The Obsession

The WWII reporter and “most significant American Jewish writer of his time” recounts his decades-long battle to stage Anne Frank’s diaries (Los Angeles Times). As a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, Meyer Levin was among the first to report on the horrors of Nazi occupation. Also a successful novelist, he desperately wanted to bear witness to what he saw in literary form. Then, in 1951, he read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. It was precisely the voice he had been searching for—and he became determined to bring Anne’s story to America as a Broadway play. The Obsession is Levin’s candid account of this ill-fated project and the mania to see it through that gripped him for twenty years. Though Levin began writing his adaptation with the support of Anne’s father, Otto, he was eventually replaced with non-Jewish writers. Refusing to let Anne’s story be sanitized, Levin fought for his version in and out of courtrooms in a protracted battle that nearly destroyed both his family and his career. In this extraordinary memoir, Levin explores the nature of Jewishness, the price of assimilation, the writer’s obligation to himself and to his subject, and the search for identity and purpose.