Reading Anne Frank’s Diary in a Community-Based English Program for Immigrants
Ashley Minihan

A few weeks before the 2007 spring semester started, the director of the Civics and Literacy program at Queensborough Community College, Prof. Kitty Bateman, informed me that I would soon be working with the program’s most advanced group of English learners. Having previously only taught the program’s low-level learners, I was pleased to be presented with the challenge of such accomplished students. I was somewhat skeptical, however, when Prof. Bateman suggested that we read The Diary of Anne Frank as the assigned class text. I had enjoyed the book as a girl but was concerned that the writings of a Jewish teenager who lived and died over sixty years ago wouldn’t have much relevance for the predominantly Asian students.

Initially, it seemed as if my doubts might be confirmed. Anne Frank’s diary had been translated from the original Dutch into an unfamiliar 1950s British-English. The thirteen-year-old Anne filled her early diary entries with gossip about classmates and boyfriends; and the students couldn’t keep track of Anne’s many friends and admirers.

Encouraging the students to teach each other proved the best way to help them understand the book while also building their language skills. After a new reading assignment, the students would get into groups. Each group summarized a portion of the reading and identified a few new vocabulary words from their section to teach to the class. The students became less anxious about passages in the text that they were unsure of, as they knew they would be able to discuss these with their classmates. Furthermore, after Anne moved to the “secret annex,” the rooms in her father’s former office where she hid for over two years, her writing became much more focused on her relationships with the other seven annex inhabitants. Many of the students were the parents of teens or pre-teens themselves and felt sorry for Anne’s mother, often the target of Anne’s criticism. We noted that while Anne’s powers of observation were precocious, she occasionally demonstrated the self-centeredness of a more typical teenager. (Anne herself admits this later in her diary.) A few students said that reading Anne’s diary helped them to better identify with their own daughters and to relive the emotions they had experienced as teenagers. They wished that they could explain Anne’s parents’ perspective to her. We all respected how Anne used writing and learning to fend off despair, even while existing in a state of entrapment and constant fear.

The students achieved more insight into the Franks’ story due to the revelation in February this year that the Frank family file had been discovered at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It revealed that Anne’s father, Otto Frank, had desperately tried to get his family to the United States, only to be stymied by bureaucratic complications and strict immigration restrictions. As immigrants themselves, some of the students could sympathize with the Frank family’s plight. One student spoke with great emotion about her unsuccessful efforts to bring her son to this country. We read an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Daniel Mendelsohn, in which the author likened Otto Frank’s pleading letters to his American friends to those that his own great-uncle had written from Nazi-occupied Europe to his brother in the United States, Mendelsohn’s grandfather. After the grandfather’s death, Mendelsohn’s family discovered that he had kept all of these letters. A student asked why someone would save such terrible letters for his children to find. Why would he risk causing them pain? In response to this question, a few students bravely shared stories of grief and guilt from their own and their families’ pasts.

As the semester progressed, the students’ knowledge of the Holocaust grew to encompass more than the Frank family’s personal tragedy. The Queensborough Community College community is fortunate to have access on campus to the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives, and a Holocaust survivor who volunteers for the Holocaust Center came to speak to the class. She generously spent over two hours with us and addressed our questions thoroughly. The class also took a tour of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park, where we heard devastating stories of children separated from their parents and families decimated. We emerged from the museum, blinking and disoriented, into spring sunshine that gleamed off the water of New York harbor.

The Queensborough Civics and Literacy program holds an annual end-of-term event for which each class creates a presentation. Our class wrote letters to Anne about what her story had meant to us and how much we had learned from her, young as she was. When the students read these letters aloud, the audience of teachers and students was deeply moved.

We had formed bonds with one another by the end of our time together, making good-byes difficult. Some of this closeness was simply due to the kindness and openness of the students themselves. I couldn’t help but feel, however, that the courageous honesty and optimism of Anne Frank’s writing were infectious. She helped us surmount the inhibitions that so often mar our attempts to convey feelings and ideas, particularly when we try to do so in a foreign language.

References

Cohen, P. (2007, February 15). In Old Files, Fading Hopes of Anne Frank’s Family. The New York Times.

Frank, A. (1952). The Diary of a Young Girl (with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt). New York: Bantam Books (Random House, Inc.).

Mendelsohn, D. (2007, February 18). A Family History Like Too Many Others. The New York Times.

About the Author

Ashley Minihan is an adjunct lecturer in the Basic Skills Department at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, in Bayside where she also taught for several semesters in the Civics and Literacy program.