By Naftali Rottenstreich

Special to The Post-Star

"Anne Frank: The Book, the Life and the Afterlife" by Francine Prose

I was raised in Brooklyn, in a world whose aspirations, values and fears were not simply defined but dominated by the Holocaust. Most of the kids I knew were either the children or the grandchildren of survivors.

But my father's death a few years ago began to crystallize for me history's transience, the ephemerality of even the most epic events. The testimonies of survivors and witnesses - so prevalent in the last quarter of the 20th century - were beginning to move from living memory into the stasis of textbooks and archives. With this passage comes the very real possibility that subsequent generations will either forget or, worse yet, remain indifferent to the Holocaust.

If history has taught us anything, it has taught us that at some point, we inevitably become blunted to the tragedies of the past. And so it seems that the relevance of the countless stories to come out of this moment needs new - supplemental - modes of justification. Enter Francine Prose's masterful new work, "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life and the Afterlife."

More than any other testament to come out of the Second World War, Anne Frank's diary is the work responsible for bringing an awareness of the Holocaust to places as unlikely as North Korea, Cambodia and Idaho. It has long stood as the most affecting witness to Nazi criminality, able to draw such diverse readers into the drama and tragedy of those eight Jews hiding in that Amsterdam attic. Yet, Prose's study seems to imply, this power seems to be waning. As the Holocaust recedes further and further into the past, its hold on people's conscience and imagination is itself diminishing. Its translation into North Korean, for instance, was motivated not by a concern for a particularly Jewish catastrophe, but to serve as a caution about American imperialism and the potential fate of North Korean children. Even in more benign settings, Prose points out, the specificity of Jewish suffering is displaced by a concern for general human suffering.

Prose of course concedes the human power of Frank's diary, but - recognizing that it is precisely this element of the work that is most tenuous - she has taken on the daunting and important job of proving its literary merit, as well, arguing for its status as a masterpiece. Her study of Frank's tireless process of revision, of her growing authorial identity, her developing sense of literary language, of phrasing, metaphor and especially characterization is alone worth the price of admission. By the time she is through with her literary analysis, Prose has made us see the "Diary" as a complex amalgam of versions and editions, and compels us to ask of it the same questions we would of the varying editions of Shakespeare's plays or Montaigne's essays.

And like all masterpieces, Prose's argument implies the diary's entry into the world - the story of its publication, translation, dissemination and reception - was itself complicated and epic. At the center stands the attic's only survivor, Otto Frank: On the one hand he was Anne's loving father; on the other, a shrewd businessman who used his commercial acumen to make certain that Anne's story would reach as wide an audience as possible.

By the time Prose gets to the American incarnation of the diary, her story begins to take on almost surreal qualities - especially in the move to adapt the work for stage and screen - a process full of acrimony, contention and compromise. For Prose, it is in these dramatic versions that the diary begins to adopt its universal appeal. For it is here - succumbing to the needs of popular taste - that the story gets softened, transformed into an uplifting message about hope and basic human kindness (qualities found nowhere in the work itself). Thanks largely to an American curriculum that took shape in the wake of these productions, Frank's inconceivable suffering was made applicable to even the most trivial instances of discomfort.

Like all great works of art which offer dark and troubling insights, the diary's popularity and popularization comes at a great cost - a blunting of both its human and artistic value. Prose's work does a wonderful job of arguing against this impulse and for the integrity of a great and tragic writer.

Naftali Rottenstreich is co-owner of Red Fox Books in downtown Glens Falls.