C’mon Waldo. How about a more through explanation? The content of Anne Franks’s original book was approved by her Dad, her only close relative. This latest version included 30 extra pages that had numerous hateful and negative references to her mother and others in the annex but also reportedly (I haven’t read it yet) detailed references to her vagina. It is not clear at all that Anne wanted that part of her diary published. Her dad definitely didn’t want it published. But the Anne Frank Foundation did want it published (after he died), and it is hard to imagine that money wasn’t part of the reasoning, in spite of anything the family might have wanted.

Anyway the alternative version was first published in 1995 and has apparently been used by the CCPS for a while. One parent brought objections to the book. Not clear whether they objected to it simply being in the library or that it was required reading. Anyway the schools handled it poorly not recognizing the potential for a backlash.

It has been used in the fall and a new policy will be enacted that will allow parents the chance to have some say about which version they wish their kids to have.

But reading your brief description, a person would have to assume that the original classic that has been read since 1947 had been banned at CCPS. That is unfair and inaccurate.

Posted by robert legge on 31 January 02010 @ 8pm

The whole point of these blog entries is that they’re brief, requiring a click to learn more. :) I can’t imagine that any fifteen-year-old girl would want any of her journal published—I don’t suspect that Anne Frank was any different. My understanding is that it just an acknowledgement that she possesses reproductive organs, something that should come as no surprise to readers, but even if it’s something more specific than that, I still can’t find it objectionable for students of this age. (As we can see, there was just a single complaint in response to this.) Too many folks confuse biology with sex. In five years of sex ed, we didn’t learn the first thing about sex.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 February 02010 @ 8am

Mottainai sounds very much like the Hopi term that a 1983 film was produced about – detailed here on Netflix : Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Koyaanisqatsi_Life_Out_of_Balance/60023737?trkid=438381

Posted by Chris Gorski on 1 February 02010 @ 9am

Some are briefer than others. But I think the blurb could have made it clear that this was not the same version that has become a classic. Part of what ticked me off about this overblown incident is that my column came out the same day in the CSE that asked why Holocaust museums never talk about the US (media and govt) response to the persecution of Jews leading up to the Holocaust, why we refused to take hardly any refugees, buried stories about this on the back pages and then refused to bomb Auschwitz or the railroad tracks leading up to it. Instead all people want to talk about is Vagina-gate. And say that Culpeper officials are akin to Hitler for not wanting this version used in 8th grade. Many letter writers questioned if book burnings were next. Violation of First Amendment (by people don’t even know what the FA is) It was a zealous overreaction.

Actually the book is still on the shelves for anyone who might want to check it out.

Posted by robert legge on 1 February 02010 @ 9am

I actually hadn’t noticed that it was a more complete edition until after I’d written this, or else I would have pointed that out. These link-list blog entries are generated via me writing a sentence or two about each link as I come across them, and they’re added to a big list of bookmarks that I maintain, and then software gathers them all up and posts them here every day at 6:30 (or is it 6:00?) every evening. Frequently I bookmark something that I’ve read 75% of, but want to remember to read the rest of later, and this was one of those.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 February 02010 @ 1pm

Well we all know that 8th grade girls and boys are disinterested in their sexual development! This sort of knee-jerk reaction is exactly why adolescents have a point when they dismiss their elders as hopeless fools.

To know that young Anne Frank was awakening to her adulthood only makes the theft of her future and her tragic murder more poignant.

Posted by Bubby Hussein, Hillbilly Sheikh on 1 February 02010 @ 4pm

I can’t imagine that any fifteen-year-old girl would want any of her journal published—I don’t suspect that Anne Frank was any different.

I just learned recently that Anne Frank actually edited and rewrote portions of her journals with an eye toward eventually having them published for a general readership. This Wiki article provides some more background and states that she cut some scenes she considered too intimate. Wonder if the additional 30 pages includes any of this material?

Posted by Jon on 1 February 02010 @ 5pm

Wow—that’s really interesting that it was edited, Jon. At least in the Wikipedia entry, I don’t think that there’s any claim that the editing was for the purpose of publication, just that it was for clarity of writing. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that the purpose was for publication.) If she was editing it for publication, that raises all kinds of interesting questions. Did she really anticipate that she could be a published author, or was this something that her parents encouraged, to give her something to keep her busy, to give her something to look to the future for? Was she editing this for an audience to read, or editing for her parents to read?

I’ve got to learn more about this.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 February 02010 @ 7pm

It is clear that she edited her diary in hopes that it would someday be published. This was after she heard radio reports that people wanted documentation for after the war about how they had been treated by the Nazis. Here is a good article about the wrangling over her works in later years. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/10/world/five-precious-pages-renew-wrangling-over-anne-frank.html?pagewanted=1

Sorry I don’t know how to insert a link here. Yes, money was a major consideration.

Anyway Otto Frank used her edited version and edited it some more to come up with the version that became a classic.

But lets consider a second. 13-14 year old girl wants to get published. Anyone think that she would want to include hateful comments about her mother and other close relative for the world to read? Then how about her “discovery” of her vagina? Remembering this is 1945.

It is incomprehensible that she wanted this part read by others.

Another interesting part of this I learned today is that there was a Supreme Court decision back in the 1980’s dealing with schools removing books. Pico school dist. if you want to look further into it. Basically the court held that schools have limited power to REMOVE books. They must be able to show that the removal was for educational reasons. Defining ed reasons is up to the judge that hears any subsequent cases.

But the ruling held that a school has broad latitude to keep a book OFF the shelf. Another strange aspect of this ruling is that it only applies to middle and high school. IOW a school can remove a book from a 5th grade library and there is nothing anyone can do about it but not a 6th grade library.

Not sure this is what the founding fathers were thinking about when they did that free speech thing.

Posted by robert legge on 1 February 02010 @ 8pm

It is incomprehensible that she wanted this part read by others.

To be a fair, while a writer’s desires are interesting academically, but they don’t particularly matter in the end. Many works are reedited posthumously, and autobiographical works are especially prone to be written initially in a style that flatters the author (and reedited later to be more inclusive and, thus, less flattering). Daniel Mendelson had an enjoyable article about the history of memoir in the last New Yorker that’s relevant here.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 February 02010 @ 9pm