adapt the diary for stage and screen. While his overwhelmingly positive appraisal of the diary ensured Doubleday’s success with the book, his own work foundered.

Unknown to either party, as neither seems to have really understood the other’s weaknesses and faults until far too late, Levin had found in Anne’s father an unwitting accomplice. Otto Frank was by all accounts a hugely nice man. He was also a man adrift in a piranha pool when it came to doing business with the fish of Broadway and Madison Avenue. Frank’s business experience included an early period assisting at the bank owned by his family and then, after he immigrated to the Netherlands when Hitler came to power in Germany, running a moderately successful small company selling spices and a product used in home jam-making. Frank and Levin never had a formal written contract, which appeared to suit both parties but ultimately bedeviled their relations.

Frank was well connected, however; one of his closest friends, on whose advice he often relied, was Nathan Straus of the Macy’s empire. But he did not always do himself or his daughter’s literary legacy the greatest justice because of his single-minded, and quite laudable, determination to spread his interpretation of her story and the story of the victims of the Holocaust to the world. It is easy now to forget that in the immediate aftermath of the war, few publishers wanted to take a risk on what they identified as depressing subject matter.

Once he found someone who would take up the cause, Frank, more often than not--to put it bluntly--made bad deals. On other occasions, it seemed that he was the victim of a clash of cultures and generations. Frank was a courtly European of the old school, an officer in Germany’s army in World War I whose secretary in Amsterdam, on whose protective mercy he and his whole family had depended during their time in hiding, would never think of calling him by his first name in a work context, even after years of loyal service. Thus, as a relative naif out in the larger world and in his unswerving desire to propagate the message of the diary, Otto would befriend anyone who offered him assistance of any sort. For a while, Levin became his “newest best friend,” in the parlance of Hollywood, by offering to help Frank in every way possible.

But what Levin wanted from Anne differed fundamentally from Otto’s interpretation of her legacy. To Levin, although Anne’s humanity, adolescent development and playfulness were all of interest, it was her role as spokesperson for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust that was central to the story. The rest was a means to popularize the message about Jewish persecution; according to his reading of the diary, Anne came to believe during her years in hiding that she was being persecuted because she was a Jew. She was to be the storyteller from the mass graves that Levin had been searching for, and if, as he hoped, he could write the stage adaptation, he could provide the gloss for anyone who had missed the point.

Levin, however, was to run afoul of the cruel world of commerce. Or, as he saw it, a far more sinister conspiracy was at work. Because of the involvement, behind the scenes, of people like Hellman, well known for their Communist leanings, the Communist-hating Levin found a scapegoat for all his frustration at not seeing his version of the diary produced. Levin became the match of Joe McCarthy in seeing a Red under every bed, at least when it came to the diary’s stage adaptation. And as he became more obsessive, he compounded his problems.

Once Doubleday recognized what it owned, the publisher began to push for a major Broadway adaptation of the book by well-known writers; they didn’t believe Levin could deliver a hit show. So Levin set about trying to get a stage production of an adaptation by himself. He wrote a draft without a contract, but by the time he had found a producer who would stage it, he had lost the ear of Frank to the others. To an outside observer, it is clear that the commercial influence on Otto, rather than a Communist conspiracy, led to Levin being squeezed out of the action.

Anyone connected with the world of movies and Broadway can easily picture the situation. Melnick, in his version of the story, however, does not seem to understand this. Relying as he does merely on Levin’s version of affairs, bolstered by the dry documentation that he views with a dryness verging on drought, Melnick does not seem to accept that publishers of books and producers of films and plays are in the business of making money. They may be crass, they may lack judgment, they may even be not very good, but do not be surprised if you sup with them with a short spoon, as Levin did, when they shaft you. It doesn’t take a Communist conspiracy to motivate them.

Having lost whatever hold he had over Frank--and there is little doubt that at the very least he was really quite poorly treated by Anne’s father--Levin lost out in the race to be the first to get an adaptation onto the stage. Having recently compared Levin’s play, at least on paper, with the authorized Goodrich-Hackett version, I believe his is probably the better adaptation, although it is in need of considerable work. It is overly didactic and lacking in humor, but the characters as a whole are better drawn and three-dimensional. This cannot be said of the official version, in which the authors essentially fictionalized the characters of the van Daan family and Dussel, the middle-aged dentist with whom Anne shared her bedroom, to an extent that the official play represents a travesty bordering on the offensive.

In Melnick’s favor, it can be said that he accurately shows the quite single-minded way all involved with the play, including the director, the writers and the producer, manipulated the rather gullible Frank into allowing this misrepresentation of his dead friends. As for Anne, Goodrich and Hackett create a suburban American teenager who might almost be locked up in a house in Amityville with a group of family friends, while Levin, skewing the character in the other direction, distorts and overstates her interest in spiritual matters. Both versions, in overstating Anne’s annex romance with Peter that lasted only a few months, miss her very progressive views on the role of women and her great love of nature, a point often missed even by those reading the diary. If nothing else, in the soon-to-be-staged new adaptation of the Goodrich-Hackett play on Broadway, the writer who has been chosen to update the script, Wendy Kesselman, should take the opportunity to rectify some of these issues, in particular those affecting the van Daans and Dussel.

However, it is also all too easy in the post-”Schindler’s List” environment of the 1990s to forget the fearful atmosphere of the mid-1950s, when people hardly dared speak of those dreadful years between 1933 and 1945 in Europe. No one can tell whether the more serious Levin play would have been as successful as the Goodrich-Hackett version was in that era. What is clear is that those who owned the diary didn’t think so, found Levin a pain in the neck to deal with and exercised their right to look elsewhere for their adaptation. Levin was a sore loser. But in fairness to him, at no time in this lengthy affair did he ever seek to profit personally from his play. In fact, he formally gave up his rights to royalties quite early on. The issue at hand from his point of view was to see his work get a public airing.

In his struggle, Levin accurately understood the clash between his own and Frank’s conception of the diary’s “message,” or Anne’s legacy. “Jewish intellectuals have been torn throughout our era between internationalist ideals and ideals of national self-expression. The line against Jewish culture has its adherents in every country. With some, the motive is rigidly political, with others it is quite simply the old embarrassment of being Jewish, the old desire for assimilation.” In the battle, Levin was the nationalist, Frank the internationalist, and Levin was to pursue his cause through the courts of New York, suing Frank and others associated with the play for, among other things, plagiarism and loss of earnings. After a lengthy hearing, the court found partially in his favor, assessing that he was due a lump sum in lieu of lost earnings. He never got paid, because the settlement got caught in further negotiations, complicated by Levin’s inability to honor promises he had made and contracts he had signed.

III

Although Otto Frank had lost his wife, both daughters and most of his friends in the Holocaust and had himself survived death in Auschwitz by the slenderest of threads and, although he was no less fervent an anti-Communist than Levin, he devoted the whole of his postwar life, until his death at 91 in 1980, to promoting the view that Anne’s diary was a propaganda weapon in the ongoing war against discrimination and race hatred of all sorts. Frank believed that it was this universalist view that Anne herself would have maintained had she lived: that racism and the persecution of all minorities were to be vigorously resisted in all their multifarious forms.

To Levin, this was a heresy; the particularity of Anne as a Jewish victim was the central message. In his view, “generalizing away the particular Jewish doom [by emphasizing other cases of discrimination and race hatred] . . . falsifies the Holocaust and opens the way for today’s campaign of denials. It weakens the warning against genocidal methods that could indeed be directed at other peoples, or again at the Jews.” While furiously denying that he had in any way added to the diary, his “slant” was at complete variance with Frank’s interpretation.

The problems with Melnick’s telling of this story are manifold. First, there was a comprehensive and rather good book published on exactly the same subject two years ago, Lawrence Graver’s “An Obsession with Anne Frank.” Second, Melnick’s book reads like a doctoral thesis or, if you prefer, the detailed pretrial notes of an unimaginative defense attorney with no attempt made to entertain the general reader. Whereas Graver traces Levin’s collapse into obsession, Melnick seems to believe that in marshaling a large selection of primary sources, he proves his thesis that Levin somehow had a right to see his adaptation produced. Most particularly, Melnick’s central accusation, that Hellman conspired with others to steal Anne Frank’s legacy, remains unconvincing and unproven.

It is clear to any student of this rather tragic sideshow to the Holocaust and its aftermath that although Levin was certainly shabbily treated, this alone could not justify his descent into the level of craziness that he maintained for almost 30 years. He came to resemble those people who write pages and pages of tightly scripted, single-spaced letters in green ink to the president protesting some perceived or real injustice, and whatever the merits or demerits of his case, the very manner of the protestations led to their being ignored.

He was not without insight into his own condition: “Imbedded in both Jewish and American culture is the precept of the individual’s duty to fight for what is right, against power structures, against what is expedient, and often against what is popular. Those who undertake such a ‘one-man’ fight are regarded as heroes if they win, as cranks until they win, and even if they win, the cost in their lives often seems incommensurate with the value of the cause.” Levin never seemed to appreciate that with Anne able to speak for herself through the published words of her book, whatever the failings of the stage and screen adaptations and whatever the merits of his own work, this fight was not worth 30 years of his life.

The tragedy of Levin was not that he was the victim of a conspiracy. It is best illustrated by his wife in a letter to him in September 1980, the month following Otto Frank’s death. Melnick quotes from the letter: “Next month you’ll be 75 years old. You’ll still have a few years that could be saved. You can choose to save these few years for peace of sorts, for whatever happiness is available, or you can continue your own total destruction. How can you feel anything for me when you have taken out your heart and thrown it into the night for the hundredth hopeless time?” Levin died, unrepentant, the following year.