In the past decade, several authors have used Anne Frank’s story as a basis for novels that imagine, “what if.” What if Anne’s sister Margo had survived and come to the U.S., what would her life be like? That was the novel Margo by Jillian Cantor. In another recent novel, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, by Ellen Feldman, imagines what Peter’s life would be like if he came to the U.S. , assimilates, marries, and tries to hide the past, only to be blindsided by the publication of Anne’s diary. But no one, to my knowledge, has done what Gillham has done in the novel Annelies; that is, to imagine that Anne herself survives and returns to Amsterdam and tries to pick up the remnants of her life. That’s the premise of Annelies.
Gillham starts with the Franks’ life before they were betrayed and sent to the camps. In this part, he’s relying on known facts for the most part, and, of course, Anne’s diary. Once Anne return from the camps, Gillham is on his own. We all have feelings about Anne, we feel we know her. This is a brave thing for a writer to do. Can he possibly succeed in developing a character for the survivor Anne, that people will recognize as the Anne in the diary? And there’s also Anne’s father, Otto, who returns to Amsterdam. Otto wants to put it all behind him; Anne can’t do that–she’s filled with anger and survivors’ guilt– and their relationship is very tense. She makes some bad decisions; can’t seem to find her footing; she’s churlish about her father’s new wife. Does the story work? I think that’s something you have to determine for yourself; I don’t want to give away more than I’ve said. It wasn’t a complete success for me, but I think that it could generate some interesting discussion, not just about Anne but about the decisions that authors make when they write historical fiction.
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