Why is Anne Frank's diary so popular? - book review

• Author: GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

That gift, which "lies at the heart of Christianity," is far more satisfying to embrace "than the obvious": three weeks after writing about people's inherent goodness, the teenage girl was murdered by monsters.

If Anne Frank's diary had provided graphic details about concentration camps and genocide, Horn contends, it would not have been so widely read. After all, she notes, very few people have read The Czech Transport, Zalmen Gradowski's harrowing and horrific chronicle of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz, discovered after he was killed there in 1944.

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In People Love Dead Jews, Horn (the author of five novels, including In The Image and The World To Come) argues that an obsession with dead Jews, which so often wears "goodwill on its sleeve," remains pervasive, perverse, and connected to "people's unarticulated concepts" of "civilization" and of themselves.

Engaging and informative, People Love Dead Jews seems intentionally provocative. All the more reason to meet Horn's one-size-fits-all catchy thesis with healthy doses of skepticism.

The essays in the book range across time and space. Horn's 10-year-old son critiques The Merchant of Venice; Horn deconstructs the myth that officials at Ellis Island changed immigrants' names; and she examines the "gaslighting" techniques designed by the Soviet Union to destroy Jewish national culture by denigrating Jewish traditions.

In a fascinating chapter, Horn takes us to Harbin, once home to 20,000 Russian Jews who created the town at the turn of the 20th century along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The flourishing Jewish community, we learn, was demolished in the 1930s by Japanese soldiers occupying Manchuria and anti-Communist "White Russians" who had fled there in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. When the Chinese took control in 1949, the 1,000 Jews who remained in the city lost their businesses and livelihoods. In 1962, the last Jewish family left Harbin. Recently, the provincial government invested $30 million to get Harbin officially recognized as a Jewish Heritage Site. Tourists visit buildings on the "Jewish Block," The New Synagogue Jewish Museum, and what may be the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East. Neither the sites, the tour guides, nor the "Real Historical Items" (acquired on eBay), Horn points out, explain "why this glorious community no longer...