Summer Reading

In our February/March 2005 issue, Ellen Feldman wrote about the controversial career of The Diary of Anne Frank after its American publication. She had steeped herself in the subject because she was at work on an audacious novel that has just been published: The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (Norton, 261 pages, $23.95). In 1944 Anne Frank wrote that the 17-year-old Peter, who was waiting out the fraught days with her in the Amsterdam house where they were hiding from the Nazis, told her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself. In this historical (or alternate-historical) novel he does, becoming a prosperous American in the 1950s. But of course he is carrying an immense burden of memory, and how he manages to bear this weight through the sunny countryside of Eisenhower’s America is explored in a novel whose sensational theme never tarnishes the passion and delicacy with which Feldman tells her gripping story.