As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl's words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author.

Creative responses to one of the world's most widely read books

About the Author

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor of Performance Studies and Affiliated Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her books include (with Mayer Kirshenblatt) They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust and The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times. She currently leads the exhibition development team for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is author of Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture and While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, and editor (with Hasia R. Diner and Beth S. Wenger) of Remembering the Lower East Side (IUP, 2000).

Reviews

This engrossing collection of 12 interdisciplinary essays covers multiple aspects of 'the Anne Frank phenomenon' . . . The overall aim is to provide a greater understanding of the general and particular engagement with Anne Frank as a person, a symbol, an icon, an inspiration, and perhaps most polarizing, as one victim, not the victim of the Nazi holocaust.

* Broadside *

Principally the work of senior international scholars in history, literature, Hebraic and Judaic studies, and performance and film studies, and of museum curators, this volume is a major contribution to scholarship regarding Anne Frank's diary and its cultural influence. . . . Highly recommended.

* Choice *

Anne Frank Unbound . . . tell[s] us a great deal about the myriad uses to which one individual story has been and can be put. . . . In addition to these ethical and political questions, the essays engage productively with the aesthetic choices made by writers, visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, and comedians, who recast Anne Frank in a variety of media and situations. . . . If Anne Frank Unbound is any indication, the diary will certainly continue . . . to raise a set of persistent ethical, political, and aesthetic questions that have been with us since its first publication.

* Women's Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253007391
Author Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 612g