Jewish literature in English, Horn writes, is basically Holocaust fiction, but fiction, like the story presented in Anne’s diary, that meets certain requirements.

“The museum finally relented after deliberating for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” His employers, she relates, told him to hide it under a baseball cap. One of her most funny-but-not-funny anecdotes is about a young Jewish man who worked at the Anne Frank house, and who tried to wear his yarmulke to work. Horn asks, “What would it mean for a writer not to hide horror?” The answer, she avers, is that practically nobody reads the book. Just reading the diary out of context, though, readers are offered grace and optimism without having to confront the reality of what happened to Anne. But as Horn points out, Anne wrote about her conviction that people were “truly good at heart” before she was captured and sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp and then on to the Bergen-Belsen killing facility, i.e., before, Horn writes, “she met people who weren’t.” However, in order to be “acceptable,” these books about dead Jews – Anne Frank’s diary being the most obvious – must have positive uplifting messages, and preferably include non-Jewish rescuers.

One of the main threads running through these essays is that there is a great deal more empathy and good feeling for dead Jews than for those who are living. This latest book is a collection of her essays, some of which I have read before, but which are compiled here in a very coherent way and which deal with both timely and timeless themes. Dara Horn has won many awards for her writing, not only for her fiction, but for her essays.

Dead jews book